baby on baby
violence
continues to be
the number one
reason

daycares
across the country
do not report
the imaginary
friends

of illegals

at the end of light, more light.
it is why I have been walking.
since you’ve known me
I have walked.

I am leery
of your sadness- you’ve mock deer
on your lawn.

you bird watch.

you rake a single leaf, give up.

sadness is your gut is
tamped properly. when I recall

on highway of abandoned upkeep

pipe tobacco
and knowhow

my hands
make visor.

a car slowly passes
other cars. I call this car
my death, and then revise.

the stomach remains dumb.
the way she finds this out
inside a school bus.

the way her father with a hot towel on his head will swoon.
the way her mother after losing a child.

two men from church in my father’s house are having coffee.
it’s odd to see them out again-

my mother’s cups.

the details of the effort have left me now that I am weak and moral.
even that I call it an effort seems to me common.

I don’t want to hurt you.

the three boys I will start with were born yesterday and shirtless.
one of them had a sister the other two were in love with.
she wanted to see a pitch black squirrel.

what darkness in her mouthed such a request must’ve been her mouth.
the two boys had never kissed a thing and her promise to kiss on sight of said squirrel
must’ve stirred
vague & crow
into one bed.

the squirrel itself might’ve been on its way to being asleep but instead it died
struggle
and / or
fumes.

sister laid her eyes on it.  one resting, and then the other.

‘ghost’     ‘angst’

     ‘wade’     where one might

‘weep’

he began to kick the place apart in his mind but didn’t finish.
some of the chairs were already down and the tables nailed.

she cut her knees and we said why

‘underwater’     the knife was there and my wrists

were also     ‘courtship’     ‘breadbasket’

     her face to which the years had not been kind but he could tell
they’d been polite.

I know my mother     ‘merestead’

‘mammogram’     I know my mother to be haunted

by a fetus     father took his hell

*to basement
where his food
came up

the interiors
of helicopters
in the air

and men
who pace

whose stripes
mimic
prison bars
behind which
a man is on fire.

he has been hours
out there
under handing
the baseball

     catching it
bare

and wincing-

his father

him left, him right

don’t know

his girl sleeps.  the drive-in has been closed a year.  they thought, last night, they could pretend.  if there are seven days in a week, if it can be proven, then she is happy for three.  it’s his job to space them out.  you would probably believe me if I mentioned a car accident, a third friend, a former lover.  but I arrived only to meet you.  minutes from now a white dog will drink from a bucket of red paint.  the girl will shift in the passenger seat and tug the skirt of minnie mouse past my idea.  the driver will start the pick-up with a fork I mistakenly told you, in a letter, was a crucifix.  in many places, for that, I remain sorry.

simply trying to remember a certain coat that took me like a mouth.
a coat my soul left me for.

I have been to the tub I would sit waterless in-
typewriter like a ******* my lap; the vaporous acorns of bliss winter squirrels, ash,
in the desperate curls of *****.  I have been

to the gym, its court of passed and passed back fire, its auditorium unfilled
as a church in spain.  I have been to my knees.  

to the egg of bird, the grief of cow, and to the lengthy absence
of train’s tunnel.  I have been

with boy, with baseball, with book-  smoking late on this fence

with these my trinities
soon to strike
for the house of my anna

cheerless and bare, not russian, not there.

she is not crazy, the mother, this happens:

her children die, in a bathtub, silly.
her husband, on a banana peel.

later, she calls about the tent.  the police take it down.

she says nothing to them until they leave.
a boy stops walking, says lady, and whistles.

each day until her daughters are grown.

inside a wall, like a sponge, moves god.
when my hand moves, my hand is upon him.

my son was born, part of my palm, in his brain.
many walk into a room, and recover.

in yours, I find the holiest of permissions.

in mine, slips of paper.  

and in that of this
oft cut
child-

the least of our forgeries.

