it is common for the male cannibal to carry the skin of the due child

fasting is a sin and starvation a commandment

orphans are given home movies and edible pillows

language is a head
we bring it cake

no person was made in the harming of this creature.

hands off, angel,
the baby’s
glove.

leafing through the milkman’s picture-book of outhouse graveyards

happy to taste the gum on the buried shoe

reverie a learned behavior

god a tornado warning and hearing
a ghost town, this

a cigarette from the purse
of a past

/ mother

she puts down the book once it begins to read like it remembers being written. it’s my book. do you know this man? his sight returned while he ate. boys play freeze tag to sadden birds.

allow me, wind, my unnoticed resurrection and forgive my smaller ear. the *** we had saved to cut the bread of bilingual angels is now a ghost watching sleep improvise. church bell beats dog-whistle and rocking chair empties horse.

when it was said
cannonball
I heard cannibal
and wondered where
was my helmet

my dad as a boy was bullied
by evocation, as a man
by the flawlessly
deaf

puppet to puppet, I only have two hands

the future
is all
you see

for her date with the giant, mom is putting on her face. our time, invisible chameleon, is over.

brain of a white mouse.

poetry and suicide
the two left feet
of a child
forced to play
horseshoe
horse
a waste
of strangeness

the spell we’re under for mocking the wrong ballerina

it learned here to roll over

there
to be
on fire

childhoods of dog-breath and wand

in my plainness a seesaw

in her dream jaw her dreamboat’s jawbone

in our daily belly

in the church of rolling our own
a film
ghosting
a film

in a rug made of bread a tooth made of bread

in mannequins where small things kneel that are living

in claw-marks and in jigsaws of the crucifixion

in

crows balloons of the strangled

[entries for tone]

it learned to read by being called every name in the book and it wrote eulogies for the children of getaway drivers and it knew nail as the light bulb of a dream journal and it did not know which palm print went with which birthmark on its mother’s vision board and it had its hair pulled out in a cornfield by a boy / god was too / young to have

[entries for Ohio (ii)]

how absence is to me a bowl and to you a basket. how brothers fight over the last fish and the first snowflake. how sisters arrive whole from the museum of shortcuts. how a baby dressed like another baby is not abused. how a father slips a bear into his story of a mousetrap. how a mother points a set of wind-up teeth away from a square of wet cement. how on a soundstage I roll my ankle while you lift alone a magician’s birthweight. how ****. how it listens in a bathroom stall to the click of a viewfinder. how they horse. and ache.

[no animal makes up for lost time]

toothache
come home
I’ll wear
a shirt

[untitled]

why does uncle
love baseball
and throw
so hard

what’s a city

kid I come before you
knowing full well
I won’t remember
my answers

the left hand is for pawing
at the broken
rabbits, these buildings

think god
will jump

who does memory
impress, who

can it warn

/ I left you for nobody else

as a stick figure on a forgotten gurney dreams of one day washing a flower or of drying a wet bird, I run the bath to put the tub to sleep then use my body to bury the water.

when your son finally speaks, he’ll say the kids in his very first dream were all sick

/ kiss only those
who blame
god

place a wet diaper on a skateboard and send the skateboard across a non-busy street. we call this summer. the older kids arrange on a stretcher the pieces of a woman’s bathing suit. the older kids come for the skateboard. our tortured turtle is bad with names. the tractor has yet to reach the deer. this is also summer. the orphan keeps two diaries.

a one-legged boy
and a lame
bird

in a roller
skate

I like everything about your story except where it starts.  a little longer in the dog’s mouth.  I couldn’t separate the gnome’s suntan from the minotaur’s heart transplant.  maybe your parents could write me a letter?  how many missed meals does presence eat?  it did make me sad, the snowball fight beneath a boneless moon.  and the daughter born to fake her pregnancies.  look, we all have a brother who can’t move.  who puts a clock in a time capsule.  suicide?  on other planets.

