I took shape
at the sound
of my father’s
whistle-

when well
rested
my mother
was the sense
god
left me-

here is how
I stole
mail:  I pulled my little brother

in a wagon
in broad
daylight.

here is what I know:

you’re not hungry
if you can’t recall
the last time
you ate.

a man dialing his palm
with a knife
from atop
a moving
train
may have
the aesthetic
dignity

you’re looking for
but it’s not
something
the anointed

confess

what small apologies
to my father
my children

are.  headless father

his many acts
of embodiment

     his book of two
quotes:

money
doesn’t know
you don’t
have it

you can buy

sadness

the imposing figure read silently from a magazine of immature fictions.

an amulet predicted itself grey.

a symptom presented my sister to a non-speaking heroine who by all accounts had been only mildly *****.

a boy, having recently written to the head of the household about dirt clods being mysteriously removed from the backs of toy trucks, could be heard sizzling as he dissolved into the memory of his father’s cooking.

a trophy room made trophy sense.

in bed with the animal, after choice cuts of echo, the man calls on the peace of having a third wish.  at a sleepover, his son falls from a top bunk.  as he waits for his bones to return unbroken, the boy imagines he is paralyzed.  the  paralyzed boy with the ******* of a woman.

now father
I scale
your mountain

like an apparition

while mother
gathers
what might
shorten

the prayer
my safety
accompanies

to an image-based
business
model

introduced
by the one
god

hopped-up
on ghost

adrenaline

a bunny my brother hadn’t fed began elsewhere in the opening line of a friend’s memoir.  I ran with a lollipop in my mouth toward my father who could sell a shovel to a mermaid.  my mother ****** her thumb and so taught by example how to become invisible to god.  your son slept while you were spotted looking through a widow’s viewfinder at each of the three places he’d wished into being.  a child-torn child made room in a body bag.  drugged my elbows.

the main character is removed from god’s existential drama and placed in a prop coffin referred to by a majority of the extras as a scarecrow’s outhouse where he is put to sleep by his hands that when put together become the coordinates of our assault on the secrecy embedded in the *** life of angels.

is the twin bed I go to hell to make

said if I let him
touch my breast
he’d put his palm
flat on the road
let me run my bike
over his hand

said I could
think about it
didn’t say

it would be
all

-

my sister backed out
of teaching me
to kiss

she told me
don’t worry
as one cannot destroy
or be destroyed by

the aftermath

-

someone
in the film we’re watching
turns off
the whole room

little boy

the boy
all
of eleven
years

pauses
somewhere inside
his eleventh
cigarette
to say

earthly life
is god’s way
of telling time
and

as a father
who exists
only
to the kids
of others
I ask him
the whereabouts
of his
but hell

I know
before he tells me
the *******’s

with
my mother
writing ****
for his boy
to say
to girls

death is not coming, sister.  brother, death has come and gone.  though a strong sentence may effectively convey the deprogrammed whim of one born to be all brain, poverty has no more a puppet for these strings than you’ve a doll to force feed.  I remember a woman who misread my closest as my closet

grief.  do you still have that mutt?  its messengers mourn the naught they deliver.

return trips offered
for body.

some, we separate
long
after birth.

fourth baby
the first
errant.

surveyor of train car interiors.

job creation
as healer’s
refuge.

godmother
in a borrowed
copter hat.

the boy we call
egg mouth
who frees
his sister.

our meaninglessly
oral

talks.

for the unreal
attentions
of my male
competitors
I created
a woman
based solely
on my mother
patient
zero
of perceived
consent

in the only finished scene
of my father’s
documented
seizure

a tin woman
eats a cricket
before a paltry
congregation
of children
hired
in spirit
to distinguish
an aerobic

from a cerebral

doom

a man
home
after exposing
himself
to children
of late
life
blindness, the man

we bike to
while able-

the suicide
of a different
man, a changed

man-

the two men
briefly
neighbors

both refusing

for the non
emerging
newborn

my mother’s
failed
cake.

in a childhood
some child
had

as if late
in locking
the gates
of the orphanage

as if drunk
on a long
history
of being average
in isolation

as if auditioning
for one
of four
sounds
a baby
simultaneously

makes
like
not exactly
this:

stork poor radio drama)

the father
pitches himself
to a scribbling
god

whose image
left little
else

on doctor’s orders, the girl forgets herself by allowing the water to turn her baby brother into a prune.  mother tells father that god has spoken and that the man in the house is not a cop.  the girl has seventeen sisters to which the man has brought the seventeen boys from town voted most likely to have teeth a year from now.  the mark has begun to fade like parents after ***.

sister stood on a rocking chair
blowing kisses
to brother

who *******
was using
as a surfboard

a mirror
that made him look
like an egg-

the two
like two
sounds
listening

could hear

father
walking on his hands
in the attic

and mother
nailing
her extra
pair

I led the babysitter
to where I thought
her child
was.  

I lost my legs.  

they went slowly, as if
I’d taken
a hoof
to the chest
underwater.

I swear
her father
brushed my lips
with the ******
of a bottle
while his wife

held back.

alas, children are not
the most
economical
memory.

male is to female
as gender
is

to genre.

