we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet.  we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks.  the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others.  we limp beside any creature that limps.  the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other.  our father is two mathematicians who argue.  our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave.  our guesses mean little because they are facts.  at school we are voted on and kissable.  if you see us coming, *** is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket.  details belong to god.

night terrors for which my daughter has a few choice words written in cursive.

that have told her she is black but have used the blank communique of her skin as proof she’s surrendered.

I want to speak with the angels.  visibility should have no viewing hours.  the angels send me away.

night terrors that only occur in gated communities.  present in children susceptible to imago.

the angels need pictures of the poor.
the poor my contraband.

younger times, I’d lose some of my hair when bathing the sick.  now older, I am not a private person.  I foresee helping father with his winter gloves and him thinking I’ve returned his hands.  if sick, one shouldn’t be grateful for the inclusion.  there’s a **** son in all of us.

you find a man whose wife has recently passed
place him in a wide open space
and give him the supplies necessary
to build a common backyard fence

you inform the man that at points a mile north, south, east, and west
a baby just learning to crawl has been faced in his direction
and he will need to begin building the fence

you understand that the viewership will need to take on faith
that the babies will crawl in a semi-straight line
will not take up with imported wolves
and because you cannot film them
are there at all  

if god exists
the man will have time to smoke a cigarette in peace
before and after the fence is built
and the babies will become a footnote
to the reported sightings of his wife

given a dry mop
the amateur was made
to swipe beneath
the bottom bunks

found in the barracks
of the dead

the night floor
water’s dark apprentice

the amateur
stiff neck and stung
nose, mouth a crooked
morning
horror

from bobbing for impressions of apples

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.

the soldier's father sleeps so as not to be occupied by the exhaustion of a civilian whose mother was killed for harboring a pedestrian insomnia inside of her daughter who was removed from the war for shooting at herself and missing and for shooting at herself and missing again-

I have to pull her bullets from the no eyed mule my memory puts to work.  father is a blindfold.  the soldier not a homeland.

for Aidan*

my son at nine years takes his easel out to the deck to paint from his dream moon above lake.  in spirit, I tell him it’s about to rain.  I am afraid aloud my words will run together.  in the dream he saw eighteen moons.  it won’t remember he’s painted one.

when he comes back to life
his first thought
is his first

and when

while sitting beside the bathroom sink
instinctually shaking a pregnancy stick

he hears from an air vent     what I would call
a frangible keening

he stands on the toilet
and chokes himself, his creamy hands
playing gentle theatrics
on his baby fat

neck
where I see a mark

as if he's been strangled
by the ghost of a snake
that when still
a snake

slithered
from the ashes
of a tree
the tree

it was made to love

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

if you were injured
before or after
you fell
from heaven-

well

it’s not something
I dwell on.

     up ahead, I am a busy with

the god question

dropping you, loving you

separating
the two.

author unknown / who hears a poem / unlike the poem you are reading

-

the unknown wife / a hidden talent / handstands / above a pair

of slippers

-

stupid babies / don’t worry

in a remote location

-

scissors / the hair / shrinks from

     then fingers / in a mother’s mouth

-  

if dead / only his ghost / would know

    he was my father / in many ways

-

a makeshift hood / on the same head / in a different body

of water

-

children / less widespread / than children

praying

a jailer
talking through bars
to a ventriloquist.

     youth / spent trying to yank a doll
by the ear.

enter
as if you’ve been sent to finish another’s listening.

love hushfully
the person you weren’t.

switch genders in moderation.

     for the memory of our first meeting
cling to the hand you’ve prepared.

touched by death…

entered?  no.

impressed?  
absorbed?
I don’t think it matters.

the days before increase in number.

mother
I count
on my fingers
yours.

take my children

who at their most vivid
recount for me
my childhood

who disappear
from trampolines

occurs most commonly in humble homes

afflicts men and the men they are tortured by

symptoms include a jesus complex that stiffens the limbs
and a weakness that presents itself only in sleep

has been known to create animals from nothing
and to make one believe
that like god

god is not a woman

teeth

the many memories I have of my mouth

the kind of childhood tag

no one knowing
it

because it could be them

every day is a scar’s birthday*.  this is how I am able to start most of your sentences.  I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out.  on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified.  the termites fled your blood.  a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick.  the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness.  your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright.  for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries.  a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.

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

who have in them hypothetical warmth

who have been saddled with such predispositions
as needing
to survive

as needing to be evaluated

who have multiple
lonely
nailings

words well known

but in strange places, arranged
strangely

upon a cave wall
by which
boulders
pass...

who prefer air quotes
made by those
without fingers

the inexplicable amount of time a father is gone
disappears.

one is left to re-enter
a mirage of hell
sent from hell.

a mother’s song begins to need
a dot.

in the gospel to revise apocalypse
one cannot abridge obsession

one can however
follow a man
pushing his son
in a wheelchair

to a word and that word
is amen

-

for the time the wheelchair wields a person
it will use the person
to leave the dead

alone

-

but oh
to sink into the living
with such a contraption
is impossible

where I wrote

the most startling entry in my mother’s diary

when she was not the greatest
source of pain / in the household

she pulled her own hair

we were five months into the first health of our infant boy

when we learned we’d been in the wrong room
with the wrong paint
happy to have
the wrong kid.

