while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on spaghetti, I had two words for ghetto and poverty.  I was able to crush only those beetles slowed by your father’s fleeting shame.  we found so many stones it became impossible to label a single one as oddly shaped.  logic was that if the horse hung itself it would leave a note.  I had my doubts.  

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on poverty, I had two beetles mother looked for.  you were so ghetto my other friends rubbed at me as if I’d come out of my father.  logic was that if a horse hung itself it would leave a note.  

     not here:  the stone that heard my baby’s heart.

safe passage
in deaf
snowfall
for brother
who carries
a beer
from his house
to mine.

breath is the rock I’m under.

I don’t want kids
but sing
to my belly.

a lasting image?

a unicycle on its side
beneath a suspended cross.

a temporary?

that little
self-aware
apocalypse
boxed

up
in crow.

empty imagery

I am aware a sparrow exists.  not in a spiritual vacuum.  people are another hell.  



empty imagery

woman large, woman blank.  vessel of prayer.  being led by my father to the backroom where her child is being held for shoplifting.  dizzy child versed in how equalizing the chewing of gum can be.  once in the backroom, my mother takes over.  the child sitting, a son, knuckles hovering as listless as this dual recount.  

the table being carried from the employee cafeteria.  not arriving before the woman rears and breaks the child’s nose with her boot.  the table in the wrong room.  the shy people around it.  the following mayhem from which the boy shrinks to swallow his gum.  how the gum goes right to his chest caved from being stepped on by his older brother’s left foot to keep him still during the nightly ritual of lengthening both arms by the hands.  his arms necessary for thieving.  

his arms for pain to tunnel through.    



empty imagery

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here.  at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet.  to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.



empty imagery**

to think on it is to acknowledge something came before both the chicken and the egg.  but don’t get knotted.  we’re going with the coverage of the tree no one heard.

i.

I watch my cigarette make the water and step from the dock onto my father’s boat.  a large fish moves from beneath it and I sense the fish is of a tearful species of fish and sense that to it my father’s boat was a shadow.  alas, fish, I am trying to know the first thing about boats.  

ii.

my father makes it hard for the cops because he isn’t hurting anyone.  he avails himself of the dense novel and uses his ***** to camouflage the riding horse.  he goes headlong up the slide and enters a realm where he is embraced for blowing a tooth from his nose.  by the time he’s using the seesaw as a surfboard, he feels the cops haven’t had enough.

iii.

my father is asleep on his back with a book across his chest and my sister nudges me like it’s never happened.  I ask her what she sees and she sees a man missing his glasses because they are on his face.  for me, it takes two fathers to begin the long process of choosing an epitaph.

iv.

I cannot mention my brother without mentioning how in that old farmhouse he saw a ghost leaning over the bathtub wearing nothing but a yellow rain slicker and how he used ten of his eleven years to push my father down the stairs while screaming don’t look don’t look

enough to make ****** mary jealous.  also how brother denied it later and called it a joke but I knew better because after the sighting I began to see my brother everywhere which made it easy for me to be there for my mother.

v.

presence is a petition.

he’s not even as special as his mother’s comb.

I am a piece of me.
I am the posterity hell avoids.

when possessed his muscles tighten.
not in english
he smallens.

I am the tiniest knot in the braid of suffering.
I am my brain.

she wore a swimsuit.
he kissed her leg.
his pain rattled
in the strangest
acorn.

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.

the *******
on your left hand

shorter
than the others.

the shoebox
that I swear
moves.  your small feet.

the baby jesus  
I’ve never seen
walk.  the cartoon

flat  
part of your

stomach.  the tip

of the mumbling
needle

I never hear.  book

on a bee’s
heart
you tell me  

you wrote.

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.

not by its neck
my grandfather's
bottle.

his penchant
for the bodies
of things.

were the prayer
of his line
too broadly
cast

he'd say
good fish
and go hungry.

saved
every Sunday
christ
in both cheeks

and fought
all day
drunkards.

     once fattened
a crow
for his son
run off
 
but could not
watch it go.  

once choked
for nine months
a man.

so full
of stories
     I am not like my father

who died
today
in a field.