mom is talking to her wounds. dear baby I don’t have to carry. dear purse I don’t have to fill. her dolls draw blood and her animals say goodbye. there’s no substitute for loneliness. memory knows more than what happened. dad is an oil slick seducing a satellite. his dolls eat pillows.

am giving the balloon a head of hair and my brother his skateboard a set of teeth. are we teasing the same creatures, yes, with mom’s eardrum. all our birds have one father and the father foreign concepts of farewell. sister is urging us to hug but we know from stick that river had a nightmare.

snow, we let it fall. our cigarettes nod off. ear shaped mouths fill with cake. our mothers open windows, and worry. lovers leave a bed, unmade, on the moon. a stolen truck swerves to miss a charging bike. a young boy, mid angel, says he can feel the blood in his body. he says it to a girl and she punches him. I wish to remove the clothes of every figure we drew as children. a blind boy with acne makes light of god and god’s face. we call the boatman’s wife from different hotel rooms. our sisters refuse towels and we put our hands in and out of a glove. our uncle

we can hear him ******* on a broken lawnmower. we pass our father and **** him for taking, already, the cat’s frozen head from the madman’s shovel.

it reads and feels nothing. a reminder’s footnote.

memory forgets its hermit father

& painters
go bald.

a mother says little.

each cigarette
has its own
language, this match

the pen
of the afterlife.

give prognosis its non-crying baby.

mom works nights answering the phone for a nameless thing

/ which sister
gets
the strawman, or

a narrator’s
struggle
with pica

/ what example
we set
for sleep

your hair looks like a missing wig. dream is comb in a glacier. sleep an ape’s thumbnail.

a rake
the scarecrow’s
broom.

ugly makes you easy to find.

let surgery leave something in your mouth.

weigh them as a whole, the clothes of the smallest person who died on your watch. the blindfolds. the dreams of your stick population. down the pill

yet inside
the black
sheep.

/ a pair of scissors in one room or a gun in two. a thumb war’s lame spider. four rootless prayers drawn on an echo. four awestruck sisters caressing with their ears the undeveloped skull of an infant. melancholy’s condoms. flowers for the arm-wrestler’s inoculated phantom.

had a child and began to see people

/ every bandage is a red-haired ghost

mirror
to window
we’re moving
away

cigarettes from your dad the impossible shepherd

a longer god

the cats
of a cruel
friend

we worship
not god
but the expression
on his face
as he recalls
being washed
in his mother’s
kitchen sink

sorrow the mudwrestler of my drought

whose tooth fairy
does
impressions

can we erase
what silence
films

a dog
a smaller
prison

I want
in the cookie-cutter’s
dream
to find out
I’m pregnant

/ what do you feed
absence

/ in most kitchens, the microwave
is above
the oven

/ tornado

it does not
put

a bedpan
in a projection
booth

/ before it is born, the mouth of the hole is open

I bring with me
to put
on the moon
my webbed
foot /

father for soap has been known to use a magnifying glass

brother he bend a tooth
in the temple
of the spoon

sister she is fixing a screen door
when her child’s fish
moves
its bruise

a cricket turns into a frog

the worm it works
for peephole

oh sound, attracted to nothing

what on a raft am I rubbing

whose suicide
is this, whose bloodbath
footwear

drivers of the haunted tank

[entries for the unmarked]

i.

swimmer was a cornfield baby

ii.

fox clock, always

noon

in the egg thrower’s
aquarium

iii.

playing tag

no blood
allowed

iv.

her bones
disappear
when pups
nurse

[entries for travelogue]

on his belly to **** on his tail, man dreams of getting laid in the birthplace of tunnel vision

/ my son he keeps showing me how to find the same animal

died of different
things

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

blood comes to me from a country of dry-****** trees. brother

as a ghost
with a snakeskin
kite. eye

after killing
the camera.

