[on seasickness]

my father saw his first ghost and his first UFO on the same day    

-

canoe

of heartbreak

a wound

is

-

a fish
occurring
to fish

~

[tooth musics]

I patch my son’s nightmare with the shadow of a fish

-

Cain
had a sister

he wouldn’t
****

-

raise mosquito
the lost earring
of christ

~

[existential passivity]

sister
a loneliness
for which
I was framed

~

[removal musics (xv)]

whose purple thumb is found in a grey ball of yarn
has remembered
every baby

~

[removal musics (xvi)]

have you written slowly enough for things to happen?  lovely

wrist
I will eat
what is there.  a flower, a clumsy

angel

touching the nerve
of a ghost

~

[reading]

inside
an apple
by the light
of a tooth

where nothing
has belonged
to god

~

[starlit]

after staring all day at a birthmark, father asks can he wear my glasses. done growing, sister breaks her nose. shadows mother from birdbeak to mudmask.

~

[stopping to pray]

how angelic
the nervousness
of insects
offering acne
to god

/ to glacier, crow is not
yet a thing

~

[removal musics (xvii)]

those first animals
were angels
who’d either
slept
in their clothes
or caught
god
eating

/ has memory
always
denied
being young, do I look  

shape
like death
is an idea

shape is waiting
to have…

~

[cont’d]

I am tired of being curious. what I mean is my son is cheering for a photograph. what I don’t mean is you can’t drown a ventriloquist. here is what I remember: his body bouncing around inside the ambulance as if the ambulance wasn’t there. what I don’t

is that first, that invisible, pill.

~

[moth to moth]

a shadow
a ghost
lost
to drugs, hey

you wanna
later
touch
the blood
with bug spray, if

say our stomachs

have the same
mother

I’ve been alone longer than you’ve been alive

-

it
that sees double
is not
a ghost

-

puberty left me for the doll this eyepatch belongs to.  (I did not deny

-

a talented god

a premature
or christ-like
nostalgia
for the mirror
surrounded
by the nothing
I feel

born
there
to a sleepy
projectionist

listening
to the ear’s
brief
spider

taste of bread
in your mouth

even
longing
loses
me

the accidental possessions
of a disillusioned
proofreader
include:

/ the asemic
pawprints
of something
swallowed
by an invisible
hypochondriac

/ paper plate
the shadow’s
last
brainstorm

/ puberty
the broth
of wound / & this

the hair that pulled me through

[tunnel musics]

metaphor to grief: one hand grows faster than the other. blood is just milk that can’t see. the way you hold a gun makes me think of a baby’s ear. I do not want a long life.

~

[***]

in how many dreams have you appeared

that were not
at first
yours

-

hey

-

in movies

-

when streetlights go out one by one

I don’t feel
Interrupted

~

[treaty, grief, moon]

no clock
fast
we live
in the house
beside the house
we bought

treaty, grief, moon

some far
tornado

some nakedness

~

[returning]

he takes baths instead of showers

the boy
who believes
in ghosts

~

[returning]

to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain.  no cricket you hear is alone.  in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong.  his first sad poem is about an oven.  his second calls dust the blood of a seashell.  his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon.  my friends they are made of grief and brilliance.  they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft.  I sleep and my sister paints my nails.  kisses my head.  she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.  

~

[having a disabled child]

means
or maybe
it means
in Ohio
we are shown
how to die
of symbolism

~

[I have avoided hugging those who miss your phantom limb]

no windows, ghost bird.  

lo a mirror that picks a side.  lo in rock the bones of bee.    

~

[lapses]

we are playing
rock, paper, scissors
and arguing
about the birth
of leap frog

it is good, you say, absence
with faces

and what / from the fire / would you

breathing machine
or canary

who has
a canary

~

[removal musics (xiii)]

has hunger
an ear

do barbers
when lonely
jog

is there glass
in your belly button, is this

why you feed
the unfinished
babe

what has no home
and cannot grieve, oh

question-

by know we’d know
god lost
a father

~

[a delicacy, here, this harm]

mother my eyes
my longest
miracle

mother my bones

I owl
your voice
above my son
how much hair

can christ
swallow, is it human

to want
for the uni
cyclist

a more
cinematic

church

[I still bring snow]

I think mom’s new dog must have the bones of a kite. I have a lover, now. a he, a beekeeper. a she if she saddens in the nearness. a nothing, a dowry. ghost china. spacesuits for stillborns. under this blanket, a puppet reads to a doll about light. under that, the shape of what goes blind in a poem. I miss you. plural. I don’t wash my forehead. I still bring snow.