I thought I’d teach them some looking.  the well’s bucket I was careful to quietly lower.  I meant to halve the rope with my tied legs and arms, to bewilder it with hugging.  I saw myself do it twice before I gave three.  the dark above me seemed jealous of the dark below; my long hair took on a glitter of crickets but would not be led away.  I waited for my name to sound its foreign bid but instead heard only the silently local.  I could see the bucket if I closed my eyes; and it, me, in my puny dress.  when my feet began their sleep they were napped in by circus water.  how cheered I would be for slipping.

yet it was another took audience- I made the junkyard breathless; my fingers already forgetting to stay their swollen proofs.  I called her name with the others, she whose own fingers had cleared the closing of a refrigerator’s door and so would not be found in a lesser hiding place alive and ******* a knuckle.  I strayed to my brother’s punishment for inappropriate play-  a scene with his therapist saying one can’t die from nothing.  there has to be something.  my brother having his hands pinned to his knees for covering his ears.  his therapist wishing he were someone else and someone else him.

if they were the stories of my adoptive father I have no way of telling.
he told them and forgot.

two brothers I remember in one had built, separately, time machines.  
their sister, though, had been done for a week.
she lost them to anger.

my real father noted the repeated references to god and rolled his good eye.

god, he said, is the mark of a first work.

I had spent years changing them, hoping my brothers
would visit.

this man jim calling himself jim repeatedly to his mouth until he is no one or no one but.  been thinking to **** his wife out of love and his thinking presently not different.  the church is empty and for its emptiness jim’s forehead is a blank check getting away from him.  to not **** his wife he’s been reading books but none of them halfway before he gets upset with how authors think they know towns.  all drab office and good deed and maybe a dog or a horse loved by some kid been felt up.  hell the history of a building starts when one enters.  jim of course can’t place his anger.  I can.

jim kills his wife because she is sleeping.  or, while.  you have to understand how some use sleep as rebellion.  afterward, he realizes he only thinks he has done it.  she opens her eyes, her name is dee, said once and enough.  he holds no pillow nor has one been dropped.  she says jim and down the road they have a daughter and she further down a fat kid

even at three and four and five a fat kid.

mother attracted to jobless
occupied
men.

a belt once used as a tourniquet.

******* circa 1989.  

1989.

posters of found children.

a reality play.

any information leading to the exact time the prediction was made.

willing to create social network
for pets.

a dog much like the one I lost

that the two  
can fight.

the antecedent story would be a simpler telling-  how it came to be the boy and I and three cows.  one can imagine; one must.  we celebrated spontaneously in our biddable house and we lost track.  sufficient that I was aged and he much less.  our argument presented itself like this:  magic paper or magic milk?  boy he would hold the bucket above the paper and pour.  I noted this was an act magnificent and an act personal.  I was pulled into the boy initially but pulled back.  the milk though went into the paper; abandoned, freed, gone.  the boy did this once a day for three until the bucket was empty.  I said paper, he said milk.  our further experiments left the paper sunned and thus brittle.  we then had only our cows which led us to grass and hormones.  hormones led to science, grass to god.  grass to his mother.

whose only obstacle was god
the dying woman
returned our baseball
to another’s yard

where it stayed
where it might
still be

the man
makes
of his hand
a lame
spider
for he
understands
as we do
it is important
that a boy
laugh-

this next part
leaves
the poem

     but not before
the boy
uses his tongue
in a way
we will call
grotesque
because

it’s a miracle-

takes three of our men
in turn
else the fly
be swallowed

not a place we can go to have my grandmother tell you again how my uncle was born with a tooth.

where slavery just a star watched and watching and **** just a rainbow bent to its work.

where babies are shaken like hollow gifts and we want people and the emptiness of people put to death.

where grey flutes billow.

where milk is in our blood and ghost letting.

where hope is ugly but don’t tell it.

where fathers disappear into the dashboards of looted trucks taking with them their once employed hands and taking with them the heat of those hands.

where disappear is not a word we lightly loft.

where envy is the work of nearby grass.

where a man moves over a woman so that she is equal and equally ransacked
of travel.

where in a field this far away one can do finders keepers to a body scraped at by others and poked.