the name of this scar
is
they couldn’t hide
the canoe

mom says there’s an oven
at the bottom of every lake

that I was born asleep
surrounded
by toe touchers

is art
world-building
for the geeks
of grief

have you crucified

starfish

my roommate’s father lives in a skipped year rewatching a tv show about what poor people film with a puking man I call future

the memory
before I have it
of this terrible
thing
I’ve done

/ and the fish
the flaggers
of blue
runways
are swimming
two by two

/ and god has no one

[entries for creator]

to keep my son safe, I invent hole and hat and await the rabbit. in the meantime, I watch videos of daycare workers beating on food as if kids could betray starvation. but really I’m just sad no one knows anymore how to make a fist. say Ohio aloud and you’ll not notice

a pattern.

[entries for undoing]

he go to water
to form’s
disciple
where last he saw
his mom’s wheelchair
momless
in a net
made of spiders

[entries for restraint]

lightning, keyhole, the forgetful
giant
blowing kisses
from bed
to the eyelids
of nostalgia’s
immortal
messenger…

is this how I am beautiful in an airplane bathroom

is this the mother burns her own
ears
to get
god
talking

/ stop reading
you come
to crow

picture him
as a hardscrabble
mystic

gay

the frog shepherd

scissor his hair
with fingers
from the hand
of your longer
arm

call out from your place
in tree
so he know
which tree
a tree
for once
foreign
as a bear
cub’s
back

for a god
who body shames

birth

be

ultrasound

be

what is really a group of nudists holding a séance

in a treehouse
in Oz

why are you here?  no one left me.  do you know god?  boy skipping recess to play dead.  is your mother sick?  she packed a lunch I’m still eating.  have you ever given blood?  to a parrot in a time machine.  have you ever been arrested?  no, but my father is alone.  how alone?  a fishing pole and a pair of handcuffs.  name three gifts.  invisibility to bread crumbs.

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

{entries for dimension}

at birth
it says
iceberg, and then

crown

–

I have this story that can put
for you
a banana peel

on the floor
of the delivery room, this other

–

with a scarecrow
midway through it

looking all
tore up
like it was used

last night
as a fork


{entries for belief}

ain’t a thing can be crucified that has clothes

when people think
you lonely
you can slip
twice
from your mother

you can chew with your hands in your pockets


{entries for Ohio}

I am to my blood
what ant farm
to ant

–

the mother worries about them sleeping at the same time
the twins

–

the dark has an ugly brother

revenge
a rare
photo

–

this babysitter I know
driven
to suicide
took things
from a movie
set

–

god says
bring her in
the fast
reader

for observation


{entries for intimacy}

things I said when I stepped on a nail
things like
a spelling bee
is underway
in hell
and how deep
it goes
the thumb’s
suicide


{entries for music}

while I kept
scarecrow’s honor
my elbows
off the table
and ate
to practice
swallowing
mom she put a litterbox
on a piano bench
telling dad
dreams
are the paws
of god

we had a baby together to solve our bug problem. god said all we had to do was read to it. the books made us look poor. some of them took batteries and, if struck, played music.

what creature
itches
at night
knowing
I have learned
to crawl

you is part lake and some bellies
were skipped

my seven year old son keeps putting his hands in his diaper. evangelist.

worry is no teacher. birth no language and mouth no age.  I tell you there is a comedy passed among the lower whites and I’ve heard them boast of taking blood’s coffin to the grave.  I moonwalk in a poem about violence.  am abused by animals for buying local

from the claustrophobe
her neglected

astronauts

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

horror and recognition are functions of the past. I brought to your campfire an empty dollhouse. I lit with eyesight a haunted cigarette. it’s not your baby, it just can’t flee.

I am looking for the phone no one hears. the phone I use to call people I want to hang up on. my son has not yet become the size he wants to be when he’s with me. I hope he has friends. I hope his friends know that to be taken by aliens means god is serious about studying who misses you. I don’t believe in god nor in those given a shorter time to think on death.