~

[house musics]

no star foreign, brother kisses a spiderless ceiling.

the diver
dead
our father
loved

~

[untitled]

a sick child can be in two stories at once. anthill. calvary. tell neither. I feel like maybe I am talking my way up the dollmaker’s ladder. eat? I won’t the black duckling. god

won’t the owl. angels

just birds
that faint.

~

[response musics (iii)]

...weigh god in photos. free a crow from the gospel of the negative. (we) revisit the medicines. call you dead and call you hawk gone to curl in the lap of a cyclops. ask (we ask) for what landbound thing did your body carry time? your past, every year, the same spot. thing never shows.

~

[response musics (iv)]

a run on mirrors. lowkey exorcisms.

wheelchair, lamb’s minus
one.

mom and the angel
of last
names. dad

and the snowplow.

dad and the ballet slipper.

yea the shadow
of his yawn.

~

[removal musics (xi)]

it’s always your story to which the afterlife gets added. did you even want children? do crows

hear thunder? no butcher believes in time.

~

[how I want you to remember my sister]

in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down

the ice cream truck
with her bible, or

as farewell

to nothing’s
church
of neither

~

[pseudo]

between the house of the first suicide
and the house of the second
there’s one
with a dog door.

the moms all work at the same ghost jail.

the dads say things like

/ finally a parrot I can hear / & / in hell
nobody steps
on their reading
glasses.

the dream is there we put our mouths on. our hands.
the dream
that was nest.

brothers dressed like jesus
brush their teeth
and sisters
keep a tender
thumb.

~

[takeaways from his speech to the poor about what happens overnight]

horror movies are all the same.

babies can’t get amnesia.

I once pointed a starting gun at the head of a thing that wasn’t looking.

sleep is the christ of the mind.

~

[dream saw and dream tooth]

to be
as asleep
as a father’s
left leg

as a birthday
for a window

~

[removal musics (xii)]

if childless, we call it mother.  

-

how long
did you fake
being young?

-

this part / of her poem / is empty

-

three men remove my shoes

-

translates

to yesterbed

-
  
self-portrait in milk

[confession musics]

I planted
a gun
on myself
in a dream, also

dad
I was faking
sleep

sometimes death

~

[blank elegy]

after death
nothing
(oh citizen)
of god

~

[phase musics]

not all of us have a sister and not all of us have a sister whose first job was to run security for a petting zoo.

not even in dream does she have her own room.

her lifetime of sickness
god’s
hidden fondness
for

/ the tattoo.

when she gives birth she gives birth in a field
to a thing that records
her lost
nothingness

& we visit

where ****
we cricket.

~

[diagnosis musics]

what moon
were you on
when you lit
that match

when they could still be made

the sounds
that choke
your son

~

[prognosis musics]

get a rabbit.

put a penny in the microwave.

run.

ask
for a third
breast

any
size.  burn

on a kiss

your son’s
foot.

pretend every day

it’s just
for one.

~

[known musics]

as a birthmark
on a fingernail
the boy
is young
and scratches
into mother
the unauthored
south
of illness

-

photo is a color
is a scar
raised
on or by
(**** it)
the moon

-

I have my health / can hide

from god

[removal musics (x)]

this father
handing bibles
to prison scene
extras, his sadness

sorrow’s
nondescript
editor…

the drive-in’s
elegiac
dog
/ nose
to the scarcity
of theatrical
emptiness…

the fish a cigarette burn on the body of god
gets bigger
over time....

how unfair
to insomnia
the monster
with child

~

[give god my space in the unleft church]

as you count on your teeth the losses
I’ve turned
to stone

~

[no musics]

I am to bed without supper for hiding my face from the lord. in the city, my brother is handcuffed for biting his wrists. still unborn is the calf that invented sadness. do I look like what you feel when you look at me? I think there is only hell.

