No god called me into this poem.
No god
calls me out.

A tooth looking for your mother is not the same as a tooth searching. Lived experience is our jawless god’s highest fraud. Dear squirrel, we don’t eat creatures made of ghost worry. Future is the aftermath of the future. I’m ugly in heaven.

in the blue church of my father’s thirst

I wear it

(hunger)

like an eye-patch, and emerge

starless

from the uncooked blood
of my shadow

film 3

Tell them this was handwritten. Tell them Ohio locked itself in the bathroom to imagine deer. Tell them god’s eyesight was too still. Tell them I couldn’t sleep. Tell them I couldn’t die, but that I bled to sleep in a field I was eating. Tell them the field is gone. The field is gone, they believe.

I lose in the dream

each child
in a way
I’ve imagined

film 2

I am everyday older than my brother. Those years I did not have him, he did not have me. Gods die in the star they sleep in. There are eyes in my sadness when I look at my sons.

film 1

An angel eats a mouth and sees for shape a horseshoe deep in the story of satan’s toothache. My sister’s hair listens while I grow nothing. I leave the poem briefly to raise an addict and the addict says pain is god reincarnated while alive. You don’t come back.

I wanted to smoke and look at water. I turned left at a tipped over gas can and walked until I heard fireworks. A small tv was showing god the hole it needed help making. A dryer with a baby in it was won by two mothers. They tried to scream. I made a sound and the sound stayed that way for good. I recognized my kids for years.

Design
a late
animal.

God is everywhere.
Obsessed
with birthplace.

the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

Some animals have had success dying behind god’s back.

I squeezed in an airplane
your hand until it broke.

(that toy
car
from our blue
mom)

Storks
can’t lose
blood.

My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.

A white sock
cannot pray
for the rabbit’s
stomach.

Look at stuff and die.

is my son
alone

ask

The disconnected god of blood

The wasp of loss

I don’t have your headache, kid

A cigarette looks for its teeth
Sleep
for the older
wrist

of proximity’s
nearby
ghost

Movies
lengthen god

Write high

God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.

A horse and a moth pass through heaven where heaven used to be

All my friends are quiet

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.

Cutting the hair of the crucified.

Stars
and jobs
and stars.

I dream in longhand. Watch slasher movies to control death. No I will not be doing anything for my mental health. God was the first weapon meant to heal time. We don’t all live here. Blood reads but not with all this blood. Be last, be small. Hide your stomach from emptiness. Check your children for bones. Hairdryer for pills.

DEATH AND A DEATH PLACE

The eyes have only
their childhood

SON IS SHORT FOR LONELINESS

Try
in a coffin
to roll
a cigarette

God’s stomach is a cigarette trying to eat on the moon. I am asleep in my homage to sleep. In hell you have to give birth to everyone you’ve killed. You can’t have your kids.

SECOND MACHINE

I watch movies naked and lightning tattoos god into becoming an addict.  

BELONGING MACHINE

God
up late
with silent
babies

God died doing math in a nightmare. Not everyone was able to hide the body. Men without mothers bit themselves thinking it would lead to nakedness. Angels did the same but thought nothing. Fire chased an empty bus past the cemetery of the three things I couldn’t name. Into a small life of startled handguns, people in photos were born. Gameshows, I said plainly, above a hole the ground touches for being hungry.

No one told me I was crying.
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies
are never
young.

A ghost sets itself on fire with a cigarette once lit to mark the end of emptiness. No one cares about my body. Touch still doesn’t know that skin is the god of touch. I hide my daughter’s mouth in mine and wait for the angel of those on suicide watch to notice my teeth. The ghost is so still it’s looking at hell.  

( or maybe I hide my daughter in a ghost and these are the ghost years lost to the god of fast food whose son is a hunger pain whose son is a hunger whose son’s childishly staged crucifixion shocked time into a fomo that found eating to be a bone from an extra past where I practice chewing upside down get pregnant for no one

I count the same money and think of my body. I send to a stranger a TikTok of a man crushing dried insects with a red rolling pin. I don’t watch anything anymore that requires sound. The last scream I heard was god’s and I named it god. The stranger messages me twice that they recognize the man. A lonely world, but for kids.

I smoke a joint.
Lean
on a horse.

See
a ghost
see
my brother.

Death regrets
thinking
on death. Some

lose babies
to weather
to avoid
violence. Our baby talk

mutes

field recordings
of creatures
taming god.

In a bored
country
ambulance, a shoemaker

guesses
your OnlyFans

password.
Cracks an egg
on the knee
of an angel.

I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.

A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll.
Stop drinking.

Teach the baby to **** in its stomach. Go bitemark bald to the burning of tire swings. Pretend you can be nostalgic in America. Do this by having at all times handfuls of woozy spiders that prevent you from making guns of your hands. Do this by drinking. I wasn’t worried but then my phone started working in a dream. In heaven, every mirror is an exit wound.

