in the story, a newborn is placed in a mailbox.  we know of no harm and the story itself is very casual.  an angel tells us the job of an angel is to fly in front of the master when the master is ****.  we try to hang on every word.  the mailbox is the only mailbox in heaven.  our questions turn our stomachs.  some of us become hormonal and some of us identify pedophiles by future rote.  we head home in a pack.  a siren behind us wails a moment before being joined.

a pendulum maleness
to the clothed eye.

     a half dropped ceiling
under which
a prediction of snowfall
sends puppy
scribbling.

a man well endowed
making like
the empty cross.

a delivery room floored with bubble wrap.

nudes in short supply.

a lame barn swallow in the heart of its master’s black typewriter.

     blocking a dog’s door
a television lost to lightning.

a modified radar bought by the ****** it locates.

footsteps
approaching a tightrope.

that first kick
in the oblivious
******.

baseball
a malformed hand
resting
in a hay bale

feet
so discolored     a figure
shoeless
at dusk

talk
an unbroken scribble
connects
the ears

bathroom sink the mirror’s
     belly
in it
are fish hooks

survival lives alone

by the looks of this sandwich jesus is teething

I am ruined.  I am ruined because I cannot speak without moving your mouth.  I am getting younger.  if my mother dies, I’ll have nowhere to go.  I wake up.  in the morning, I have one finger and use it to light the rest.  my muscles are whispers of a mass firing.  my father throws a well dressed mannequin from the fourth floor and disappears.  I wrestle it into the burning pile.  meat is scarce.  supplies a tiny church.

of course, I am drawn
to the parting
story-

the red sea,
the granted custody
     of a child’s
top
half,

my thighs.

but also
I am stilled

by scarecrow, man on cross, or by

my own     stillness, my head’s

wish     to be gripped

by a crown of thorns.

if ever there was a blind man
chosen     to care     for a stork

what a story

what a story, alas

this is not the real life
where I would not dream
of abusing
you and yours.

not a mark on her body was admissible.  on person, she had a child’s paintbrush, a still glistening breath mint, and three black & white photos of a woman’s *******.  first blush, we had her as someone’s muse.  

     my handwriting suffered.  my cursive began to match a popular suicide note.

in madness, explain a chair to the ocean.

unborn, be buoyed by pregnancy.

scrape
mother images
on a cave’s wall
by the glow
the unborn
have.  

I sense I still flicker in two lost minds.

she would say god planted in her a notion of anorexia.
she would sanely say her morbid obesity made her largely abstract.

on a tour of heaven, this tower would be the spacecraft they died in.

to the child your father became, some gravestones look like thumbs.

     a trumpet on a country road.
     a soldier with a heavy pack.
     an ambitious raking, Saturday, of dry leaves.

severed hands forked into the sun.

dear witness, I’ve never seen a fly drop like a fly.

since being found, father busies himself helping mother locate her copy of the report of missing person.  if sister thinks hard enough about puberty she can pick a lock.  she treats her fingers as if they’ve fallen into the wrong hands.  paints her nails with white out.  

I clean only at night.  I scrub severely the bottoms of my feet in the event I start retracing my steps.  any thought I have lasts as long as any thought god has

on volunteering.  my one friend became my friend by feeling up the top half of a train tied mannequin I’ve come to believe has been falsifying evidence.

in spirit, a grey kitten
curls into
the crystal ball
of an old black man
whose white readership
never materialized.

across town, the man’s first book
is buried beneath a tree    
that was not a tree
when the book was buried.

as a character
in a far death experience
a white woman with a shovel

     her face a storm cloud
above a prison yard
with no prison

adds a bit
of humor.

a shy band kid with a patch over his left eye

a crucifix stuffed in the front of his jeans

showing some belly
    its button made for the head
    of his small
    jesus

barefoots his dead father’s river

    cuts his heels
    each on a half of a split beer can

and is seen
by one of two boys

their treehouse
decorated
with stolen things

all abused

not there when your mother
cries into a poison soaked towel
to a childish god
while kneeling
before the remnant heat
of an open dryer.

not there when your father
by the sound of it
breaks your arm
pressing it into
the shrunken right sleeve
of a shirt that should fit.

