I make my daughter see a gnarled tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.  I look at my father and commit my face to memory.  I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.  I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.  thirty seven when my son graduates from gag to blindfold and wants to know why it rains but never snows blood.  when I learn from an owl of my daughter’s aversion to pillows.  god is more and more the map he left in the kitchen drawer of a dollhouse.  I shoot into the air a rubber band given to me by an alcoholic relative recovering from the time I called the white of my eye the ******’s acre.  my wife is holed up in an outhouse shunning her diet of run-on sentences about the Qibla.  I don’t have an answer but change it.

that my father can sleep, god has me put a pea under the resting body of my disabled son.  my three older children are sober enough to call my mother.  my wife puts a gun to a head that’s not in the freezer.  I jump rope thinking I might move into the land of plague my acre of miracle and find for snowfall the farm machine that once cleared lambs from the formlessness of habit.  night, you.

dad is trying to load bullets into a flashlight.  his tv show is having trouble sleeping.  mom wants us to drink the water while it’s hot.  myself I’ve heard horror stories about ******* in the baby pool.  I tell my brother having a fever is alot like giving god a *******.  sister opens the oven for a doll she thought would be taller.  we like you but not when you’re lonely.

the bottle takes what it can from the baby’s mouth.  the stirring motion delivered to the hands of a misfit prophet.  the knowledge of my father’s people that god is too old of a lover to get satan’s attention.  the silence my mother kept quiet for.  the second afterlife of a single breast.

take
to the sinking
city
of god’s
jack-in-the-box
a stick

from the wand’s
dream

anyone with sight was put here to warn my son.  the past is the past of no sudden moves.  the future is the language god uses to hallucinate.  if I remember correctly, memory is the safe word my father avoids to make his presence known.  touch is the cage in all things mom.

1976
her ghost
on standby
my mother
throws a phone
at the man
reaching
for his gun
while my father
closes
in a prison
yard
the white
bible
he’s named
the gospel
of the bad
knee
and swears
to carry
my voice
and with it
me

I am not a warm person.  different gods, none exist.  did this really happen?  the things I counted myself as a person passing were longer than I thought.  someone kissed jesus on the ear before he could get from bad fish the poisoning that took your mother from hers.  now is the act of stuffing a picnic blanket into a basket of doll grief and then is the fossil of suffering that bones invisibility for daring to redress the father of great avoidance about the loss of behavior in his boys of sudden things.  what I do I don’t when gutting a stork.

because in its guts, poetry knew it was born of two miscalculations. creating god was all for nothing. I think I make my parents lonely.

touch is a sign of weakness.  my father opens his mouth after speaking.  meanwhile, miracle, it occurs to me in separate car accidents that bringing me to my son in god is less an undertaking than that of arming the man who transports a stopwatch to a cemetery.  do we live the lives of those experimenting?  beauty is not alone.  suppose it knows.

we keep it like god
the wheelchair
you’ve outgrown…

I myself
leave
the feast of absence
to clean
my tongue

that it remain
not unlike
a room
in your mother…

if I fail
three times
to haunt
a word
oh well…

I have nothing to shake

from death
their doll

death

the distance between my brother and a random sister

if

what they struggle
to share
is darkness
their childhood
blanket…

-

realistic depictions of my mother watching films

-

also

for a shy
god

my mother
divining
from belly
mud

trends
in angel
fashion

-

me
liking only
the me
I see
in mirrors

*** as something that has an end.

evidence of god
provided
to beings
of proof.

I will offer that I had children
because I myself
could not
shun
authority.  post-harm

pick a word
you’ve heard
me say.

if I die before my father, place my body in full view of the man tagged by god as a hunger strike.  if I have a meal left in me, listen for my turn-taking sons…

the earth is part earth and there is a hole in the sound I made you from.  I am

no I
am thunder.

how far we are
from soup
when mother
burns her tongue
trying
to convince
god
they had

the mime and the mute
the same
childhood.

we love her so much
we use our brains
as often
as baby
spoons.

first base is a landmine.

there’s nothing to say
we weren’t
here.

what bone am I, stillness?

what can I tell my son
I carried?

what is it knows me
that isn’t god
by the humans
I am
in my sleep?