I say this for effect.  
I am god cruel, god brave, god loved.

my wife is god murmur.



there is so much telling in a diagnosis.
poet son, let me explain.

      

     I have a cardboard cutout in the shape of your demon.

you otherwise
have all the space in the world.

by morning, the bite marks on my son's arms have moved to his legs.

as for magic, there is none.

one must go everywhere in person.

father arrived
with a convincing
deafness
in one ear
a broken pair
of handcuffs
he'd named
the left hand of god-

mother had called him from sleep
with a birthmark my mouth

the shape

consumed by another man’s pain
I stayed close to home
but worried

that if even my mind
wandered

none would find him

or discover the shape
he was in



this that informs

I scratch the cheeks
of my sleeping
son.

both of my secrets
are hands.

my son has only one secret.

it curls his body
into a claw.

it caresses

the sibling world.



years I was not kind

playing flashlight tag in a darkened church
I kicked whatever form
hid under

the pew I’d chosen
for mine.

though I’d not hear the squeal of an actual pig
for some time

I’d seen Dorothy fall
in black and white

and had cast her most anxious
uncle

as Lennie
in Of Mice and Men

and so knew to broaden
god’s periphery

playing dumb.



the draw of evening

if I manage to hear myself
in my children
I can close
my eyes



museum with one exhibit**

everything his daughter makes is ugly

hide it all
he says

until her soft fat hands
remain only

to lead him
to the others

become kind
from waiting

infants
by nature
are cryptic.

beset by symbols of worry, parents

become clear.

draw for me
a bomb shelter.

     name those already there.

I will step
from the long line
of fledgling
historians

to join
the performance art
that sustains
our most
crowdfunded
sister

and such a stance
will reveal
gentleness
towards women

my silence     will stutter…

     brother,

my oldest son
pauses when speaking
like in your youth
you paused
when speaking

I know now it’s because
people flicker-

     that my son resumes
when they reappear.

as a child
the happy child
had no notion
of a childhood

he knew of ghosts
because things moved
whether he minded them
or not

he was haunted
by visibility

and cared for
in theory
by a woman

nightly moonlighting
as a man

in late years, the incarcerated man becomes a vessel of facts not widely recorded.  he puts them to paper for the daughter he’s imagined by.  on the outside, the daughter settles into a calming routine with a perfectly good father.  her mother abuses animals with such regularity the family name becomes synonymous with the fight to end recidivism.  on the whole, the man’s youth is something he said once and forgot.  a real wife was humanly possible.

not much happened.  after I was born, father stood outside of a church and watched mother go in.  before I was born, they had eleven cigarettes between them and smoked maybe nine.  

not much happened.  my brothers joined me on a bike ride.  we made visors of our hands and squinted into the sun.  we looked for a hill.  I’m not sure what they saw.  

a boy pulled into a house by a spotted arm.
an increase in sadness.

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

when a father
feels as though
he’s not
been here
before

the angel of near death
possesses

any idle
grown man’s
finger

and with it traces
a held
baby’s

outline
into the man’s
chest

for father
to not see

     / angel has no tricks

again, not unlike health

there’s nothing
there

or, the pickpocket

voted
most likely
to be chosen
from a nudist
foster care

by christian
couples

the number we did on our mouths
as boys
as indians

sitting on the earth
calling

with echo
to a lost

friend’s
child

it is enough to know

god will never once

be startled
by an animal

an orphan in and out of homes connected only by sleep.

a quiet nine months.  

your brother in the cab of a snowplow.  

a clear plastic fork carried up
     your mother’s bare calf.

sister cursing the power company.  sister spinning
     with her palm
          the ceiling fan.  her body lifted

          into the arms of the father

you’ve always had.

asleep, he was loved.  loved, also, in the margins of waking.  a hand on the head, or breakfast after payday.  he would try to keep quiet the unclosed wound of his voice; a darkened bandage, like bacon, held to his mouth.  but the morning, each morning, would leave, more so clothed than it had come.  if ever you’ve looked, at noon, for your mother, she would’ve been with his.  two sets of thumbprints, two glasses.  he would put his thumb to one, then the other.  days your mother stayed with you, his own would give him crayons.  once, that he can remember, he put the white in her cigarette box and heard about it.  it’s the kind of kid he was fully awake: bad.  his cheeks often burned.  their redness would unhinge his mother so that she would slap at the pale inquiry of his neck.  seven years old, and still drawing stick figures.  he could not keep himself from it.  three legged figures, one armed.  torsos were a problem for him, and crotches.  but there they would be, middle on middle, three lines to indicate ******, or wind.  his mother wouldn’t get sick but would say that she was.  before dinner, she would give him ice cream.  he would fall asleep without dinner and his father would come home, shower, and leave.  it made him stronger, not seeing his father eat.

