the last time my father sees me, I’m trying to resurrect the girlfriend I hid him from who made me believe I could do anything as well as a man.  who kept a memoir of how she came to own certain dictionaries.  who ordered pizza and had it delivered to a house on fire.

to him, these meals
are small
fictions.  there is

however
some truth
to his mother

the weigher  
of light.

uncle has been all day figuring the teeth of his that will never touch.  he has this riddle he calls code for what to get the man who has nothing.  if I can get him to stop biting his wrists I might be able to chalk something won’t need moved.  when I was born, I was small enough to fit in most mouths.  uncle is not the tiniest bit mad.  he holds babies only when they are hungry and he is not.  those with angels think those without are selfish.

the crow
in each
of its two
dreams
had
an arm.

father said
be
on the lookout
son

for the receiver
of an old
phone.  to this day

I ask god
because mom
won’t

how sad
can one person
be?

our mother
was not one
to make sounds
above an infant
in another’s
house, no, our mother

our shepherdess
mother

would have us flock
to god’s
epizootic
nostalgias

because there is more than one city, my brother falls asleep in the back of a taxi he’s pretending is an ambulance.  my sister remains close to father but not closer than he is to the mouth he used on the woman who reached me before I could get the neighbor girl to eat a rock for cussing at the egg she’d given my baby’s name.  it’s turned up again, the dog whistle I buried.  my brother likes to say he is no later than the man his dying adores.  I still show faith my signature move.

I was born
impossibly born
addicted

to the sound
of footsteps.

god

loves the woman
who makes the bed
of his last

believer.

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

my brother
jokes
in the barn
about suicide.

the ****
would eat snow
if it came
from a cow.

I ask him
does he think
mom will miss
two cigarettes.

she’ll miss one, she’ll miss yours.

I am half his keeper.

in the mind
of baby
unborn

where time
is frozen, where god

pleads
déjà vu,

the formless
mother
of embodied
whims

ghosts
herself
to associations
of gender
that exist

only

like nothing’s
kitten

when dressing the disabled child in front of family

my language
is often
the one
I use

the fireplace is on drugs.  get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

-

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold.  jesus-on-a-stick.  the crown of thorns, extra.  I close my eyes.  I dare the brain.  the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

-

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful.  I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams

dreams only

-

everything happened in 1985.  words don’t mean.  numbers mean.  tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

-

the wind is asleep.  it sleeps outside.

as acne commits my face to a memory of scripture, god worries that man’s silence is a pox upon both the crow and the crow.  on good authority, the cyclops is blind in one eye.  you were tortured, yes, but nothing stands out.  my living hand performs for my dying.  imagine my father’s dismay at the realization yours had of having done this autopsy before.

as he prepared to leave my world to the memory of a man addicted to god, my father was stung by a bee.  this matters.  bees carried the scent of absence.  bees spoke to mother.  mother was the woman it took two like my father to make.  mother swallowed to bruise the body of any dropped thing sounding itself out in a nightmare had by children new to infancy.  mother swallowed and called it singing.  there will be a god.  this matters.  perfect, now, the nothing you say.

I am walking up a hill the dark is trying to move.  my mother has a way with words.  my mother has a baby.  reading is a kind of crying.  the baby is crying because the baby has lost track of something that possesses nearness.  there are two babies.  one is always blind and one is blind when it eats.  never lose a tooth you can swallow.

when out and about, we bury baby brother’s head in big sister’s chest to keep his acne from strangers.  when inside, we rotate setting leftovers in front of our only mirror.  my growth spurt happens overnight.  I start telling stories of a woman dentist and the family she doesn’t see.  baby brother starts to bite.  his parents buy a hairbrush and work together to thieve a single paper plate.  someone gets too close to the face of god.

dear eggshell belly.  dear mother.  dear church of my father’s owl.  dear Ohio.  dear owl the deaf bee’s church.