(another slight edit)

leaving the theatre, he tapped, twice, the hood of a parked police car, lifted lipstick from a drunken woman's purse and squared himself in a store window before shooting himself with his hand.

his first film, completed, by the time he was eighteen.  roundly praised.  from there, a many colored thing.  russian women, guns under suits, and cameos of indians with indian names.  at twenty three, nostalgic for twenty one, his seminal 'my white father' wherein a mute albino would be upstaged by mimes.  further brilliance followed.  mostly in quotes, such as “babies are full of grief”.  women ate from his hand and their eating progressed.  one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.  the woman divorced him and took with her the man.  in the midst of attending to the list came the advent of black and white which added a much needed plot to his smoking.  his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  in 1973, his doctors, grey from vietnam, convinced him to go under.  his last film was silent, and many complained about the lighting.  he cried, in his mansion, for the windows he did not put in.  he would not often entertain tourists but when he did they asked about his mother, her ghost, and if the east wing was really haunted.  he would on those late nights produce a letter his mother had sent him only yesterday.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs set out for his father, he made walking his home.  every now and then a hotel of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss

     the death row scene, the little saw his mother used for the cake, the mysterious basket moved from bike to bike.

because no one in the hotel knew it was being evacuated, it took a week for it to empty.  the employees were told it was on fire.  some have saved their voicemails to play at sparsely attended parties held in country houses forgotten by the rich.  a boy in the corner of the hotel’s elevator goes up and down wearing a dunce cap.  please think of him when your mother is assaulted for monies the poor already have.  when your father is opened up and dictated to an irreverent surgeon as having the insides of a radio reassembled by a ghost.

far
from the oral
present
of wine glasses
     broken
in the rhythmic
*******
of gulls

     the girl
allows
the boy
her measured
swoon

as he curls
to his ear

her swimsuit’s
mute
waist

him

mouthing

to a lost plane
above a silent
orchard

every name
in the banshee

book

after leaving
my mother’s
double
my father
came home
twice

once
with me
as an infant
and once
with a pair
of shoes

that my brother
on my mother’s
side
filled-

at the time
my brother    
was older
than me
than regret’s

bright future

while my mother
swims
in the lake
where my father
learned
to coexist
with his ability
to be
alone,

to which
my father
brought
the seashell
his father
coined
the ocean’s
bible,

I sleep
the sleep
of my hair
not the sleep
of its brush

on her fiftieth birthday our alleged mother hires a driver to remain parked outside an abandoned warehouse.  she promises to pay the driver extra if he sees more than two stray beasts and promises further employment if he consciously brings the uglier of the two or more home to his children.  we hear offhandedly these things and others

     as if we are hidden inside a very large cake.  

     the driver is an hour deep into the assignment when he notices a barefoot woman flat on her belly scooting across a puddle of oil near the warehouse entrance.  the woman is swallowed by the puddle before the driver can call to her or commit her outfit to memory.  he says aloud she was feral and her ******* had to be, by then, bleeding.  it’s christmas morning when the driver comes to and his wife’s sister has this look like she could **** the red from a childhood firehouse.  his kids are crying over invisible toys.  invisible because our mother touches the future without looking.

altar

the baby is too light.  its mother puts it on a scale that reminds her of a plate her empty childhood couldn’t break.  its mother invites neighbor boys to punch her in the stomach.  some of the boys bail.  some don’t.  the mother’s nickname doubles as her real.  the baby is not called bricks.


zero

when I couldn’t get my head around the surrender of my body to the flotation device of an immaculate conception, I’d simply swallow a baby that had swallowed a pill.  years go by and I am zero.  the number arrested for suicide.        



basics

because he is asleep, he does not find himself sleeping in the tub.  something slides from his belly and becomes wedged.  his dream business goes under even in dream.  he makes eyes at CPR manikins.  his son, his life, pushes for legs.



safeguards

I call this piece

the hotel room
that left
your father.

a hammer is a good bid, an unmarked
bottle of cologne
is better.

your mother stopped in
to let me know
my high school
mile time

was threatened.

she said she would’ve come sooner
but she had to work
a fork
from her thigh.

the disabled are born liars
but lie
only once.  




turnout

before the parade
I carried with me
a trombone
and entered
the high
corn-

what I played
there

was mournful
after
the fact-

a tune
for no one, for a tree’s

late
cat


outlet

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.



viewership

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.



pressure

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.        