I like to think of your house
as a treehouse
and imagine

the tree.

ask me only
what I’ve done
in the short life
of god.

ask me about my mother.

ask me
if it removed
my fingerprint
from a fish.

ask my why a disease
with the ability
to travel
travels
from one present
to the next.

ask me to procure
oral
input
for the boy
whose mouth
won’t move.

ask me if meat
keeps
its sorrow.

ask me
if I’m
a day
old
which angel
discovered
fire.

ask me why your mother
would feel
in her words
like an ambulance.

ask me what I see.

a man on horseback
casting a line.

a plea
addressed
to the non
readers
of said
poem
to leave
its writer
alone

she began to drool
and removed
her shirt.  she was still
growling
when her face
returned.

I was nightmarishly poor.

     in her thirteenth year, she met her double.  in her fourteenth
she recovered
from no more
than two
illnesses.

she assured her acquired stutter
it was just
an old
friend
of god’s
come to collect
a hair
sample.

fragile
as in
opaque, she leapt
from a balcony
over which
I’d pretended
to flick
cigarettes.    

I ate dry cereal in the dark and thought of spiders.  she called me ****.  I called her toes
air quotes.

she was involved
as a passenger
in a car
accident
on three
consecutive
days.

she predicted herself
saying

the world isn’t after me
I am

after which

I couldn’t
win a fish
that would die.

his new right hand
has an extra
thumb

to date, it’s been found
twice
in the dryer

he is loved by father
but cannot
stay over

father is a reasonable man
full of possible
fishing trips, stories

of pregnancy, napkins

written on
by god

father met the boy
in a common way, through suicide’s

mistress

a woman
said to have forgotten
what it was like
to die
doing

what it was
my mother

loved

the bawling
gift
apple

muffled by a pillow
stolen
from some
honeymoon
destination
for third

wheels- the penny

in the horse
father hurries
me from…

a brother wets the bed

is reminded
of age, the number

of kissable
girls-

in another life, he has
this one

there is no
imagining
of his
surprise

for Meg Pokrass*

before we knew what was going on, we knew the myth of what was happening and followed suit.  my kids told me I was taking their childhood.  I told them it was the long hair of their mother made me do things.  she thought she was seeing another man until that same man lowered her into my arms.  we think of him when we pray because when we pray we’ve all a job.

i.

a child’s edition of your father.  in which

the unused
scarecrow

is found
hiding
the *****

mags, the cigarettes

of a sister’s worry, and other

inanimate
markers

of accounting, meant to be

traded
for fireworks, for fat frogs
not given
to snake…

that is, had the boy
lived
to unsee

the water
he didn’t
make…

ii.

(my handle on death)
is holding
a book.

an overfilled
pauper’s
grave / transcends
its archaic

reference
to belly.  all mothers

are single.

she kneels
and she kiss

grasshopper

she fight
to be

fluent
in longstanding

interruptions

she father
the skirted
issue

she make for mother
no baby
but tends
an entry
in

its travelogue

she not wear
anything
under
her clothes, tells me

she pray

to headcase

we proceed
as in recess
of mourning

outward
of the brief
city-

longing is a pup, a kit, a word
the stupid have
for infant
ape-

we constellate
in godless silence
only to form

our tragic
figure’s
jawbone-

it may be
there’s no future
immune

to the draw
of evacuation-

but sway

beneath the high
empty

crib

because god
knocked herself
so silly
I became

pregnant
with a praying
child.  it entered my story

to tell me another

of bomb
removal
and nervous

energy…

I cowered early.  my mother received one leaf per nakedness.  in my youth, I was touched into being a mold of the unborn.  I was said to be overheard and I was said to be with mother.  I was spotted by a spoonful of milk being fought over by those I slipped from to watch tv in the smallest museum of childcare.  when I am most alone I count backward for my newest boy and for god’s limited son.  soon is a heaven of affordable pills.  comfort is knowing all my boys have eaten late.  yesterday gives birth to a pecking order.

the two are both men.  saviors by way of remaining.  one crosses your mind when he remembers to pace.  the other keeps his distance as the private rent he pays to be stationary.  the woman is an object in a town beyond me that is, beyond that, passable.  a town mothered by darkness.  through which I roll a hula hoop.  a balm for the ache in my hips.

as human as the main character in a robot’s dream.  as human as the next, as the previous, as the kid playing mine as a *******.  as alien as father sleeping in a grocery cart.  as alien as my sister’s death-metal band my brother’s anger.  as animal as the wire your brain calls inside when a child’s finger is shut in a car door.  as animal as pawing at the keys

of piano.

my guardian angel was a bicycle.

my bicycle
was a dog.

actual angels were postcards.  

I saw what I could
of actual dogs.  warpaint,

I saw what I could
of the newborn’s face.

be clear.  preserve for me the myth of white male melancholy.  we put a cross

on the moon.  we gave

hell a hell
that does not disprove

a godless world.  in the origin story

of my father’s
parvenu

unease
we

mid woman
came up

with woman.  