the homeless woman pokes my belly and says in all creation I’ve got no middle.  says she catches herself sometimes pretending to be homeless.  says we ought to stone god.  says we do with prayer.  says the first spider she talked to could speak but didn’t.  says she has the two jobs my dad’s between.  says she can hear mom or mama in the radio of my brokenness.  says angels can’t go mad, can’t parallel park, can’t feign surprise.  says she eats with her ears.  says she can stop anytime.  says I’m someone’s sugarbones.  says sound is what god knocks over looking for his mouth.  says it could speak its name and it wasn’t spider.  says to hell with speech though it be our singing’s salt.

the power
fathers have
over death
is the power
to reduce
god
to a mother’s
inheritance.

my lawnmower is a dog.
my sound
is the sound
neither
make.

pray you
me
to the part of nothing
that is no.

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell.  a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair.  a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache.  a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

you begin to draw me and I begin to hurt.  I know what a brain looks like and I’ve heard what I can only say sounds to me like many rats worrying as one to keep dry.  maybe I can tell you about my ears by telling you about my first bike and how its handlebars grew and grew.  did you know your grandmother broke nothing but was always on the lookout for pieces of glass?  anything she swallowed she swallowed to strengthen her knees.  some of your drawings seem to believe what they’re peopled to believe.  is being childish something melancholy can attain?  I rode to where the school had been before it was moved.  wherever it was, it was empty.  a father carried his trampled child up a slide and a mother identified me incorrectly by the back of my head.

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

no one goes to the crazyhouse
for having a hand
that repeats
itself.

in a new place
my brother
does one
of two
things:

masturbates
or says
deja vu.

if he didn’t tell me
I wouldn’t know
I’ve slapped myself
awake.

one of us
then one of us
will die.

the looks my brother got when he sang seemed to say someone sold satan the wrong voice.  stories of an all-seeing god pegged my sister as the loudest person in two rooms.  to me, mystery had nothing to do with church.  if I’d survived, I had done so to wear clothes.  food and weather were the twins of a middle child.

starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.

water
is nothing’s
blood.

one of my eyes
is my father’s
alcoholic
eye.

says anonymous

a blood
dipped
balloon
is not
the baby
the angel
had.

says mother

into moral
isolation
the hands
you bring
are dry.  says hers

sleep
orphans
fatigue.

pretty early your brother
is a dog
believes it can leap
the electric
fence.  red handed

is the daughter
of empty.  indian rub, noogie, crown

of thorns.  the village suicide

a shill
for whimsy.

with what she’s learned online, she puts her age between nine and twelve.  

-

based on the following, her attacker

walks.

-

(that’s funny, he didn’t sound invisible)

-

how do you pray
for a clock?

I am on the train that will take me to my brother and he is on the train that will bring him to me.  he has only just seen the great bird I’ve envisioned since birth.  I make myself in his image and use his inside voice to describe the bird.  my train arrives early.  once off, I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it.  I pace.  a beautiful woman asks me if I have a light and I say sharply no.  I apologize to the woman and explain how nervous I am to meet my brother this way.  she says she understands.  she says she’ll probably see god before she sees her sister.  I offer her my cigarette and she takes it with her.  my bird is getting smaller and I don’t know who to blame.

for Jake, for Amy, for those who know*

in the beginning,

his mother and father
were there
to be
the parents
he’d lost.

his first tooth
anchored
a ghost
within

shouting distance
of the boat
named

for ghost.  he amassed

a useless
vocabulary

that nonetheless
included
the word

amidst.  when women  

and children
waged war
for the men
who’d agreed
on the drug
god
would take, he burned

etymology’s
least favorite

haunt
with a fire
he’d ******
from a sword…  

-

the lives we touch are evil.

go
to a different
hell.

-for Jacob-

when I say there are four of me, I want you to imagine you can board a paper airplane to resume your life elsewhere as a supplier of matches to the triangle of vague nations.

-for Noah-

when I say there are four of me, I want you to fill equally exile and absence with a color you’ve seen twice.