On having a secret mother

the boy is lacing up his right shoe
when he sees
the string
tied
to his middle
finger
and wonders
how asleep he was
when it happened-

(being forgotten
is a lot like
being forgotten
by) harm, that purple balloon

lowered into
then surrounded
by

the inactive
construction site
of the world




On suicide

you are further than I
in your worship
of the slow
vehicle
that carries
praise
back and forth
from appearing
to reappearing

god (how else)
to bully

what would
wipe you
clean
of body

language…
 
On foreclosure

any chance, no,
of improving
upon
my impression
of god.

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat.

wheelbarrows, wagons.

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I am
rowing.

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

no cats
on cat
island.


On libido

the previous verse was a poor man’s bible.  like wildfire a fondness for appropriate discipline spreads.  one scarecrow means practice, two scarecrows mean parentage.  a third is your father’s failed garden of baby teeth.  is, by definition, is.  I are

motherless.  what mother doesn’t know doesn’t worry.  many spiders came on the wind and a few were swept into mouths briefly opened by age. what made woman did not make the disappearing girl.  flashing back to a scene that’s not there or forward to one dependent on space, pain arrives

in memoriam.  


On memory*

for all the showing, one would think the only things born were eyes.

when lord
says
or lords
say

this is the body

I tend  
in unison
to trail
behind
my voice

as if

I could make my own
remember
the anesthesia
it underwent

to intervene.





On devastation

brother, there’s not a cigarette

on earth
that you
can surprise


On the past

my death a warped photograph of a former awe, my life

four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-

it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably

here, ably slow
in sight of
the aging

marksman
I’ve given
a sporting chance
 


On supervision

you may have been a child
projecting a maze
or an adult
memorizing
the hollowness
of things.

in a condensed version
of poverty’s
obstacle course
I still hold the hammer
that works for a mirror…

with dog or with dogs, we were presented
as two examples
of how to be
family.

I love me a farm machine
and the week
you knock yourself into.

(a silo
saddens
a drunk)


On phobia

before the brat kid
can repeat

this is not
the television
my father
writes for, it is my understanding

that such a child
belongs
to the itch
to have a child
disappear.  as I refuse

(to enter
the ocean)

I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug.  






On the need for a watchlist

if one can talk of it

one is most likely
not
poor.
    
we called you to life to give you a name.
odd imagery ensued.

a prisoner gave birth in the yard of your mouth.

god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress
he could see through.  a short history
of heaven
made its way

to hell
to have its
location

shared.  

your mother developed a stutter
for which I developed
a stutter
application.  things began to click

on you
and when that
didn’t work

your fake cry
took on
a depth

of meaning
made us dip

(into
your brother)


On paternity

as his mother heard yesterday he was born to some nobody everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear. as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream to put a cricket on the witness stand.



On contact

talk early, walk late.  

eat
for food.

hold kitten
like a rifle, your father’s head

to god.

call my / with your

premie.



On looting

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.



On my father being gay

a crow
born inside
a footstep
is passing
for dark



On having little to no vision

the amount of thought
given to locating
the secret
mind.

I am on count eight
of ten-

ten, the future.

I call your hiding place
water.

-

of course you dream of falling-

those toys
are the toys
of god’s
children.

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor.

-

let there be
all

the light.

 

On decompression

the zombie movie
about buzzards.

the hungry enough horse.

the 48 hours
that go
undetected
in the parents
of special
needs
children.  

the civilian
birthday suit, the war

footage.