where a pill is like a mouth but smaller. but wants a bottle. and roots at the tip of your tongue.

some meals for which I would use the word exquisite; these are some of the meals I had.
online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.
in house, I matched socks and when I could not I became accusatory.
worry was everywhere- I would, here, like to subtract the time I spent in the bathroom
and add to that
choosing an avatar.

what I called a proverb I would tell my children was the proverb of the right hand’s ring finger.
it made them laugh.

in hell, I thought I was in hell. 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.

never do we imagine the toy aisle
has in it
a girl

made mostly
of wheelchair

a skipping boy, maybe,
a parent
should holler at

better yet

a boy who cries
on the inside
of what

how sad, my cheeks, to fight
for shadow.

awards itself
a **** name
would make
Lazarus

love life.

has this look
it’s had
before-

white wall.  snow’s double.

a thought
a ballerina
might have
of smoking.

wombs itself
in the stuffing
of a pawn shop
theatre chair
carried by
a father
to his daughter’s
and granddaughter’s
wake.

other than
its ability
to lean
on a wall

and things like that

the ghost of bill murray

is wholly
ghost-like.

lightning
might find
sixty
people
per year
one of them
foreground
of oblivion’s
lucky
bee

a third subtle breast.
a handful of grave dirt.
the palm the coin abandons.

the man
mother irons
from the moon.

the languid hurry
of father’s care.
     his old sweater.

I was dreaming of you kissing me just softly between my eyes
and of children chasing a lamb around the silence of a grave.* – Alex Hoshor

I comb one hand with the other. beside me my son moves his jaw front to back, his chin massaging the ridge in the skull of our new puppy. we are snug in a velvet chair. my groomed right hand was last week reset by an accidental flash of fire and to look at it now makes one think of snakes veining then leaving the earth.

I fear I may soon have to field the proffered inquiries of angels lobbying for a pet heaven. I fear that fear is just something we say.

     the dust on my daughter’s dollhouse worries me. disuse worries me. these small shoes on step at the dollhouse door.

it is the simplest thought that it could’ve been my boy, my girl, at flame. but enough that sleep of late seems cat nap to its greater insomnia.

     awake, a mob of naked children some saying excuse me move gently past or leap the car or belly under. I walk from it slowly as if I am pregnant or as if in front of me one is pregnant. I lose my foot on the discarded handle of an axe and lose my way thinking it is the found arm of a puppet. I know I am bare because suddenly there is sand in my toes and the pregnant women are here to sunbathe. it’s the gas can tells me turn back.

how long have we been friends? the length of my belt, bed of copper or garden, removed with my left hand and laid.

he’s got this look like he doesn’t know how much he’s into them for and the kicker is he’s alone. I’d subtitle him as nervous but it wouldn’t be ample. we’re brothers, 4 years between our bleaker anxieties. he talks with his arms and I see my father at age 32 and my father sees me and winks. brother he knocks the table wood that separates us with both knuckles and tells me he’s gonna need luck in both of these and he shows his open palms. he begins to gag and I **** but he shows me again his palms. I lean back in my chair and pretend I am in a very small space and pretend I am cigarette smoke. I see the oval in his throat and then an egg and then the egg broken on the table. my brother he loses his cool and bites his palms and futilely tries to set the table afire with matches, some light some don’t, no matter. he tells me he usually catches the egg and telling me calms him. still, it’s some trick and I say it. not a trick, he says, but magic. he drowses right there in front of me and my subtitle is ‘****’ because I am scared. we go inside to the dog we’re sitting for and I retire to the guestroom where I check the eggs in my bag to make sure they’ve not broken. I go into the bathroom with one of them and say down the hatch. I spend the night on a hard bed and care for my stomach. my stomach and not the egg.

i.

one ground to another runs itself rock and rock in the unclosed pebbles of dirt open to aching at the wire your father fixes for free in the canceled warning of crow made gauze for blacktops poured not wholly over a woman-

she a belt buckle drunk pocked full the called back joy of a pop gun.

