Look at what god was given. What did you do with your last silence. You sharpened yourself in a whale and let your baby die in an owl. Yourself has no world in this place. None of my cousins are dead but I'll never see them again. My sickest son has no hell. Have no hell.

sacrifice 6

we look all the time at dying and call it stargazing then while whale watching someone says you know alcohol disrupts your sleep

sacrifice 5

I’ve been trying to leave heaven but my body tastes like a photo I took in Baltimore Ohio of a groundhog’s skull
and my blood is still in the bowl of a dog sleeping on earth.

Before death dies does it see every lived thing

I’m in the accident
but I’m in the car first

It’s hard when your parents know there’s a god.
Babies think other babies are screaming.

Any last silence

sacrifice 4

If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.

sacrifice 3

God
a mere
flare
Creation’s
signal
to Eden
of a typo
in its dark
message
Leave
under a corpse
of light no
cried out
thing

sacrifice 2

Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.

Dear Ethel Cain

I might be dying. It is rude to care for oneself when your kids make from children bombs that bomb. It’s not hard to be drunk. My blue mother lives on motherhood while worshiping in miniature the sleep of the lonely bear bought by our most eccentric celebrity. I’m not okay. I have to drive to work when at home my son is sick and my other sons aren’t. If I die, people will stop looking at me right away. My brothers aren’t on their knees with this. Dear star my abusers used puppies to touch my blood in black and white. You can’t deport a witch. A miracle. My nakedness shrinks death with a folk song about angels protesting permanence. The lie reached heaven and that dude set himself on fire to burn god with Palestine. Jesus rose but the rest kept their graves on earth. The minotaur fell out of love with a horse. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder.

sacrifice 1

Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.

When found by my children, I am the most lost of all fathers. *** sounds like crying to someone crying. I want to drink with nothing in my stomach and talk to no one about art. I still have only five words for what my hands can do. In Ohio, either the box is the church or the pup is the church. In Ohio, animals think fire is the last supper of the afterlife. Look, I tire of both angel and ghost but of angel first. Younger I thought the bible had been written by my uncles. The fish is holy and the bread boring and unending. Caress the scales downward. By my uncles against their will.

Dear Ethel Cain

Mom cracks an egg and says she is no longer holding onto the fingerprint of god. My brothers look at me as if they know how to erase my eyes. There is a problem in this poem that only a poem can solve. Death is death because it couldn’t sleep in heaven. Stones here are thrown because a stone can’t eat more than one bird. We listen to our fathers argue over whether or not ghosts are angels that are sexually active. Then to the same tooth for nine months. By the time we’re assaulted, we’ve not been uniquely suicidal. Echoes learn the wrong language.

If there is
no god
I hope
there’s not

One is born
with one’s
own language

The turtle dreams of strangulation in a green emptiness

A star is the graverobber of god

I texted the writers not all of them

Writing is sometimes being drunk while putting a mouse back together in a mountain

We can kiss here
is an eyepatch
for your moon
tattoo

I don’t know why anyone would want to see anything

What if his son
stayed put

I am not going to tell you the name of the movie but 1983 I thought my mom was asleep and she thought I and our closeness got near enough to be seen watching the wrong ****** put a lookalike in the right life anyway the past like your body is always new and before the eclipse I pressed a bottlecap into your thigh

you will never
know
what this
is about
but sing
**** all
to your double

What if I am close to knowing
why
I have brothers

Life is the line drawn between death and death

Once I’ve seen your body I look at your body

Shape is the shape I must become to receive the world. There is no bomb called grief. No bomb child. The bells were rung I held my son. You can love your brothers forever. Thunder misgenders echo no more than once. Oh no Ohio forgiveness forgave forgiveness. What if you can’t stop writing this poem. My mother and father have the same password. Sometimes when I’m touching you I’m not. Touch tombstone for the mourning cosmos.

It hurt
Being made fun of
In the bathroom
That way
I got myself
Back to class
A whale
Shrinking the ocean
With sleep

Last night I told my wife
There were little hands
Tugging
On my jeans

Small enough to die
Please
Pleaser

A squirrel in the guest
blood
of god apes
history’s unthinkable fetus.

A brother and a sister
forget
at a funeral
who they look like.

My son’s
hot ear
smells
like the cigarette
gave Jesus
away.