On the expected delays**

in this place
paid for
by another
country’s
melancholy

two dreams
of being
run into
by a newly
pregnant
late

bloomer

are had
by the one
man
we share

like a comb
to forget
whose hair
was first

an overhead crow

flat on my back
in the loft
of my uncle’s
barn
where I
thought to please
my father

and resolved
I would not
be like
my shadow

she who
upright
confessed
so loudly
that her heart

flew

into a quiet
sky

     and she collapsed



angel scene*

when on the path
some small
unnamed
creature
senses
the oblivious
coming
of a man

and wishes
in its own
animal way
to be called
into ash
or bush

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.

based solely on the original man in room, the man certainly seems to be charting the brain function of the child bride.  you’ll remember, his dementia opened to great controversy but as he predicted has since remained the perception of dementia.  what you might not recall is that the room is the very same room we hid while using.  both men were students then.  heavily armed.  attractive.  I still give the third world a vibrant thought.

an indian woman, you guess, runs room to room.  
moves, by herself, beds.  

sleep, but for its vacant host, would sleep.

the hollow locust in your right breast
     leans for the dust in your left.

for roach, your hands made of toast.
for mouse, a mouse-sized moth.

a crude infant can be made and will be
     from a phone’s receiver.

     dark food, and below it
your body of bright milk.

a bowl of brown rice
in a sandbox

a plump girl in a flea market

barefoot

barefoot as

the jesus doll

left

in her father’s

car

a car so yellow

it hurts one to be

inside the car

-

some lady turned up her nose by pressing it to that screen door
your kid seems okay
licking

-  

this my face and this my totem face-

make neither
too long

-

hope is a rabbit’s foot

secretly

the lord’s

slipper

my wife was pregnant with a silhouette.  it lost itself to her.  it left me out.  I began saying sensitive things around women about their bodies so one might trace me.  I said lord I thought my life would be sadder.  I bought an AK47 because it was the only gun I recognized.  I hung it on my neck.  my wife used her memory to pluck things from my hands.  food, mostly.  it helped me realize I was rarely using both hands for the same purpose.  my wife began going out at night.  said she did so to hate America.  when once I tried to join her on the front step I was informed how she missed me but not as much as I believed.  she threw bread crumbs into a shuddering bush and I had the feeling it wasn’t new for her.  yesterday, I sold the gun to an interested neighbor with a child to protect.  he told me my wife’s nightgown is rather sheer but that he’s more concerned with how she carries herself.  after hearing that, I don’t think anyone could’ve dragged me to him.

my mother
she stands
behind
four boys

her smile
mirrored
in each

like any photo
with my brothers
and I
it engenders

some to say
she was cursed

     I see it now

the ghost
of my camera shy
sister

they share an abyss.  gum is rare.  gum is the gum in god’s mouth.  they smoke in two places a stroller can be pushed toward.  they ask without question what is in me for it.  one hand is for writing on the other.  this is the hoot molestation can be and these the shapes the clouds obscure.

as a father, I can’t imagine being a parent.  the inside fastballs of my youth loosen the blood in my nose and water fountains become locales of low tragedy.  consistency is a sense only grasshoppers make.  as a firstborn, I was set gingerly on a swing.  when my father’s bare feet left him they became fish.  hiding from my mother is as good for her self-esteem now as it was then.  some no higher than my knee seek violent alternatives.

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.

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.

boy
in a loose
diaper

standing
on a cement
block

in the stranger’s vacated car, he counted seven dogs.  

the town was a.m., a grocer’s dream, a fisherman’s desperate tooth.  

tragedy, his raincloud, what else

     it wept.  wept the window down.

off duty
lifeguard
with cigarette
his nerves
shot
reading
an obnoxiously
cursive
letter
about
how a baby
moves
in its very
still
mother

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.

while being whipped
by the woman
who taught him
to mark
only
the people
he could hurt
a person
with, the boy

recreates himself
as one
giving birth
to a unicorn
beside
that horse
oblivion
or family
of horses
eating

from the straw
the stork
became

(all titles available on Lulu)


~



from The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake - Sept 2013, 211 pages, 10.00


the recidivist

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.        