infancy, what overtakes
your period
of mourning?

dear pilot of my father’s animal

dear tree
the ahistoric
ghost

dear space
blood

~ the director

one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.

his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs meant for his father, he made walking his home until it called itself a hotel

of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss
the death row scene, the saw his brother took from the cake, the plain basket
as it moved
with his mother

from bike
to bike…  

~ transmissible

the stomach remains dumb

the way she finds this out on a school bus

the way her mother
after losing
a child  

~ ephemeron

cornfield visionaries, they sat around the ball as if it were fire.  I myself was tired of magic

so we played four short and the ball was a fact.  a hard period planted in mud

or a long quote
buzzing the ears
together.  

~ alleviant

of all places a park bench will do for the man not yet reading but planning to the children’s book with its cover of mother and child and kitchen and some kind of batter on the child’s face.  presently the man is alone much as his mother is alone in one of his fingers.  two men nearby are drinking from a water fountain and in turn are each palming the low **** for the other.  they are friends but only by length of service and the man can tell one is aggressive and the other allows it.  the book itself is disappointing.  the child is just ***** and the mother is just angry and they learn only to be themselves.  the men at the fountain become two men on a bench and the reader scoots over to hear about the voice of god as ****** children take the park.

~ amends

your house in foreclosure and you leave it and you are holding two bags of cat food.
  
sometimes a tricycle is a particular tricycle
trying to clear
with its back wheel
the low cinema
of your bare
foot.  

I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.

I hope we can meet without talking money.  this story my mother gave me
about the world’s first invisible man
is a keeper.  he was born

that way.

your mother I saw her setting the patio table for two and I looked away but could hear
no one
beating her.

we can talk about your cat.    

~ homology

the empty raccoons by their emptiness have kept the priest awake.  the church dumpsters wheel themselves into the world and he watches.  he tells his mother it is the silence of god.  she shrinks from him more and more and eventually fits through a door he cannot see.  his house fills with garbage and he becomes convinced he is wearing gloves.  we do not argue.  he raises them with his hands to take them off with his teeth.      

~ fiction

my age, father paints an abstract jesus.  mother has the kitchen to herself and sits.  mother watches my brother lift a chair and leave.  my sister lets a train pass and bites at the shoulder strap of her bra.  not my age, I draw a violinist.  draw a dog at the neck of its owner.  at my age of apple and rope, I prefer god’s early work.

~ monodist

online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.  in house, I dreamt not of my wife but of a grape being rolled by a palm gently toward a grape the dream could not see.  as it is in heaven, I was not all there.

~ signage

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs.  my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened.  soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I startled that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad.  I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of the man who’d fathered the boy whose fist had found so recently fistfight heaven.  the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise.  everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now see as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance.  I told myself I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly.  the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine.  the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but went quickly back to its original.  I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button.  I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and that boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.      

~ discipline

somehow sweet in his want of no trouble, the unwashed man goes hand in hand with your father to the backyard where they wrestle as if hurt were people keeping them apart.  your father’s jaw comes loose, the man’s ear seems held by too small a magnet.  at window you a sickly child with overbite and a scarecrow’s pipe stroke the puppet-corn hair of a sister’s doll and walk it cloud to defrosted cloud.  amidst this bartering of vanished weight your mother is being made to balance on her bare stomach a glass of lemonade.  in three days the man will come back, your father a bit healed, your mother less angry about straws.

~ the rabbits

the head of a shovel enters the earth of this southern field.  there is no more give here than in the northern.  the burying boy has been long facing the wind and will be longer.  in walking toward the boy, the old man’s knees have locked.  the old man is seen by the boy and the old man waves upright in the wind’s gnaw.  the tops of the boy’s legs reach his stomach.  

~ archaism

a man carrying his dog stops to kneel.  for my distance from him, I am disallowed any inquiry that would flower.  he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god at the simple chore of placing those first shadows.  I am holding my son nostalgically, almost forgetting how my tooth would ache and his tooth would ache and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.

~ sincerely

the males had in them a sloth and a jolly fog of sportsmanship

and in the females a mistake was made.

against frogs, and against the dim leaping
of frogsong

I had this friend

broke his arm
while *******  
at the wheel.  