ii.

over glass I go with my milk bottle feet to church after church past mirrors sick and doctored.

iii.

needs hisself a dog he does the speechless boy drawn mother to his own mute breast -

so he clicks the roach of his tongue

makes a hole with the hole in his sock

makes tunnel sounds.

iv.

my aunt’s ear like a deformed thumb.
my aunt dreaming she says for two.
my aunt changing her mind, her mind
a mid-bread knife.

v.

soldiers able to turn in the throat a chicken bone straight.

vi.

for muscles: jaw down nightly the door of a stove,

jaw it up,

and salute.

vii.

tiny cups cured with sugar cubes and stilled with steam taken

from a skinned
train-born
pig, a train

of blackest
fur.

viii.

about ladders and war, about the devil-

a man stands on his hands in three feet of water. about god-

marco. marco.

ix.

the blue dolls and the gray dolls and the care with which the chosen choose cloth and after
all of it

some meat colored cloth.

x.

water knows your lips, and mine; takes our mouths

on faith.

xi.

*top teeth on the skin of an apple. top teeth mine. a test of joy, joy’s age. mama stepping on a scale holding my brother. mama putting him down, cocking her head, picking him up. asking for a towel. asking nicely be a good brother. the towel, hot from bread, sick with ants. heavy my mouth with sorry sorry. my slapped mouth, my loved love. mama’s hands back from hell. dish soap mama hands

uncut by the hair long had by my head.

there will be
no more
death*

announced
a wasp

to the lot of us
come to patch
my mother’s
roof-

then a fourth
strange thing
happened

     mother covered
with a black cloth
the empty
birdcage

as an only child to a mother wants three he buys two balloons already blown and fills the downstairs bath, the bath with the cold lever broken. it’s a one story house so any inclusion of down is a joke. his short arms match his legs so he needn’t kneel to put the balloons under. he loses them both below a minute and because they are still strong they make the ceiling. his mother is not there for long stretches but can’t take her eyes off of him nor put them on anything else. his father and stepfather are somewhere peeing on each other to keep warm. the balloons lose air at different rates so he has to lean toward the quicker to make himself develop. his father stepfather in unison and in blood dumb glory sway and are taken with the hymn when I raised him above my head his diaper sagging. his mother sees him taller as he should by now be getting and his mother no longer misses the baby untold where it went as in heaven there is no crying as in hell there is also no crying. the higher balloon hisses and can hiss all it wants.

grandeur

had brought the well outta ground the muscled men and she came upon them when they had split into teams and were rolling it and had not yet become competitive. the hands of her gone infant came back to her to see these men heave back and forth a vanishing. of her many fathers one had said ‘the deep train went even deeper and I could not wake’. he had said it to excuse his one day feat of linking unadorned toilet paper rolls to stretch a rat’s mile. her stomach had yet to go down and she was comforted by such literal remnants as thinking of the last place you had it.

libel

two white boys come outta shack each with a wrist one left one right being ****** at the mouth. their laughing I wouldn’t say manic but still not righted. like certain bible stories seem to tumble outta that book it’s the same with their eyes and ears. their heads each one shrunk so as to be united. I want to say here at least a ****** knows what it’s mocking. I only know one of’em and only as far as this thing being passed and told that he ain’t a foster but he was born in a pan and taken from the offices of the parent company his father got laid from. you think that’s the joke but had I not said white you’d have thought they were anyway. here come two girls grisly with month and I never seen two boys so quick to put down the shack they come from.

prayer

I like it best when my girl is pregnant because I get the sympathies. on her hand, she likes me drunk. at any one time, I can remember seven of our eight kids. this means of course one gets left home but also that not a one gets left grocery. I’d tell you their names but then I’d have to split this saying into parts. but I can tell you seven are boys. now and again they’ll slip on sister’s dress to **** up my math. a good joke I start with is that they take after their mother and if they take after me it’s with sticks. I change the batteries in the alarms for fire and carbon monoxide every two weeks mostly outta fear that I’ll lose them all and have to recount them to some fireman I went to school with. I don’t know if batteries are cheap or not, I don’t know anything about them, but I know I spend a healthy chunk of my portion to have. wife and I are keeping the ninth at bay the ways we know how. she don’t ask me and I don’t her. one kid a week goes with her to church and it’s up to me to remember who in my charge caught a fish the week previous. but I’m not wrong with god; no book is the bible, I believe that. at cemetery by which I am lack whelmed: I wish I had his memory.