not there when your brother
spooked by a deer...

    not there when my body
stops the procession

that one might be held in its image.

the boy on the stairs won’t be around much longer.  three days time he’ll choke on a paddle ball.  a detail will be passed around how a passerby tried to save the boy twice by pulling the paddle only to have it slip and snap the boy on the nose.  sadness over it seems impossible.  

not yet, but a tunnel under me as I carry my adult daughter from jailbird to jailbird collapses and I lose her to walking.

before my mother’s eyes were terrible things
she believed evolution would inform her next move.

my father is on the run.  before leaving, he pinched my mother’s cheeks and said there ain’t a buzzard knows your son is a dream.  his letters mention a clone upset at being homeless.  his handwriting has a sound to it.  one I can nearly recreate if I chew on my fingers after a hot bath.  the last dry morsel I had was my tongue.  in a recent game, god’s tongue was a campfire.  my mother doesn’t disappear but to make food look for her hands.  rainfall we understand as god’s census.  next thunder, I’ll gather chickens for his beard.

a prison closes because another opens.

on a track, a train car is hit by a train.

     the central aesthetic of a father’s dream
remains a homeless shelter
with a skylight.

nourishment belongs to private property
where god     steps
on a stick.

in Ohio, a conductor’s widow wanders the wrong prison
with a piece of her mind.

before he is out of the city, he takes a cheap umbrella from under the passenger seat and rolls down his window at a stop light.  he motions to the fat woman he thinks only he can see.  she is ugly in all kinds of weather and she is ugly now in the rain.  though wide awake, the thought of her walking is an insomnia that torments him with the restless image of her walking.  before he is out of the city, the woman catches up to him a total of three times.

-

    over the course of a day, the perfect tongue god gave me might cross my mind once.  

my son was put on this earth to worry about his baby brother

not being able
to do anything
about having an itch.

-

after knocking the girl from the bike
I stay in the car.

as for facts, she has six ******* sisters and two middle fingers.

-

as for confession  

I have a kind of claustrophobia
brought on by having a body.

in the closet across from the delivery room, a janitor disguised as a hospital janitor sits on an upside down bucket under which he’s trapped what might be the world’s slowest rat.  in his mind he is attempting to clean his mother’s body while supplies last.  his hands are curled like the receivers of certain phones con artists used back in the day to convince people they could talk only to ghosts.  the young and personable volunteer assigned to the hand he doesn’t answer is speaking so softly the man leans forward.

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.

i.

it is my first time dying.

I have no friends.

my arms don’t feel
like your arms
when they fall
asleep.

when born, each of my thighs
took three
injections.

I will my scars to open.

tiny human fingers breach
the top
of an egg.

I yawn by vomiting.

ii.

my parents look the same in the dark.
one of them brings the other
white pebbles     in a glass.

iii.

death
surprises only
the look
on your face.

online
a photo     of a young
girl
after some
self harm    

inspires.

iv.

bottomless     you are snagged     on a bird

v.

nowadays, child free
is the term we use
to separate
ourselves     from being

kidnapped    

vi.

be heartened.  

suicide
remains
impartial.

i.

diapered
fat legged

baby, propped in posture
by a stack of wet bricks
the flooded basement

provides     and provides

often

ii.          

     baby, under foot

bedpan for the sadness
of the upright

iii.

I stand
to sleep
standing

the rich man sits on the abnormally small black couch between his twin sons who, having never been separated, begin to sob.  he touches their heads together and worries their emotional immaturity will awaken his old want to have *******.  he tries to think happier thoughts but cannot keep them from arriving in pairs.

a baby left in a cloud.  a cotton ball pregnant with a dot of blood.

     states away, his wife regains consciousness in a spacious kitchen and rubs her forehead with a hand wearing a dish glove.  her mouth moves to the words of an old poem of his wherein the leg of a preserved grasshopper was used to replace a burn victim’s eyebrow.

the kid shakes salt from his palm onto a dead mouse.  his girlfriend’s cat slicks itself as if its spot as a pillow in hell has been filled.  I can’t see the look on your face but my imitation comforts me.  I once lived nearby but had a dog and moved to be closer to it.  

    yesterday, the kid’s father sold me a mirror.  said I would have second thoughts.

no babies, yet, in the newly funded baby jail.  

a pair of baby handcuffs, though, shiny as two ideas.

as for baby prisons
they are still a thing
of the past.  

with any
Ohio luck
you’ll spot a garage sale cashier
sitting in a small
electric chair.

be alone.  enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress window shopping for a red.  

know

     that in between heaven and hell, there is war.  hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell.  hell sleeps more than your sister in love.  heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.  