[response musics (i)]

what nostalgia is to angel, eyesore is to animal

most mothers
hate
being filmed

there is the way I hold my son
& there is
the way I hold my son
while running
in place

tornado means
I am touched
in a house
with no
basement

wherever it is your father goes
the postcards
there
are small

oh to see jesus
walk at all

~

[response musics (ii)]

I thought girlhood the boyhood of grief

childcare, handprints, the failed hearts
of octopi

toy / on a stair / left there / by doll

god (memory)
making its way
through the useless
infant

myself
an impressionist

(because all

my mothers
faint

~

[a prayer for the tall mother whose cigarettes void brevity]

piano that disappeared
milk
that didn’t…

feather in the stomach
of my angel’s ghost

~

[cleaning the body small and boy]

the brain a ****
in the remoteness of god

~

[removal musics (ix)]

what a quick study
addiction is

this longing
my father’s

(her childhood a pinning of morose insects)

no horse but maybe
one
that pillows
a tree’s
broken
hip-

this poem, lonely expert
in a town of goats

~

[guest musics]

sand in her ear
she goes
as a seashell
her small
joke
a way
of living
on land
with the ghost
of her unbathed
child
her mother
calling clothesline
the scarecrow’s
scarecrow

~

[how to make a body]

sleep
until you feel
it passing
the slow
mattress
drowsy
and afloat
designed
for god

throw anything
you can find

stick, stone, nest, honeycomb

bird
the weight
of wasp

- name
what lands
with a friend
you can touch

~

[being alone went by so fast]

we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,

inventory, very motherly.

this one-man radio show about a father looking for his mouth. this tornado.

my first owl was a bee-loving tick. my first milk
was jigsaw

milk. being alone went by so fast.

~

[musics, other]

mother’s
farsick
palm, father’s

pack
of disappearing
nails-

our goldfish
insomnia

~

[toying with object permanence in kidnapper’s invisible world]

how
to unfossil
the mourned
boy
kissed
we believe
on the wrist
by
(we don’t)
the last
to experience
déjà vu

~

[lawn musics]

books on arson, grammar, vandalism…

god, multiple owners.

a typewriter
touched by father
at night.

the electric chair my brother imagined
& the hair
my sister...

adam (who’s never known the age of eve

[removal musics (ii)]

how naked
the alien
as it paints
pictures

(nest
after nest)
for the ghost

of a bird
birds
want

~

[altar musics]

you were not wrong

(child)

to come out
scared

(thought you’d be)

my haunted
proof

of lisp

(and home)
yourself

~

[having a disabled child]

means
it is enough
this morn
that the weak
kneed
angel
of small
hands
dreams
from the disposal
the rabbit’s
foot

~

[son musics]

i.

the ambulance
the fog’s
chapel

ii.

the angel
obsessed
with a human

ear, the overbite

iii.

common
in creatures
of departure

~

[fact musics]

my dad’s
second book

how to look
for teeth
in the rain

forgotten
like every
spaceship

sister
            saw

[airways]

I move
tonight
(while he’s
asleep)
my son’s
finger

across
my throat
/ everyone

wants to publish
my sister’s
ghost  

~

[confetti, glitter, sadness.]

to get news
in heaven
from other parts
of heaven
do you know
what it’s like
god’s blood
has fleas

~

[gulf musics]

two bodies of loneliness separated by the same beauty

(sea)

the eardrums of extra mothers

~

[soon musics]

i.

loss is lucky
to hear once
from absence

ii.

pregnant / reading fiction / to god

~

[aster musics]

i.

a god / whose god / has only / just died

that we understand
but cannot
by it
be understood

ii.

a deleted infant’s blank thirst

iii.