I want to drink and cook.
I want to watch movies and not drink.
I want my invisible teeth
abused
by color.
I want my doctors to say seashell
*******
syndrome.
I want these meds to sadden drones.
I want fatigue. Hell’s rubber mirror.
I want my children to be so exhausted that they pray
to a ghost
that’s praying
to them.
I want your poems
your shorter
poems
to drive
death mad.
I want to crucify my tongue.
I want a wasp to crucify my tongue.
I want shape
to burn faster
than form. Nudes
to zoo
nakedness.
A fed raccoon.
Or a dog that believes.

I can count on my teeth the number of your teeth gone soft in the knees of boys. There’s nothing you could’ve done to make me beautiful. The ghost of body image believes in one ghost. We’re all too young but see anyway the unfinished angel blowing on the stomach of christ. Mother from her father wants only the pea behind his eye. Distance is clickbait for god.

Two birds with one deer.

Touch is touch
teaching touch
the backstroke.

The ****
think snow
can die.

Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.

We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain.

Letter 082524

Dear Ethan Hawke

The nervous systems of angels. A funeral for a cigarette. There are two Ohios. I am still in my singsong violence when my sister throws her youngest in front of an unmoving farm machine. Sometimes a year yanks a room from death. A wasp eats the shadow of a practice wasp. My wrist thinks I’m brushing its teeth and god is the child who survived my dream. I can’t fake sleep long enough to be healed.

Letter 082624

Dear Ethan Hawke

I live in a body that sleep hasn’t noticed. A ghost is an angel in love with slow motion. No one touch me. I am dreaming of a poetry book written by Chelsea Peretti. I forget its second name, but its first is Lamb Hat and Crow Perfume. It is being reviewed on tiktok by someone whose mother is unable to recently die. I can’t say on brand without crying. I don’t think it’s healthy of course to dream that celebrities want to secretly write poems. But Chelsea’s poems are perfect. In a houndless south, my god gets high. Stay pretty. Goodbye.

Letter 081124

Dear Ethan Hawke

I don’t write to anyone. I am hated. In photos I am the photographer’s ghost. In the dream I wear a girl’s bathing suit and someone shoots me in the foot. This is how I learn to swim. Thigh is a perfect word. The way it dies in the mouth. Mouth is dead. Who can tell. Only god. In Ohio at every fair the young say eat me until I’m young. We make jokes about crowhio and about the baby’s stomach born without an inside voice. The spider in my ear comes out a wasp. I don’t want my kids to see me do anything. Spiders get toothaches and angels, erections. Wasp is on its own.

I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.

I never have enough teeth in my mouth to love my brothers equally. They each have a tick full of blood to throw at a beehive. We form a band to hide our erections but only write one song. Because I’m the oldest, I’ll be dead the longest. Boys don’t call things what they are. Baseball and deer got Ohio lucky. We aim our **** and cry with our stomachs. Think Jesus did all that just to poison god. There are easier ways to get a sister. When shot, we take it in the leg. I don’t go outside anymore but here and there the unshaped crawl into my ear. The re-shaped, not so much. Boys and girls aren’t real. We compare school shooters. Blueballs, leg pain, the holier symptoms of swimmer’s echo.

this dream where an owl as big as a mouse lives with a mouse in the mouse's hole and they share a scratched up plate that looks like something a microscope would eat off of and for once I don't really know who I am in the dream beyond maybe just in the theater making sure I don't drink too much because when I drink too much I miss scenes but inevitably I miss a few scenes and I come back to the mouse and the owl fighting over the plate and the mouse kicks the owl out and says this wasn't normal anyway and of course the mouse says all this without speaking and it's only when the owl doesn't leave that the mouse realizes the owl isn't real and the problem with this realization is that the mouse then thinks all owls aren't real and I can see where this is going and so can you and I told a friend about this dream and he said dreams don't usually have a moral or end that way and the real end of the dream is that I don't have friends and now we're both sad

God forgets things before they happen. In third or fourth grade, I was pulled out of a bathroom stall by a boy who’d been nice to my mother and I was told what should or should not be in my stomach. There was another boy with him. A city named Empty and a city named Goldfish took turns burning. I missed the future. The past, more.

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

would die
of ceaseless
immediacy

fish
fishing
for grief
idk
I always
cried
near spiders
so made
to display
their hunger

I do a search for images of babies born without ribs and I don’t see what I want. An article scares me in 1983. Saying that thirst is hunger’s blue ghost is the same as wanting thunderstorm to be a strong password. I’m not on fire but my son is sick all the time. In my nightmare of plenty, sea creatures for the skinning of god pretend they’ve kept god young. A dead angel weighs more the more the news of its death is shared. Is this a love song? Sexting in the *** shop, no two phones can cry like me. Vexations pin the ghost spot where you cloned a sighing bee. Touch touches its exile and my stomach slurs like speech. Positionless you dial theft bereft of any thief. Yes and no. Yes and no. The angel is dead. Dead over here.

Light’s
egglike
silence
Rock
paper
infant
Infant
omen
hair

A movie died and I wanted to write better.
You put a lake in a lake.
Whole childhoods
of an angel
went nowhere.
I binged
for my brother
body horror
from an invisibly
watched
loneliness.
Mom
gave us mom.

Letter 061624 climate sameness

Dear Ethan Hawke

Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I **** a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I **** a rabbit. I’d never **** a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.

I kiss her stomach and god sets a seashell on fire.
Angels fake amnesia.