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.    

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

i.

the mule’s belly
travels with the mule
makes in sand
what my son claims
as a whale’s
bed    

to ward off
the otherness
of any creature    
appearing to him
that is not
or that is my

whale

ii.

a son

I always say

a son
for every
sadness

iii.

one dreamless mule

immediately old, the statue of the woman with child.  the baseball star, the soldier whose gun won’t fire, the preacher whose bait palm seems ready to deliver,

     or to receive a dog’s mouth, or pitch underhand.  we try our throwing arms.  poor mary.  you can stone her.  she will never lose the baby.

to be completely dishonest

being told how much time a son has left

turns the body to hourglass
and bones to sand

-

rather, I know
my father    
disappeared
from his cell    

     rather, I believe
he was eaten

-

this is the cigarette you’ve heard
spoken about     in other

males.  that females

keep
enjoying.  

it never ends
and it’s not like thinking it does
destroys

male me
male you

-

what is death?

-

     but the second showing
of memory

i.

in no dream did I see you emerge naked from a lake smoking a cigarette you seemed afraid to touch with your fingers.  in no dream was there a ruined enough tree that could take your ****.  

ii.

we are not doing too many things at once.  we are merely extinct.  god's final act is god's only.  we harp.

I was raised in a silence and went on to *******.  I was not close to any named animal.  I let my brother's leg break in the barn and watched as he appraised the length of the rope he jumped with.  when hunting together we followed telephone lines and shot into the air.  birds did more than resemble the feet of our jesus.  our mother was glad we lived but couldn't recall which of us snuck up on her.  our father let us call him by his first name.  his logic remained impenetrable.  he smoked to remember smoking.  slept on the floor so mother would stop making the bed.  before standing on his head in a full bath he'd promise to breathe with his brain.  he'd introduce us as my son the tattoo and my son the artist.  I loved him so much I had to run away and come back.  to this day my brother doesn't know if he was taught to distance himself from prayer or to embrace it

to distance himself from god.

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

a crookedness within a white cat.  a naked boy on crutches.  a girl in a pink jumpsuit jogging in place beside a man rolling a tire.  all of this says I’ve witnessed my father by himself on a child’s swing ******* two unlit cigarettes.  we don’t exist until god begins to worry.  our neighbor is an old woman with a gun.  she is afraid her color will suddenly change.  when she chases my father home I understand the riddle of his cigarettes.  around him I pretend to be asleep.  I hear him watering a rag and wait for him to press it to my nose and tell me my dreams are bleeding.  when a kitten, the head of our white cat would stick to the refrigerator door.

my son was taken from me before I knew he was mine.

     when this is true
I can talk to no one but God.

I rub my hands under a faucet you’ve yet to turn on.
I hate the faucet so much my hands swell.

your mouth is a bullet hole covered by a before picture.

after therapy, I put my son on my shoulders.
he bites the top of my head.

your legs work.  you are who you think you are.

feminine, she cuts bread in the dark for my father’s meal.  I sit on a piano bench and play no piano one can hear.  my brother fears there is no soup under the dust he longs to blow on.  two miscarriages away from god leaving her alone, I am allowed to listen to a beautiful voice.  endearingly, I was a fat baby on a flat land.  the three of us are unified by the same vision of a wound our fingernails close.  the bowl has kept us from licking our palms.

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

he ended by saying surely it is evil to live.


I have not been stunned by fiction since having hands.  


he started by asking silence to observe the audience.  
he crushed a cocoon under foot because it had no god.  


I have not been beautiful since needing nourishment.  
I have not sinned since taking an active role in my dreams.


he arrived in a white limo.
he applied to his body a lotion of black milk.
he penned in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels.


he cried like a baby he’d seen.
I have not cried like that since being cut in half.