within hail

     the flashlight works if you shake it.  this tree is the tree you should use.  every other home is broken.  every other window has in it my house arrested father.  the dog run off, the dog come back.  back with a beauty I will bed to babysit my brother.  the crow is empty.  a plaything, a part of the show.  crow can be blindfold, camera.  can censor among other things an exposed breast.  the fence wasn’t here when we got here so it’s not here now.  an uncle says there is a dog only he can hear.  will say anything to get laid.  in all fairness I’ve failed more than once to insert myself into the loneliness of my person.


a country

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


assistance

from the boy

(on the soon to be
exact
date
our poverty
matures)

this ballpark
statement:

I did not ask to be born.

     he wants the names
of those
I’ve told.

~

from father, footrace, fistfight - June 2014, 177 pages, 10.00


the gentle detail

in the time it took
his daughter
to soap
her brother’s
cradle cap

the man
was able
to lose
an entire hand.

every now
and now
he corrects me
with a puppet.

there is no place
where nothing should be.


lift

my mother steps on a wooden block
with both feet.

stepping off,
she announces
she is going
on a diet.

my father covers his ears
and gets shaving cream
on them.

he turns me in his hands
like a dish towel
then drops me
at the base of the tree.

I transport
god’s blood
on three
disposable
razors

to my neighbor
who

on a high shelf
has a microscope.


deep still

ghost of snake.  

an adoration
of atypical
young mother
fear.  

mouse needs a toothache.

footwork
heads north.


1998-2014

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

~

from The Women You Take From Your Brother - Aug 2014, 351 pages, 18.00


joy and joy alone

I broke the boy on my knee because I needed a switch. we ran around an empty crib. I let him catch a breath and he let me kneel. we tiptoed in a manner of mocking past private make-up to which his mother had been softly applied. he drank tea from an eggshell and I declined. I swatted him to let him know I was dying. his bent sister fell asleep and the boy was kind enough to believe her hair was a nightgown. I swatted him again to let him know I would live. the tea was gone. the rest is sadness.


being

a man my mother knows
only in passing
is reading a library book
in the dugout
of his dead
child’s
home
field
while his wife
rounds the bases
pushing
a stray dog
in a grocery cart.

at the dinner table
father says
we’re fasting
in a world
of spirits.

~

from Misreckon - Dec 2014, 115 pages, 9.00


clear heads

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.


untitled (ii)

afraid of my sons, I was born scared.  to my friend of few words I say

a few
words

on how a newborn looks like an undiscovered

fish
fresh
from ghosting
the underfunded
aquariums
of rapes

that occur.  at some point
I’ll tell my daughter

we’ve met.  my father

when he comes
comes

from another
dimension
to bear hug
our dinner guest
who’s arrived
in a mirror.  

mother puts a gun to her foot.


end psalm

god had an earache and I heard thunder. I learned to shrink into the smallness of my brain. I associated money with my father’s funny bone. my mother with the dual church of hide and seek. I went on to have a son with special needs. he cried once. cried milk.

~

from Eating the Animal Back to Life - July 2015, 316 pages, 10.00


off night

when what we thought
had entered
our father
left

we used him
as an alarm

god is coming
and mom
is vacuuming
stones


neglect

it didn’t take long for the frog to become real to those around me. some would bring it back and pat me on the head and some would laugh when I told them it’d never tried to hop away before. some would say it was the frog that was depressed and some would pray for the frog I was lucky to have. when it began to speak, I told myself that’s just how frogs talk. god came to me sooner than most. mom joked that he must’ve known I had a frog to get back to. my sister maintains to this day she had no intention of eating the frog as she was only trying to impress the snake her eyes were made for. by the time I woke her up, her hunger had ballooned and she leapt at me the odd leap of grief.


contact high

it gets so you can’t throw a rock without having a baby. not all of us talk this way but you have to hand something to the ones that do. I’ve seen voodoo dolls with more personality. had my mother’s god been my father’s, I would’ve gone blind from staring at my birth.


themes for country

I am at the truck
getting ice cream
for the overly
nostalgic
girl
who refused
to cut through
the cemetery

~

from Drone & Chickenhouse - Oct 2015, 84 pages, 6.00


chaos

brother drinks water enough to shock the devil. on the inside, he’s all doll. I shake him for show might our sisters travel in pairs. I used to talk but had to close my mouth when the soft spot on his head kept my mother from her toes. it’s the second stone that really lands.


deep scene

speech itself is a failed translation

dreaming is a farm

a mother
makes it as far
as mailbox

bear
to fish
there’s water
in the water

is, today’s mousetrap
tomorrow’s

shoe


language

word gets around
the schoolyard
pretty quick
that my father
drove his body
off a cliff
so god
would have a nail
hot enough
to touch.