I love you.
Terrible
that we’ve met

Dear Ethel Cain

A spacecraft carrying blood for the animals god didn’t name loses power near the star of Bethlehem. Those on board have nothing to write with. It’s not the saddest thing, but has happened prior to there being sadness. Later, sound takes a chainsaw to the sound of a chainsaw. The world makes me afraid of movies.

I am
when I drink
a birthmark
removal
expert
or an angel
privately sad
who prolongs
with a rabbit
held together
by grief
a whale’s
insomnia…

Boredom is a mirror’s god.

Pianos
in the winter
are cruel.

god
wants
nothing

The mouth is the only wound denied entry into paradise. Each eye beats birthmark to the body. The angels find us, forget. A tooth like a ghost growing in a fog bathes itself in a window. Bombs, miss. Meat into dust, that ****** hoax. All but a pair of creatures know the truth. God taken by two kids who can’t move.

to the goodbye
that created
distance

God is being tortured to tell us where we are

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.

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.

Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

The shape you left open so you could ***** on your walk with god.
Our uncle's blood that went back in time to skip us.
Horse twilight. Bombed omens.

I took a toy car from the fire and put it on my wrist.
The far ambulance

of your drinking...

Name in Ohio
no one. Arson

doxes
angels.

The angels let us drink for six days before telling us about god. Day seven, they give us each a son old enough to bite us on the arm. It’s a lot to process. This rabbit is all ribs. Eight is wasted on angels who miss their ghosts.

Dear Ethel Cain

I sleep in the sleep I’ll die in. My heartbeat says too soon, too soon. A hand on god’s eyelid. Nothing.

Losing dogs is good practice. In heaven, I look with Ohioans at ruined cars. I love Jesus for those few moments she went unnamed. I don’t see blood. I **** myself when my nose runs. When I say moon, put out on my brother a cigarette. When I write moon, become on earth the first to be invisible. Religion is apology and pain. The afterlife is a place for morning people to talk about death. Dear Ethel Cain, I don’t think letters help. I so try to not love poets, but they read aloud so nervously that books disappear from the bible. I keep in the same place coughing up anthill dirt. We can’t find the sleep god died in.

They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.

**** nostalgias accumulate in the sadness of new elations. I am photo deep in the longing you’ve abridged. Hands shrink with age. Facts wrestle me from the hair of god. You’re allowed to be a vibe. After kissing the salt from a dissolved rabbit mask, I see the redesigned deer of my disappearing. The writing stops but it can’t tell you.

mothered by a silent
shape my
mouth

The body’s been to the body and back. Catching fish presses the eyelids of god. I look at my brothers to see if our *** dreams have overlapped. I look at my brothers with the unmilked violence of nostalgia. A church painter works backward through the bible. The painter says if the mother’s nose is bleeding, find a baby to put under it. Does not say that touch returns in an image cooked up by the face of pain. Meanwhile a book as quiet as a book turns blue in the space between belonging to the strangled unhoused and beheading the hand that starts a fire with a nail. Meanwhile, the past. You’re never far from the unborn.

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

Dear Ethel Cain by now abuse is nostalgia’s first job

I did not mean to pay attention to my life. For that, I am touchable and sorry. Not dying earlier is always the most cruel month. In school, in second grade, I wet myself two days in a row. I’ve never been able to scare the right people. During the assault, I spotted on the bathroom floor a pencil nearly sharpened out of existence. I thought of a star, a cigarette, and of a newborn being ****** back into its mother. I burned my face on a mask as something god could use when asked about my teeth.

Dear Ethel Cain

I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a ****** we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish.

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

God was in the room that was later turned into god.

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.

Dear Ethel Cain

Despair is a food group. I had to read the line again that said my brother’s hand was eating out an angel. Cannibals surprise their mothers in Eden. Is skin still the longest dream? My fake sleep is not your fake sleep. I thumb my own eyes in the shepherd machine.

Existence a distress signal

mimicked by those
visitors
looking
for the body
of god

Dear Ethel Cain

somehow for both Aria Aber and Franz Wright it’s hard to have good brothers I can’t go a week without drinking because the week is from 1983 touch resurrects itself how lonely sleep is named after sleep my eyes fight over two memories a line of ants carry a lightbulb to god I pray in a bullet to a melancholy bee don’t be afraid there in no nowlife

in divine distraction
to worry
on the child’s
past

The poem says so little.

Food is a ghost that saves my mouth.

Hi, all my gods stop dreaming at once.