I put my arm in the grief of my arm.

the *** of the first person in hell

the number of animals
giving birth
in a field
where emptiness
burns

the logic of
if ax to tree, then scissors
to kite

he has the look of a woman with a place to die. he grounds my father with a sickness reserved for flying creatures. he owns nothing. his people are a hospital my mother calls one too many. his prayers replenish absence. he counts in the garden an invisible populace whose dreams my dreams were having.

her nightmare
from the era
of hibernation
revolves around
a baseball
made
by her husband
from the cobwebs
found
soaking
in the mouths
of babes

(mouths)

dry
from dreaming
of the sponge
bathed
by god
in the egg
of a spotless
crow

i.

while still
a butterfly
a caterpillar
landed
on the head
of the crucified
christ
who asked
himself

what can I do
that I can’t

ii.

losing a baby, no, think of it
as losing
your baby’s
hair

iii.

whatever was born had a nosebleed

the composers of rain
fight gently
but fight
nonetheless
over the brush
that first touched
my mother’s
teeth.  mother

is asleep.  I’d leave

a thumbprint
but am not sure
which lid
covers
the eye
she drinks with.  I want to say

dying
is the bath
we draw
for death
but know
father
can’t hear
a thing
since losing
his voice.  

/

though I am rarely old enough to have seen a boat

the boat is weeping

I always ask my brother which eye he wants to open in the dark. I have a foreign notion of how to be homesick. I have a son whose body won’t tell him he’s well. I see the face of god as an idea gods use to evoke intellect. as a girl, the man of few words found himself surrounded by things she could describe.

the bean counter
of cigarette butts
our father
sits on the roof
reading aloud
from silence.

it is mother
has a mind
for arranging
furniture.

it is dog hears digging.

the future of my ant farm
is the mirror
delivers you
as advertised
to satan.

in this version of my father’s bully
I am always
a boy.

I kiss my son’s foot.
his parachute
does not
open.  I am taken

from the dream
by childbirth

just a face
I make
at god.

in the house
of the toddler
famous
for pulling
from a dryer
an entire
scarecrow
the soon to be
dad
with his one
bad
blind

eye

puts a rock
through hell

~ son in bathwater ~

nose to nose, my hands under his armpits and his hands soft and missing. his legs holding onto his feet and the river or the rug pulling away. I haven’t looked at anyone like this. if somewhere a knife slips in and out of consciousness, I don’t care. it will not be news.

~ a diaspora ~

don’t worry, because here is worry:

a stone in a grounded bird’s nest.

it is easy to say, I guess. to come up with
the fed multitudes.

hell is to be in two places at once that are both hell.
see above.

see below:

shade of stone, kind of bird. knowing, here is knowing:

the poor write good.

~ harlequin ~

as a father I audition alone for the part the mother does not get.
to my audition, I carry two eggs. I break them on my chest.

cancer, family, but mostly cancer.
in the cardboard forest, my daughter picks up a wand.

~ a fear of ~

baby on baby
violence
continues to be
the number one
reason

daycares
across the country
do not report
the imaginary
friends

of illegals

~ my father’s singing voice ~

an abandoned dog
on a weekday
shops its grief
from homeless man
to homeless
woman

under threat
of lightning

where else

~ escapism ~

my wife was pregnant with a silhouette. it lost itself to her. it left me out. I began saying sensitive things around women about their bodies so one might trace me. I said lord I thought my life would be sadder. I bought an AK47 because it was the only gun I recognized. I hung it on my neck. my wife used her memory to pluck things from my hands. food, mostly. it helped me realize I was rarely using both hands for the same purpose. my wife began going out at night. said she did so to hate America. when once I tried to join her on the front step I was informed how she missed me but not as much as I believed. she threw bread crumbs into a shuddering bush and I had the feeling it wasn’t new for her. yesterday, I sold the gun to an interested neighbor with a child to protect. he told me my wife’s nightgown is rather sheer but that he’s more concerned with how she carries herself. after hearing that, I don’t think anyone could’ve dragged me to him.