I thought it lost, a meal

our language
finished

iv.

or

v.

a ghosted

grasshopper’s
thumb / the sole / possession

of the brainless
calf

~

[a scene based on the need for such]

boy

(whose blood
is a fairy tale
kept
in his brain)

(who sees himself
reciting
for threesomes
the denial
of peter)

has his mother
cut the gum
from his hair

~

[vacancy musics]

how priest-like
my father is, the biter
of his own
breast, in the church
of my sister’s

bluer
moon

~

[on peacelessness]

no jump
scare
this losing
of child
to sheepish
math

~

[drift musics]

you won’t
drink it
but ask
anyway
for a glass
of milk.

vigil.

that bone you broke
while swimming.

[inspected musics]

with birth
we’ve bookmarked

the awestruck / god

still hates
his artist
sister / her flytraps

hang
in hell

/

[access musics]

I have a friend whose father called every basement the devil’s treehouse. a friend who’s here today because she hid a knife. whose brother met god too early on the path to god and whose mother would jump from anything to fix a tooth…

there are people who don’t smoke
who want to

when it rains

/

[thorn]

the dream
bread
of insect, horn

of dust

/

[Ohio musics]

a call-in radio show
whose listeners
are asked
to describe
loneliness
in their own words

(******

farness)

to a coal worker
or a clown

/

[corpse musics]

bread leaves home and food / comes for all / in animal / metaphors / favored / by god

/

[remote musics]

I write in this tongue and pray in another.  

we sleep
and are kissed
by an ear
in three
beds:  train, cow, frog.  

if you’ve seen one roach,
you’ve seen them all.  that’s where they come from.

I drop
down the back
of my brother’s
t-shirt
a wasp
and for years
he has
dry skin.

there are words
our mother said
that we’ve used
to protect her. this day

(to that)
gunshot
means gather
eggs. sleep

is your shepherd’s
prison.

walking
a blank
stretch

to rival / the disappearing /

wilderness
of starvation

/ the bride
of reflection
with her dog
made of sticks

i.

brother
while slicing
an apple
changes
his name
to earshot

ii.

an orange eats everything
but its mask. there was no ocean

iii.

until we hid from the storm. ticks are crickets

iv.

that belong to the poor

paint for me / in lost / white

an Ohio / so divorced

from its visionary
plainness / that one

can brush
an erased / hand / at the mere

thought / of spider’s / hair

newborn
with back pain.

(the cigarette that takes the pulse of our ghost)

it is raining

on the feet of god

this story again
my flat
brother
on his bike
with baby possums
eight of them
under his ballcap-

the mothered vehicle
of home, the doubled
kindness
of road
and ****-

how taken
from heaven
we lived

it was easier / in the whale / god elsewhere

god perfecting / the alien’s

coffin

–

fish and bird
loose
in the same
mirror

–

moths / of a softer / ma

map
in dream
what you can
of heaven

be the hurt
child
who fascinates

(birth) *****

thunder
with the soft

horse of male

privacy / my angels

are graves
in a country

of wind

in a nightmare

(praying over
his father
to highlight
the size
of the first
computer)

he disproves

god

(son) who breathes

for a snake
made of milk

say even god / would leave / this church

to step on the bones of a star

as if waiting
for you
to hallucinate

it is there

the sea

-

eating secrets in a dream

is the owl
with hands

-

I think we buried
darkness
wrong

the elderly
our unpraised
orphans
with healed
and self-taught
toys

~~~~

cancer is a pop gun and when I say missing I mean her body was seen by the lonely / her body / was having children but only those / we’d seen / in photos / I mean bus

of a christian
swim team

~~~~

when cooking, mama says she is burning the uniform of the country I was dragged through.  she knows better than to come from rib.  cheek, maybe.  or fishhook.  

~~~~

scar to my wound, this man believes in god. the last thing I learn is what I know. Franz Wright’s final book is called The Toy Throne. I understand this man when he says he was born with a disabled child. what is lightning

to a fish

~~~~

faith a shoelace in an unbroken egg

I stare at the letter x

~~~~

the plate

in god’s head
is a writer’s
dream.  she crows

her three
words
for stoplight
as a doll

bites down
on a stick…

math is maybe not the best look for grief

and hunger

too academic