     the stick figures, when he met them, were not like his drawings, but they wanted to be.  they would contort  and untangle from each other and giggle.  his mother once came upon them and they broke into many sticks at his feet.  she did not know what he was laughing at and tried to lift him but he was fat for his age and she pulled a muscle in her stomach.  he put her on his back.  she would not unstiffen.  at home, in front of the fire, she was angry.  her arm was crooked, aimed at him, and one of her eyes was trying to watch him.  he shut the door to his room and practiced becoming many.  his parts would not let.  he gave up; the fire lowered.  the noise his mother made sounded set aside; some special box opened in the house of a demon.  he had to cut her clothes from her so she could breathe.  she rose, simply; not like the dead.  something, in the second box, skittered from it.  the boy crumpled.  his head did not roll like he thought it would, but he smiled anyway.  if his mother was screaming, only his ears could hear it.

lives in Columbus, Ohio, with a white wife and four white children.  one of his kids cannot chew gum.  in *** his body consents to stave off yours.  the lion’s share of his self esteem comes from automated payment reminders.  most recently his stepfather passed away.  before you read this latter part to your mother, remember who you were.  links forthcoming.

a son holding his breath
above water

his reflection
swam through

unseen, and ruined

is it real

the woman’s leg
I photographed
using little
else

but my brother’s
nosebleed
and

some straws?

awoke.  was not wanted.  not wanted in the way a war is wanted.  but being awake was at least something.  the other side of a pane of glass.  not the side a god would touch.  a finger belonging to the earth is a bit much but the unwanted was pressed by it deeper into a softness ascribed to the dark.  the unwanted would lose its three surviving teeth on the way down.  one bets they float there still in baby room.  (baby rooms across the country lift in slo mo when another god angers.)  what age appropriate thing the wanted would do to choke back some dirt crumb stars.  those teeth.  my first word was water.  your first word I drank.  my body is a photograph of the oft cut child whose parent was an atheist made of darkroom chemicals.  whose other parent was made of angels arguing.  whose final parent witnessed nothing but drew a blank with gusto.  

-              

the moral was always at the beginning.  this is how my mother kept after me.  

-

the naming ritual offers its own blood in increments.  a date on a red brick takes on water.  we scratch our heads but not without vigor.  I reach into my brain.  I use one eye to do it.  you follow suit but fail.  because we have each two eyes our creator is self reflexive and thanks god for the both of us.

-

insights occur most nobly inside boys boxing tether *****.  you are an abortion that lived.  I know to turn away from it.  I know one thought should lead to another.  you were creative but only on second thought.  you were disabled and you died.

the middle life of hands

say poverty could possess a doll whose favorite and only outfit a schoolteacher mends while picturing

     two pieces of chalk which become the late life ******* of the ghost mother who cannot cradle the crucified yet travels to the many scenes of crucifixion to lade the Christ pale glove onto the hands men think they’ve touched.    



sibling talent

my sister rubs cigarette ash onto her palms.  her lips could kiss a mime and get away with it.  I can’t walk on my hands at night without having my father come home mid-day to find my mother on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with circus cloth.      




husk bearing*

the bath a baby pool for the barren.  I turn the knobs, hear nothing, and call to my mother.  call with *ma, and then ma again.  most made of one silence but she of two.  my right ear at the door and my other patient.  her knees sound like my father’s cheekbones.  the tears in them he says are shrapnel.  of course I don’t believe this.  when I wanted to paint my treehouse yellow mother straightened me and asked for stillbirth yellow.  then poverty yellow.  for another example you would have to believe my bout with chicken pox left a yellow basket stranded on the still river of my tongue.  

     listen.  the buzz on a delay

but bee
arrives.

be the still
working
camera
god
dropped

I’ve had children for years.  I’m only now going public.  my advice to them is no secret.  speak when not spoken to.  throw a rock at least once in the general direction of a future sibling.  climb a tree.  in the absence of tree, pray.  if my advice disappears, stop eating.  not too rapidly.

it is like trying to pinpoint the body’s first secret.  dear depressed woman.  unpopulated cities abound.  a screenwriter has a ******* and one is supposed to say what exactly train sounds trigger.  the human head passed around at a party.  partially, but also.  the human head my life parades with confidence.  past children sitting on their hands to make them sleepy.  into something even the third act would understand.

when in poetry she is referred to as mother she uses it to show others her fatalism has regressed.  on par with such beliefs as voice recognition and voice recognition technology.  she knows a dream is a good reminder of how someone looked.  when detoured from the road they’re filming on she manually rolls up the driver’s side window to say curse words.  a tire rolls by.  then a second tire called ahead by a bus on fire.  adventures in adoption.  her diary keeps a brother.

just as art
is not
the external
sadness
of one's
inner
monologue

this poem
is not
an apology

for blackface