~ angel scene ~

when on the path
some small
unnamed
creature
senses
the oblivious
coming
of a man

and wishes
in its own
animal way
to be called
into ash
or bush

~ immolation ~

when it burns
in the oven
we call it
crow bread

in our mouth
we call it
wasp
then slap

first our own
then the cheek
closest-

when it does not burn
at all
we check to see
if we are wearing
black socks, if we are standing

on carpet

~ kenning ~

he wasn’t put here
to beat you
in front
of any
fool
reminds him
of that woman
who wished herself
into a fly.

he has been more than open with you
about it
about
his reincarnation

how he happened
to be the first
to know it.

you keep it all in, bring your mother
noises

from field
so she can determine
which ear
works…

word association
is a thing
of the future.

be the property of your blood.

it is odd
at first
but becomes
common
the inclusion

of ghost
on a list

of demands

-

winter means
little
means
ahead

of winter

the mothers
they swallow
snow

worms

-

in no time at all

the bomb-maker’s garden
leaves its mark
on the wrong

snake

-

the infant believes I’ve sent for my body

I can’t write about angels when I’m drunk.  my father’s blood

dries
on the hand
of a mannequin
in a shop
I no longer
own.  the drugs I take

I take only
when brother
has a bike.

the angels I refer to

refer
to my mother’s
bib.

dear apple
in a paper
sack
there is
no

tornado

the boy possesses the silence of god

/ bring me the scarecrow’s parrot

suicidal, mom is thinking for two.  the storm says again there’s a hand in my soup.  my ears are sounds from the son of god.  the sister of sister insane has an arm and with it throws a roller skate at a school bus.  you can’t see my ******* anymore than I can see the worried eyes of a giraffe.  people are people from church.  the we in we let her believe.

[Adonai]

as if asked to bathe an angel
father drops mother
from an open
first floor
window.

with little effort
my brothers move a trampoline
over her body.

I talk over
with two actors
in prison garb
how to shoot the scene
having only
one phone and one
pane of glass.

all were rich
father included
when the window was closed
and he was on fire.      

~

[mall nuns]

a chicken with its head cut off
takes part in a melodrama
fit for a swan

-

both halves of my daughter
live thinking they are survived
by the other

-

mall nuns.

just nuns
taking a shortcut.

-

my daughter uses a pencil
when pretending
to smoke.  

nesting failure

makes her sad.

-

I spend my days seeing things.

as if
youth is a museum

-

poverty isn’t

~

[virtuoso]

mommy I am stones.  I am in the blacktop river.  my veins have been used to unpiss cows.  like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are.  the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten.  they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move.  I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed.  I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing.  if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t.  there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped.  I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

~

[cinema]

when as a father
one arrives early

one is lonesome

and given
by no one
the task

of remembering
the empty lot
roped off

and daughter
needing both hands
for the rock

~

[podium]

a toy tugboat
in an unfilled
baby pool

a dead spider
beneath it

I could talk nightly
on these-

my dreams would look for missing children
my dreams would turn to salt

~

[proximal]

this is the holding father
bent from the weight
of his child    

ear to eardrop

a hospital tree     in aftermath
hunched to the loss
of discovery

this is day 39 of 40
observations

each day I have so many
children     to name

differently

I don’t remember the first time you were here

anymore     I am blessed
to see your toes

hear a storm
when the storm
is distant

in one room
a light is on
in another
off

-

I live with my parents
hymn to mouth
delivering
fluency
by hand
to the language
of vicarious
passage

-

gender peasantry
is about
to become

a thing

-

mom, dad

I don’t think there’s world enough left to be quiet in

-

my bad hearing
I take it
with me

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

~ youth ~

holding a baby
as if she’d
had it thrown at her
my mother
came out of the museum-

it had stopped raining
it had also
stopped
snowing

and people
were giving me
money
 
~ to message ~

to be somewhere without a book on my person. hard word this, hard word that, for the never arriving marble of grief. to rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel. to let the water from my mother’s body but not before telling her god lives in me as long as my son is outside. to have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to. to die well. die punctuated. by imagery the drowning cull from years on land spent openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.

