for fainting
in the afterlife

ask god how long it takes to decide on a language. remember the dead bear. the sleepy spoon. ask the soul about its weakness for image.

my eyes were invisible

it is hard for the nostalgic to forgive. I was raised on awareness and reincarnation. I remember, doghouse, the dollmaker’s tornado. and how to clear for my drunkest brother a mousetrap from a mountain path. believing, as a hostage would, in the taker’s amnesia.

poor death, sleep
the shoe
that never
drops

and poorer
dream

mine of a foot being nailed to a seesaw made of light

yours
what the rabbit
did
to its knee

because time has to remind itself to be invented

the holy spirit
still calls
it a rubber…

movies, mental illness....

(arms

twisted
by children
of the blind

thunderstorms
reported missing
by some
verbose
orphan

the fly
has a bed
and cat
was declawed
by snow

was he wanted a dog and was told to go through mom

(it:  torn from nothingness to live in this world)

/ attraction
the voided
bird

I write to the church about the orphanage and to the orphanage about the church. I write that football is the end of the world and that I owe my death to someone. she’s in the tub getting sick on her brother’s back and thanking god for sign language. our boy has an illness that lets him tame, elsewhere, ants. surprise for me a crow. disappoint.

why, brothers, are we so angry? I’m just out of image rehab. tell mom they couldn’t get the ****, so to speak, back on the oven. I know a kid of mine won’t walk the impossible dog. I know it deep down. arsonist first, birdwatcher second. drone to stork and stork to mermaid. I feel your pain.

satan is a dinosaur. existence an earliness for which I’m never quite prepared.

/ having been to volcano and back, dog

has this look

games like tea and fake
blood test

/ doll with a pill in a painted-on shoe

all things fish, I suspect, have forgotten to worship the devil.

/ riggers of cow-country staring contests. bread’s ruin.

the ball is not red. now stare

at the ball
that isn’t

(my half of the seeing eye dog

for yours
of sickbed)

oh,

our abuser’s futuristic nudes…

/ the angels
want
their dead

/ those who’ve boiled mouthwash in a baby’s bottle

/ my ice-fishing father’s crystal ball

/ the leaf
that prays
for hand

disappearance, firecracker
you never
get past it.

in the angel’s book on animal visitation

a deaf clown
bombs
a flower.

a harp
is the imaginary
secret
a spider
keeps
in the clockmaker’s
eighth
dream

I am the weakest person my brothers don’t know. I go with them under a blanket we won’t all come out of. hell of a word, hovercraft, but not a sucker for meaning. god torches the bathroom then speaks farmhouse to the father of the accident that never happened. I have a tooth or two knocked in by a footprint. a tick I call dust.

…this is god, this could be
god
gaslighting
his mother’s
online
presence

/ I never
see
the right
cricket

wrapped head-to-toe in toilet paper, he’d still ask for a cigarette. does this kid scream suicide to you? it’s not ******. the name of my animal

is shape. remember the face we saw in the bruise?

god to slow spread of reincarnation

this, from death’s
newspaper

–

found: nose of the crow-eyed infant

as touch explores its past

lipstick on a juicebox

was hell
so poor

this repeatable body, these monologues for echo

–

suicide’s mother, parole’s father…

–

snow a cemetery with mascot christ

forgiveness
was always
assault

/ visions mutter
in the ghost
of my stomach, film

is low
fruit

a runway model
in a cornfield

/ the stone a short film on snowfall

a mention
here or there
on the police
blotter, a chicken
scratch
on a giant’s
petition
to condemn
the church, kids
we lose
to birth

this one sleepwalker
hung
our laundry, this other
left mom
a rattlesnake

some man was mowing drunk
mad about church, a recent batch
of runt
lightning, that baby’s
age

the hangman’s bike shop goes under

it’s been
grey apple
a slow
year

I am

in that sleepy
window
where lives
double

crushing pills
for the scarecrows
of trampoline
graveyard

/ suicide, it lowers
a shoeshine
chair
in a spotless
interrogation
room
for pregnancy
thing
of the present

the healed are chewing their hands beneath posters of fast food taken from the walls of god’s cell. poetry is dead. prose the bone placed in the bowl of a frostbitten dog. nothing burns. not like a baby’s ears at an oyster farm.

seashell as failure. bread my raincloud.

touching my face in a clueless dream

on sorrow’s
blank
horse.

again
this baby
so okay
with dying

/ I was in the outhouse
praying
for deer

a thumbsucker
sold
on the second
coming
of invisibility, or host

of my father’s
most remembered
midwestern

gameshow

/ and my poems
they would not
flower

/ I quoted mom,

two eggs
to make
a phone

fate
will protect
nostalgia

I *** cigarettes
from the butcher
gave boredom
a fat
lip

/ death has been trying to guess my age

a statue of my father drilling for scarecrow. immediacy as elsewhere’s double. my mother’s dream to play pool on an empty stomach. blow-up dolls for the drowned christ.

[magic pills]

a doll taped to a skateboard. you get the idea.  mirror for doghouse, nest for traffic light.

[mystique]

/ boredom, falling short
in a mom’s
coldest
child / I understood

your movie / is there a meal

choice

prepares, or a less

direct
psalm / a taller me

where ovens
talk

[scrap chapel]**

a black tire, the bed
of the fisherman’s
crow- death and guilt

genetic-

same dream, same bear-

the afterlife of god

– tree of more

yeah madness had a motorcycle
for every
drive-thru

boy finds
a plastic
fingernail
and suddenly
he’s a rat
surgeon
washing
hand puppets
for god
in the birthplace
of buzzard
fiction

says he been seeing things after they happen

/ aims to bury
for free
bomb squad
dogs / thinks hell

if a scarecrow
can miscarry
in kite
country…

miracle and forgery, mom’s funeral

invented as a way to impress pain

/ had to pass
through sleep

in a barbershop
one hears

off
with his head

must be
slow town (this)

with dreamy
approximations
of coasting
wheelchairs

and uphill
bug swallowers
believing

it is hidden (it)

like a fishhook

in stomach’s
wig

to find
in the moments
after
the vision
that yes
you’ve eaten
everything
in sight, that a baby

yours
or not

is asleep
in a somersault, that you worshiped

prayer and fell

for hunger’s
childhood

our mom
to alien
you need
some clothes

/ scoop roadkill, look

marionettes
in the mouth, read

to the healthy
from a pop-up
book

on birthmarks, yeah

we spit
in the dark
let god
fish

putting
in flashback

birth
on the map

not at the same time will I break every bone in your body. god can brush his know-nothing tree. satan run a bath for a hole.

your mother, she’ll eat you in shifts.

/ horns make zero sense to the boy tossing horseshoes at a rain puddle

errors in care

how many hells does a death need?

the lost mind
the nurse
of the mouth.

I mean to be impossible, oh

/

and dreamt
from sleep.

~

horror movies

because they have no master
and don’t
overstay
their goodbye.

because in talking
we hid
sound. death

happens more
on land.

~

devotions for pilot**

historically, it has gone this way

birth
flashing
the present, my lap

breathing

under hypnosis the boy becomes nostalgic for its opposite. we are having for the hole in your brother a funeral. at sea the haunted cage. in a fish the robot’s rib.