nativity

wonder they ever told him grown, that black foster, how he'd been at three years dropped manger while crying for the congregates. straw in everything. back a throat, bottom a shoe. pop said he just about caught himself afire at work, straw sticking out his pocket. pop unable to split work clothes from churched. some wanted to resurrect a fuss about color; don’t go resurrecting a fuss and waved his hand he did that pastor ingénue. heard then I the word negress and after its saying the sayers looked about as if she would appear. this was our town after god and many were still making their own. this answers how the black foster needn’t audition. the gold I brought was soft on my thumbs and the flakes stayed in my nails weeks after. pop could tell for that time what I’d been touching so I’d cover when I could. we were quite a pair in our fooleries what with his straw and my gold. he stopped going on about the blacks and I was able to skip school with your sister the ****** mary. the town was never up for nightmares or for dreaming so I kept your share to myself until now how you seen mary fingered by a man with seven. heard him saying it's okay baby, this one's asleep.

holy ghost!

I will cut myself, Horror Film. will fidget my nethers a last time. maybe make the snow an angel with a third leg. which means I have gone outside. maybe my father will happen by you and put his beers together. but I will be gone. into the woods dragging my feet so some will think it took two to take me. I will whip branches about me and generally scuffle so the some will better convince the left. my poverty will be confirmed by your presence on videocassette. my father will hold you aloft and your tongue will droop above the depths of his hair. my father will claim a vengeance he owes on and the some and the left will follow him over the states of my angel and into the woods. when they find me I will say I had an in body experience; that the two men nearby sleep and it’s what we’re walking in.

haptics

little he knows that in holding them hoppers until they spit and before they go wing he is making hitch the upcome carriage of his *****. his future nudes are backtracking and the gravity of this has been diagnosed as your emphysema. he is your, nothing more, son. he will rub your back and worry his thumbs orphan. oh thumb; toe six. the way you deeply stand arms folded he sometimes thinks you have been replaced by a statue of his mother. it is then he remembers the fence his father built and the collective plank his father carried under his arm. you want life to be good again; your son’s low hand and the pups it could feed.

verbal abuse*

she has brought with her a shoplifted teddy bear. on a good night her age is seventeen. two days ago the voices in her head moved to her mouth. she has seven teeth that remain quiet. she fears so much how this third day will go. she has been told, and she believes, I am only in her mind. but there she is, at the sitting rock where we met, the rock I told her I could see things in. unprepared for her faith, I am unclothed. I am glad she has the bear and glad for my part in her having it.

spiders

we got some kind of plague in our toilets mama.*  that’s my dad calling her mama, my mom. that’s him declaring another plague. week don’t stop until a plague has been pieced together by this man so named Paff Snull on the subscription stubs of any number of unread magazines mom uses to swat dramatically at imaginary flies and wasps and locusts depending on the week. this time though I’m ******* because when dad cracks his knees and ***** himself to fetch mama from silence, I look in the toilet up and it’s true and in the toilet down and it’s more. spiders grey and black and off white. with our low water pressure, spiders having a ball. mom and dad they get tents and tell me twice to get inside mine once it’s on the front lawn. I get told things twice because I was born thick and I haven’t the heart to tell them that after the first saying the saying of it is diminished. I mumble to myself in corners, sure, but it’s the same mumbling. our dog gets a separate tent and I sneak into it when dog allows. seven nights so far outta three weeks I haven’t. mom says it’s because of my acne dog don’t recognize me sometimes. ******* bit the meatsy of my right hand a month ago and my handwriting got so neat I was sent from school for cheating. it’s most of my summer and the house is still spidery. the dog has gone to the river to drink and seems okay with it. mom, dad, and I **** in the backyard in shifts. mom ain’t swatting anything, she doesn’t have to on account of the spiders. when right now I mess up my shift I find myself next to dad and he’s just some guy telling me them glass-full people got the joke on them because the water is contaminated. he’s so happy it makes me think I’m the devil to be grinning so big. long wasn’t the reign of Paff Snull.