~ disburden ~

god went from wall to wall unaware he was god disguised as a graffiti artist.  renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  the homeless are tattoos that remove themselves.  I guard the outlying cross and go through the motions again of nailing to it the same madman.  my only tool is comfort.  in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.

~ apace ~

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed

     in full view
of the elderly.

provided they have gestural transportation

a second class
on image crafting
is held     off site.


~ clotheshorse ~

     a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.  

your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.  

your mother is a vow of silence
you were born     to second.

I am nobody I speak of.  those alive to nuance, those seeing

a necklace     in a grandmother’s     clotted leg.

     god is not silent.  god is forgiven.


~

from - father, footrace, fistfight -  (June 2014)

the film
halfway through
had this idea
gave mother
heartburn

-

the baby

-

the baby is a monster with a broken foot

-

it comes out of my mouth this thing that feeds a brother

it learns to read but only has time

for phantom

-

cosmonauts

-

mother she loses father to headaches anonymous
mother she likes the film

it’s one
of one

it reminds her of raccoons
refusing
to eat

-

profane chauffeur, grief

in the house that doesn’t go to heaven
my father lives
the life
of a stowaway.

tell the tornado how poverty has too many gods.

/ the walls have ears.  I have

my collection
of roaches

wrapped in foil / someone

will take my word
what firewood
was.

he can’t tell a baby
here
not from

a hole
in the ground

a white sock in father’s stomach

the rabbit’s head
we use
for mowing

saying
instead of chore

char, mother

saying
it’s his
her blood

sleepwalking

(all titles available on Lulu)


~



from The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake - Sept 2013, 211 pages, 10.00


the recidivist

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.        


within hail

     the flashlight works if you shake it.  this tree is the tree you should use.  every other home is broken.  every other window has in it my house arrested father.  the dog run off, the dog come back.  back with a beauty I will bed to babysit my brother.  the crow is empty.  a plaything, a part of the show.  crow can be blindfold, camera.  can censor among other things an exposed breast.  the fence wasn’t here when we got here so it’s not here now.  an uncle says there is a dog only he can hear.  will say anything to get laid.  in all fairness I’ve failed more than once to insert myself into the loneliness of my person.


a country

i.

I approach the dream as if I'm asleep
the answers written on my hand

ii.

I stick out my tongue
at the mid
born

baby

iii.

I raise awareness by praying
you go through
my exact
hell

iv.

I see myself as my son
writing to his father
about deformities

v.

in a crowd of soldiers
my daughter's head
bobs up and down

as if passed around
on a stick

vi.

it takes an army to imagine
only one thing


assistance

from the boy

(on the soon to be
exact
date
our poverty
matures)

this ballpark
statement:

I did not ask to be born.

     he wants the names
of those
I’ve told.

~

from father, footrace, fistfight - June 2014, 177 pages, 10.00


the gentle detail

in the time it took
his daughter
to soap
her brother’s
cradle cap

the man
was able
to lose
an entire hand.

every now
and now
he corrects me
with a puppet.

there is no place
where nothing should be.


lift

my mother steps on a wooden block
with both feet.

stepping off,
she announces
she is going
on a diet.

my father covers his ears
and gets shaving cream
on them.

he turns me in his hands
like a dish towel
then drops me
at the base of the tree.

I transport
god’s blood
on three
disposable
razors

to my neighbor
who

on a high shelf
has a microscope.


deep still

ghost of snake.  

an adoration
of atypical
young mother
fear.  

mouse needs a toothache.

footwork
heads north.


1998-2014

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

~

from The Women You Take From Your Brother - Aug 2014, 351 pages, 18.00


joy and joy alone

I broke the boy on my knee because I needed a switch. we ran around an empty crib. I let him catch a breath and he let me kneel. we tiptoed in a manner of mocking past private make-up to which his mother had been softly applied. he drank tea from an eggshell and I declined. I swatted him to let him know I was dying. his bent sister fell asleep and the boy was kind enough to believe her hair was a nightgown. I swatted him again to let him know I would live. the tea was gone. the rest is sadness.


being

a man my mother knows
only in passing
is reading a library book
in the dugout
of his dead
child’s
home
field
while his wife
rounds the bases
pushing
a stray dog
in a grocery cart.

at the dinner table
father says
we’re fasting
in a world
of spirits.