I was not ***** in a field of vision
nor have I been
since refusing the kit.

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

as the hands pray without the diver knowing, I ease my father’s ****** heels into the shallow end of a public pool.  inside your mother, a girl screams like a girl.  at home, my sister kicks herself for getting pregnant.  while beating his brother into the fence, our stock bully gives himself heat stroke and has to out his ***** before it disappears.  

I only have one memory of tugging at my father’s heart.  he checks for his toes, tousles my hair, and damns the lazy fish.

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread.  her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on.  her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours.  her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door.  when the door opens, any dog will do.

the back of my mother’s head was spotted in an Ohio movie theater by a boy whose eyes were covered or maybe closed.  I received word secondhand from the boy’s stepfather whose own recollection was marred by the violence he shied from to reach me.  in fact, the theater was even possibly a drive-in where the boy remains in the bathroom standing on the toilet to avoid the knowledge he is no longer deaf.  like most information regarding my mother, it hasn’t aged well.  she’ll set the table at noon for two and drink her coffee and I’ll join her convinced no child dies from its hair being pulled.  more secret than my son is his ability to withstand miracles.

pray knock, mannequin

here is my daughter     she lifts arms

for a living, I’m not

around

-

when young, not so much losing the mind
as going elsewhere     with it

even then, you are not the first to arrive

-

the baby won’t shut up

I can’t find it

-

my father is poor / is missing

people he’s never
been to

-

when she was not    not yet     I cut a hole in her

for when she would need to see
the light

-

here is my brother
buying a coat rack
for our christmas tree

so it can double
as a coat rack

-

for the sake of your memory,
I wear the same clothes everyday

bounce down the school's
most narrow hallway
off kids

playing moth

any mention of slave trade conjures
within the brood
retroactive     existential     endeavors.

it is confusing for the crow
to land on the arm     of a man
manmade
by straw.

secretly, perhaps secretly
jesus is not sad
but envious     that our sins permit
exhaustion.

mother never follows the word disabled.

without warning
I am the same age as a breathing pattern.

     god is an only father.

a mother, a red permanent marker without a top, and a light Ohio rain.  a patient’s outside Monday allotment.  Tuesday we’ll try to find a vein.  proof of actual motherhood.  we are not far from doing this.  the time it takes to find a sturdy rocking chair in a recently dusted room.  the time it takes to sit there, pull an arm hair from the weak **** of one’s inner ant.  as it is, utter as you were, madness.

my pupils conserve blood for the dotting of your thighs.  the stages of grief omit grief.

a would be mother
with an english phrase book
boards a train
she thinks is a train

jesus meanwhile
on tiptoes
circles a tree

a motivational silence
within a nondescript
third person

propels both

though by
some miracle
only the hands of jesus
remain curled

i.

though still in the process
himself
of being
created

god is an expert on earth.

he is just now beginning to regain his composure
after a short stint / speaking in tongues.

ii.

laymen exist
to question
what my mother’s body
cannot identify-

a specific amnesia
that attacks
her many
pseudonyms

iii.

stories keep my children perfect.

in the story of the rabbit’s mask
one finger out of every ten
is as empty
as the rabbit’s brain

iv.

to bring my first stranger
to god

I plan to use the alias
my father goes by
to pray.

the town is wiped from the face of my face.  a volunteer pokes himself in the eye.  becomes the rescued map of my brother.  I take my slippers by surprise.  I reach into a sack of masks.  the first is made of cloth.  is yours.  the second of plastic.  is mine.  when one is murdered, the others read the burning book.

the poor are beaten
from the future

they get off work
the day is hot
it's ungodly

as ungodly as placing a single chair in a garage

the poor get home
the chair remains in the present

the dog
can't afford to be here
appears mid-scene
in the backyard

the poor imagine
an electric fence
scrounge together
the amount they would pay
to fix it

& smile as they would smile
at the mindless sap
whose job it would be

whose chair it is

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

under threat
of lightning

where else

a donated pillowcase
made into seven washrags
one for each
church window

after whitening
the teeth
of the adult
orphan
you might have seen
on the shoulders
of a tired usher

a deep sea diver
swims solo
in a private lake