I don’t mean to be hopeless.

I mean to be
hopeless.

each letter
of this word
is silent

On a bicycle I was a priest. A girl who liked me told her father that her mother was dead. She gave me orange peels and said they were from a book she couldn’t read. I put them down my brother’s shirt then hopped on my bike. My brother said it burns it burns but not enough to put a wasp inside of god. I rode until my friends had daughters who shot them near cemeteries that were never used. There were days when I could string together days that I was well enough to drink. I don’t know that my sleep ever touched yours. If you can get the skin off that rock you can throw it.

Dear Ethel Cain

They pronounced my name correctly then killed my children. A shredded angel brought to god the blue arms of Ohio lightning. For too long, an infant heard itself think. God outlasted imagery. And gender, god.

The angel of the zeitgeist thinks death is a lover of short films.



It was a game I played with my sons. Like this: It was cold, and my brother was dead. My brother was dead, and the music said drink. The music said drink, and I sang god down. I sang god down, and god bent himself to a moment in Palestine. God bent himself to a moment in Palestine, and he was othered by his own brain. He was othered by his own brain.



Time uses god to tell time.
I drink myself to life.
Nothing outside of Ohio

is there.

Dear Ethel Cain

They are moving the body from star to star when a landmine made in a dot of blood yawns arisen somewhere in the white acre of my poet friend’s eye. Needing a past, my sister lets a snake eat her entire stomach. Father invents in the grey cinema a remote for loneliness. My friend becomes an angel obsessed with redhaired dolls. My father leaves the cinema wearing nothing but a seashell and spends the rest of his life dreaming of a doorbell that tracks decay. Three mothers we can’t place leave together for a nightmare where a fetus bounces into the back of an out of control pick-up truck. I keep changing what my mouth holds, but it all fits.

I don't need any of you.
I don't have details.