~

from Misreckon - Dec 2014, 115 pages, 9.00


clear heads

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.


untitled (ii)

afraid of my sons, I was born scared.  to my friend of few words I say

a few
words

on how a newborn looks like an undiscovered

fish
fresh
from ghosting
the underfunded
aquariums
of rapes

that occur.  at some point
I’ll tell my daughter

we’ve met.  my father

when he comes
comes

from another
dimension
to bear hug
our dinner guest
who’s arrived
in a mirror.  

mother puts a gun to her foot.


end psalm

god had an earache and I heard thunder. I learned to shrink into the smallness of my brain. I associated money with my father’s funny bone. my mother with the dual church of hide and seek. I went on to have a son with special needs. he cried once. cried milk.

~

from Eating the Animal Back to Life - July 2015, 316 pages, 10.00


off night

when what we thought
had entered
our father
left

we used him
as an alarm

god is coming
and mom
is vacuuming
stones


neglect

it didn’t take long for the frog to become real to those around me. some would bring it back and pat me on the head and some would laugh when I told them it’d never tried to hop away before. some would say it was the frog that was depressed and some would pray for the frog I was lucky to have. when it began to speak, I told myself that’s just how frogs talk. god came to me sooner than most. mom joked that he must’ve known I had a frog to get back to. my sister maintains to this day she had no intention of eating the frog as she was only trying to impress the snake her eyes were made for. by the time I woke her up, her hunger had ballooned and she leapt at me the odd leap of grief.


contact high

it gets so you can’t throw a rock without having a baby. not all of us talk this way but you have to hand something to the ones that do. I’ve seen voodoo dolls with more personality. had my mother’s god been my father’s, I would’ve gone blind from staring at my birth.


themes for country

I am at the truck
getting ice cream
for the overly
nostalgic
girl
who refused
to cut through
the cemetery

~

from Drone & Chickenhouse - Oct 2015, 84 pages, 6.00


chaos

brother drinks water enough to shock the devil. on the inside, he’s all doll. I shake him for show might our sisters travel in pairs. I used to talk but had to close my mouth when the soft spot on his head kept my mother from her toes. it’s the second stone that really lands.


deep scene

speech itself is a failed translation

dreaming is a farm

a mother
makes it as far
as mailbox

bear
to fish
there’s water
in the water

is, today’s mousetrap
tomorrow’s

shoe


language

word gets around
the schoolyard
pretty quick
that my father
drove his body
off a cliff
so god
would have a nail
hot enough
to touch.

I have a tooth
can make it
snow.

the waters recede and god

good for him
saves

with the carcass
of a deer

mama’s
parking spot

/

unrelated, I have begun to see

the fat kid we surrounded for pulling a knife on a bird

again, we have given the baby too much credit.  these are simply the gods I grew up without.  here is my son serenading the seizures his mother salvaged from the praying I do for my hands.  here he is repeatedly not.  here is yours the psalmic nonverbal.  here they are shadows limiting death’s vocab in a tiny tent not crawling with legs of lamb.

if man’s interpretation of god leads man to interpret man, we are lost.  my neighbor is crying.  that’s not her house.

as for hangman
and as
for the donkey’s

tail

mother

wets the bed
before leaving
to weigh herself.  

-

the cave is all mouth.

-

when they ask what our sick
son
has
say

echo.

i.

some dog is ******* the ghost-mourned balloon as mother does her thing in the body of big boy bite mark  

ii.

it won’t come back from seeing father go ace on a bag of flour

the crow
if truly
crow

she can’t stop herself
from knowing
the fleas
are burning
what with
her passionless
baby

its biological
god

what would she ask
sadness

that old blindfold
from the future

how did you
get old, how

did my father
eat
and eat
at the same

time

perhaps
you’ve seen it
the mask
that took

my face

the feeling
we’d not
been here
before

-

doom’s little hiccup

-

my brother
dead serious
that we pronounce it

hick
gnosis

until he can recall being born
he will be an introvert
made
to endure
the props
of forgiveness
in the nowhere
theater
of his health
where a noose
hangs

from a showerhead
and live shows
are for the past