-for JP-*

when I say there are four of me, I want you to put my face to a face and imagine two hands shaking beneath a god with six.

have mostly boys and then have one of them need god.  stop the spread of suicide by not only creating an angel but by creating an angel that knows to cover its mouth.  kiss any person who says it’s your daughter’s height that keeps her from landing the role of jesus.  assume you are bait for touch.  dedicate yourself to men populations bore.  put the male in male ****.  ice your knuckles.  give death a day here and there with crow.  switch crows.  the past can’t leave itself alone.

father sends me to school after being won over by what mother calls the artifice of experience.  father puts the dirt in my blood.  father cares for the doll of my instructor, a woman whose pet writes on the board that we feel neglected.  my twin sister puts gently two eggs in a bra she’s saving herself for.  I don’t hug.  I don’t hug and so prove my father’s rib that I am the tombstone half of **** and tombstone.  my boyfriend says I can have any girl I want but he also says his mouth can bob for snowballs.  this is my body the teachable moment.

desperation
as in
desperation
in the disappeared
eye
of its least
loyal
member,  

witness
as the failure
of god
to preach
to the choir,  

and abuse
as a testament
to the animal’s
frequent
submission
to the IQ
of poverty

the girl who cries wolf
cries wolf
to three men
whose sons
are dead

instead of singing me to sleep
mother would put a cigarette
in my mouth
and have me
hold my breath
while she peeled
an orange.  my feet

were the first
to go.

to heal her father, she asks me to brush her hair.  she promises that when I’m done she’ll not only show me the scab but also remove it so I can see where her batteries go.  the knots in her hair are ungodly.  she says to leave them.  she says she can get any cat to come inside.  ******* is new to me.  I almost announce aloud that I must look often like I am trying to get a pair of scissors to eat snow.

my father snaps his shovel stealing snow from our travel-addicted neighbor.  his mute sister’s last confession is a first.  his doctor brother’s dollhouse is a hospital.  television is a byproduct of my mother’s human longing for animals.  if my arms were healed, I’d keep the baby from swatting its *****.  I call my next trick rabbit sorrow.

whenever the doorbell rings, father says it’s broken.  the outside world must be a quiet place to lose a baby.  wow.  the scratch on my memory makes me think we had a cat

or a mother
with time.

when you were with god, I alone doubted the sincerity of your absence

during the assault, I was seen praying an oceanographer into heaven by all but god.  a body entered a nursing home to find a suitable head.  I stayed put to care for the little blood they say never hurt anyone.  I have since held that some have both haloes of bird and star.  that any man with two has a single unnecessary blindfold.  long

that there is no wrong way to collect errata.

my second attempt
inspired
by my first.

my third
a success
my fourth
could envy.

my first
a superpower
given
to my brother

who noticed
mid dream

his dream.

she can see the beginnings of a boy in her husband’s abandoned poem.  a skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven.  god is in the air.  her daughter is taking a pregnancy test to prove one can get food poisoning from hunger.  

all I seem to lose is ghost fat.

I put my sense
of taste
behind me
by placing
a sick child
beside one
sicker.

a crow is not a star.

loss
is the salt
of now.

a bowl of brown rice
in a sandbox

the mother fixes nothing so she ain’t gotta hear of it breaking again.  the father saves on the sly for a rabbit.  the brother lives long enough to see one of his eyes challenge the designation of his sister’s foresight

as a miracle
of brevity.  the neighbors argue over whether it’s a migraine or a headache.  what one tells the lord, another tells an angel.  the god is the god that teaches a snowman how to have a stroke.  the animal learns to speak by having none recall what it plans to imagine.

I show
for the fleeing
your cigarette
attends

-

a butterfly
is at first
a butterfly’s
ghost

-

for the face
of god
I admit
I’m torn

-

go dog
catcher

white

a spider on the ceiling
in the bathroom
means father
fill
the tub.

your mother stood on water
before she learned
to walk.

something about a fly
speaks to her, the way it

enters a thought
to leave
a message…

providing for a child is like trying to hide one’s mouth.  the first thing god said god said in the dark.  before I brought my son, I couldn’t place him.  things from this world make me think of another.

if I am harder than most
on god
it’s because
he’s mine