     I am not made

of touch.  I am made of yours.

to fall asleep, I’d try to swallow my tongue.  my words came by way of spelling bees judged by scarecrows.  my father would’ve drowned had the rope not snapped him back.  it was a story he told to knock a letter from poverty.  my mother worried off and on how close I was getting to my childhood.  she looked at me like a pill as if to say dissolve already.  we lived in a room that for halloween went as a house.  that in the past had failed as a church.

I am not one to criticize your method of self-abuse.  examples of god set examples for.  all babies are early.  all babies are the death of blanket statements.  sending a body to hell weighs the same but is not equal to holding the bloodless ***** of the poor man’s number one squeeze.  from what you tossed off, I took this:  twins are gay.  and how your father’s suicide was facilitated by your grandfather correcting his aiming of the garden hose at a hornet’s nest.  what I left were the sounds of war presented as souvenir eggings of the same fog swallowed house.  and my mother, the missing headline of my emergence.

we will not be having the grey child.  

word is
it is nothing
if not
an embarrassment
of imagery.  

with god-given whale sounds
it consoles
description.

loneliness changes hands.  when wife mentions the baby, I borrow a phrase from father and it works.  care packages are my sister’s forte.  by the way she dresses, you’d think she works for heaven.  you would not entertain for a moment that her child was sent by god to interview itself.  on the plus side of my brother, my brother has a fog machine.

we move the cemetery to confirm there is nothing outside of this town.  the ******* remains a two man show.  leash laws are for dogs and angels.  our doctor has a touch of deer worry.  exercise is for the birds.  god is the pitter patter of imagined feet.  our fathers double over in bathrooms from the shame of not calling out for paper.  our mothers have done the math.  by now, most kids have eaten a popsicle alone in a church.  I’m in it for the stick.

I was blind but now I was blindness.  religion turns water into the snow jesus healed.  high in tree I have spotted the baby before it walks.  the closest thing I can say to jogging in place is don’t be black.  my son is the museum a hospital wants to be.  life expectancy is I don’t think the world of my children.  my son is my language.  if I speak I speak skip to video.  I’d cheer but it’s not my first heaven.

my nine toed baby rolls its tongue as if to speak for the sock on my hand

I’m here, now, if you want to put a bug in your dad’s ear about pouring coffee.  in the war the thing I felt crawling up his spine became his spine.  in the war I called it abandoned and he said not while we’re in it.  he scratched the worst looking dog into the side of it so we’d know it was a church.  I shared more than once how I’d be stupid as that dog to guard a dogfight and less than once how jesus would’ve been a suicide bomber had the crowd been clueless.  we cried about women and children and by our crying they were found.

I am counting on my fingers
in front of a mirror
those I’ve known
who’ve died
of fright.

I am working the loosest brick
from the house of god
while standing on the backs
of two kids
whose father
borrowed
then sold
a crowbar.

I am telling my abuser
how to direct
with a magnifying
glass
the stream
of god’s
****.

I am charging the riding mower’s
battery, I am alone, I have a hair

on my head
for my son
to pull.

the one time it crossed his mind to hit my mother, the garage door opened.  the day I was born, a man called my mother at work and left a message that was mostly breathing.  the story of the message was repeated to those born after me when each became old enough to need a laugh.  when it was known no more would be coming down the pike, mother began hitting herself.  it was in this era of standing room only that I was able to convince god we’d slipped into the water satan said was there.

many times
when I lifted you
I did so
thinking
you
were a cloth
I’d folded
for god’s
swollen
eye.

many times
I pinched you
so hard
you fell
asleep.

in all scenarios
god promised
me

the world
would not end
if he talked

about

your weight.

a raindrop
as impossible
as raindrop’s
double.  

apple, this part of no
you understand.  

bird beatings
I don’t
report.

we’re so hungry
I could eat a dog
in a dog
costume.  I am having my mother’s dream

while you rub yourself
rabbit
beside the body
of boy
slender.

I see an ant
in an emptied
house
and hear
father
praising sleep

for happening.  taking heart,

I tell
half
the story
of carrying
to term
god’s

emotional response
to being
denied
tenure.

draped in ghost

you’re dry
in a downpour.

playing kitchen
for the cup
game
of grief

the blind drunk
sees

a mouse

the cyclops dies having never heard you recite the last two letters of the alphabet.  it’s 1983 and you’re all of seven.  hearing beautifully gets you slapped for hearing things.  you kick your frog legs on a swing going nowhere and try to touch your mind with your forehead.  from a stolen bicycle you quote future passages written by a lover half your age.  your pity has the lifespan of a voodoo doll.  sound is the word of man god disobeys.

the devil
puts hair
on your chest
but takes it
from your head.  

mother’s mirror
catches lice.  

I am working on my tongue because father is late.  
his speech
on narcotizing
dysfunction

is longer
now that mother
wrote it.

where no surgery
is
is where

brother
has an itch.  we call it

trouble
in the garden.

there was trouble in the garden
when I filled my father’s
foot
with blood.  I had seen

a woman’s
legs

turn
inside out
as she ******
the poison

from a gas nozzle.  legs

she didn’t need.