~~~~

after suicide, everything that happens is the past

~~~~

I am not a ghost,

hand
I use
the least

~~~~

the mothers they were rehearsing in the drive-thru
the *** talk for boys they thought
were still
alive

-

crush a white tick / you’ll become / a projectionist

-

sleep is a bleeding stopped by the eye

~~~~

with god
prepared
to remove
its white
stomach, the dream

sees brain
as the print
of its thumbless
hand

~~~~

/ to a breathing machine in a swimming pool

the angel says whale

/ my nightmare

has a whale. it takes grief

from a mule

/ my brothers are ****

and star. claustrophobes

haunting
the hard
to forgive

~~~

alone in that no-name church of dream

scales of grief
and thrown back
fish

[boy musics]

we’re counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed *** shop in Ohio when I tell you my father is gay. it’s too late for crow and all the deer have been hit. you have just read me three poems by your dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister. a vacuum is running below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.

~

[tube feeding]

the boy who in the middle of performing a handstand finds god just as she’s creating the oceans after being overtaken by a herd of ghosts

~

[in a cornfield a trombone case full of ****]

we buried a god in Ohio today with a ouija board and a map. pain is a different god altogether. smaller mouth. no belongings. I remember becoming a dog with more clarity than being assaulted on a bus during a rash of housefires. sister says that from here on out television is the devil’s paint and bends herself into translating her mother’s poems for grief, the doomed sycophant of language.

guessing
the animal
at the end
of the chain
that’s eaten
the matchmaker’s
rib
but what
do we know
of weather
and its persons
gone to salt

her eyes

loot
the imagination

unreal as it may have been, it was a trauma only he could imagine. recovery is a prison run by fish. light’s one song

the past is bleeding

in one dream, a carousel horse. in another, a stomach.

–

dream is a shortcut

when there are no mothers, I will crawl toward the one sitting with what her legs couldn’t burn and I will ask my blood to be the same fish

mouth pain / in a clean / house

–

the weight
of sister

–

the passwords of worried creatures

a stroller’s
body
of work

–

treeless (quiet)

it is beyond me how a neighbor’s dog breaks all four of its legs. once, in looking at the smallness of my life, I dismantled my son’s dollhouse and told my daughters of the storm that didn’t wake them. I still learn in the church of the death I was taught by. I have my health and the healed their amnesia. do you see this ******* dog? and now for my previous trick.

and, beheld, she imprisoned the god
seen by those it changed

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

abuse has no before,

no after.

small windows for unfeeling birds.

I saw nothing fantastic.

an angel
freezing to death
in a somersault. a mirror

coming out of its skin. emptiness

the size of a pea
no pea

empty

everything but the barn is red. the barn is the shape of red. one can jump from its roof and never land. deafness, my proven

ladder, puts her mouth into words. she wash in horse

her father’s hands

/ of a grief misplaced by loss

if it’s missing
from your life

know
I’ve eaten

[for Kazim Ali]

pain has no spirit, I am never

so sad
that I can’t
scrape
the neighbor’s
car, probably

you won’t
survive, babies

are all
the same, I recite

what sounds
pretty, it seems

less happens
in the winter, to animals

and bread

‘sister played outside with a broken arm
and the wind turned her into a constellation.’ – Allie Gilles

a piece of ice
in my mouth
I’m kissing
a screen door
in Ohio

eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate

and doll
the first

eating disorder
in space

the words
I disappear
to say, the circle

I can’t
finish (that devoured

is the mouth
of nothing’s
babe) the knowhow

to inherit
immediacy

I don’t have very long
says the stone / all sadness

recent

dream’s oldest pig. stork’s

bucket
of footprints. god

the signal
it sent

pain passes out. boy is almost

body.

the hands
they look
unswallowed

but (dear hate)

I’m the same
person
I always

wasn’t (tree

with frozen
stomach) (the wrong

grave) (movie)

that ended
god

birth
knows everyone

(I know by cobweb)

the childbearing age

of a ghost, that dream

has taken
mirror, and also

that I cannot reopen
the mouth
my mouth

erased

memory (my

mother’s)

of personal
space