[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

the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

can I miss
my body
with yours
our blood
the loneliest
bone

the mother is not so human as to be beautifully flawed. the mother is too perfect. take her poems. they are good somewhere, but translated. wound comes to me in a headlight. her visions return spineless men

their undrawn
ovals.

i.

to be called forth
from nothing

how perfect

/ no melancholy
is fair
to insect

ii.

would that we could be separated
later
by birth

that we might enjoy
shape

/ the darkness of being remembered

I am from the future (I miss

you) there is a way

to contort
the body
and deepen

scarecrows (my son

has an illness)
I’ve seen

in pictures

a year older than his violence

the over-feeder
of goldfish, the quietest lover
of his voice

would bruise
when his ghost
would blush

I pine more for the being god was thinking about when he made you. visually, the moons of pain. where circled by what. the one-eyed lambs.

I don’t think I was born to see my face. my father looks like he’s about to say nothing. her vocabulary comes and goes.

before touch has a body, we can see only

the hands of god
how they fumble

loneliness
and imagine

birth
for a family

of small
permissions

the day you were born
you were killed
in a dream
where some
were wounded.

I was there / to look / at the sky

I don’t know the name of the animal that slept with god. that ate the pea and left a rib. that moved the angel’s grave. with help.