how the saying
of nada
tamed
my mother’s
tongue
as in

being nothing
your father
has
nada

and my sisters and I
would momentarily
wild ourselves
verbatim
to bang
on a thing
with a thing
until father

in the a.m. and late with poverty
would enter what there was
to enter

     and how flush
he would be
with fiction

show me my mother’s back, and her elbows.
the faucet’s spit on neck.
eye black to eye black my brothers checking
for teeth.
show me insomnia, the pacing witch hats
of a dog’s great attention.
my father, but don’t
take sides.

the land here is so beautiful one can forgive all kinds of bad behavior.*

see rabbit knock into a pail, then knock it again, so it is upright.  

see the later mother believe ghost and for that in the thirst of ghost.

see angel, being seen, pained by a bell that aforesaid rings.

see the hand of god once thought to sweep, sleep.

see slow the jeopardy of dog ticks.  see bullets in a wall  

or track them their holes; some in a line and some stepped out.

see a film, the south in it.  your lips with your teeth.

hats.

A pregnant woman touching a window with a napkin
To stop
A black spider.

Her other hand, of course
Keeping towel.

The spider, then freed, under the door.
The scared leg it leaves

This woman of chore.

Her audience wider
I’ve asked her to cross-

But I’ve looked from my longhand’s impossible loss.

to be moved again by the stillness of things a still thing I muscle into.
it is why when you walk you are above a cage afloat.
it is why your legs do not fly off the handle.
I am bound to the world and my head bobs.  what great arrest    
to be under- in this room survived
by a wounded curfew.

eventually, I was asked to write about a dog.
there was a letter, and a man above it.
in my own letter, I asked for the woman behind him.
she arrived with the very little I came to know.
I could’ve been a room she sat sewing in.  
her one hand nibbling the other, the foster door
of her back.  my whole life in front of me
on another’s fours.

all of nine, ******* skates
with bucket.

I once had power
and at thirty three
could easily ****.

avoided parks, happiness, and socks

eraser pink

she is
by the tail
easing
a mouse
from the bell
of her pant leg.

present tense
my love
I have broken
the teeth
of your purse.

he thinks
of a pill
and bottomless
rabbits.

I held an apple with my ankles.  
boyish, I guess, very still.

these two girls, new to me, in my sister’s room

they were
with their hands
talking.

about tomorrow, or maybe
a spoon.  I could imagine

mother, by me, loved.

dad sitting sober as a fence, looking to bite
before dinner
a hard sweet.

nightgowns, drying, the last of our water
on four legs.

my sister
a curtain
sheer

to the angel wake of my bones.  the mute

rub
of soap
in a stranger’s
bath.

balloon, blushing into the side of a mountain.
the hand, that came from the arm, that came
from the room.
the first finder of mirrors.
hair, brushed over the blindfold’s ear.
hair, tucked under.
pet rocks from Palestine.
wrist, dropping like a slipper, from the mouth.
or like a newspaper. nine months old.

had we one mouth. had our teeth been field workers swept into a bar after a fight. that we could find them. that we could tell our wives where to look. had we not been dragging our shadow by the foot. had the ground not shrugged itself lower. had it opened. had we cut the palm, not the throat, of death. so that when it prayed. so that when it tried.

had they not banned, so early, the dogs. had my best friend a suit. had he not talked so much about getting one. had it not been his hand I seen come outta the earth to take its pick of hats from the wounded. had I not laid his fat sister. had I gotten money for it. called her fat and not loved her for standing upright what was another’s tale of composure.