I have a tooth
can make it
snow.

in awe
of my father
being
in awe
is habit

forming.  I want

invisible
beast
my fingernails

back

empty imagery*

Adam had no memory of his first wife.  as created, he would look at Eve all day and feel nothing.



empty imagery

the vacation house was found to be owned by another family.  in it, my mother resisted arrest.      



empty imagery

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left.  he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.



empty imagery

God created the world because he couldn’t do it on his own.  ah, note to self, *******.  person is place*.  I might’ve killed a man had I not been poking holes in a poem by Barton Smock.

to encourage
the unionization
of stereotypes
in YA
fiction,

join my father.

for money, add punctuation
to a vandal’s
prose.

women are not soft, but
I think
anyway
it’s true.

on paper,
proofread god.

his earache
the scorched
zen
of a scarecrow
the man
stands
on one leg
with cigarette
in mouth
and refuses
to lean
on the child
heavy
minivan
seemingly dropped
by god
into this field
to remind him
perhaps
of the lapsed
dental work
that gave
to his famously
unhealthy
son
that terrified
look
which said
I am here
to eat
only that
which was cut
from the cookie
sheet
of hell

the woman wore goggles and held a fork.  

I was pushed
up a hill
in a stroller
by a lover
of snow.

in her books of bookish loss
her knees

are a nightmare
had
by the fork.

her man
shovels
his madhouse
meal.

by one such as you the lake is crossed, one side to the other, on the hoods of cars. commonplace it is heard that I am in love with my
behavior.  the real you looks for the real me but only after your violin lesson.  meanwhile I am sharply anger.  my undershirts rip oddly while I wear them.  if sunlight were my body, says who, I’d be a torso of nervous pentagrams.  the one collects piano keys and favors the white.  they are his dream of clean teeth.  the black the slugs pulled from the dog and from the deer favored by the lake.

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.

kid with dog, I know, not what you’re thinking of my midwestern peace ****.  for lightning burn a stick above advancing plastic army.  make zeroed the black kid with red dog.  this I can follow.  my loyalty to shame and to the poorness of my spirit’s ghost.  god drawing himself in god’s raffle.  a woman with cigarette on a zoo outing.  bold I make her in images mine.  I stalk, don’t worry, I tell her myself.  it’ll pass being tired of god.

brother says

how thin
we've grown

on the fat of self.

I hold the map.
am

its only
reader.

a bone drops.  

desert & cathedral
I tell him

     the words

I can figure.

bone like that don't break.

he has come to see the marrow of angels.
and I

what devours.

she thought nothing
of the *****
shaped
bar
of soap, and nothing
of the boys
who’d no doubt
worked together

in close
quarters

to create
from their
gods
the ball
god

dropped, and still

nothing

of the note
in her locker  
instructing her
on how
to take

a bath-  not everything

takes the form
of a sickly
double
afraid
to meet
its match

I use god to spy on the gifts he gave me.  youth is a type of wheelchair.  I can see my facebook page and the back of my mother’s head.  I talk so fine my baby talk is for show.  memories are like animals, not made.  my father is happy one of two dogs has learned to shake.  I can look at my hand for hours and not forget its name.  hand.

for sale by owner.  rooms the rooms where nothing happened.  outside had been for so long a black boy shot.  a certain, rote by now, blood draw.  during which was brought the inability to dream.  having come so far, drop of rain.  heart in a mirror.  father talking but not until my bare heels touch the pool’s bottom.  the first pass of a delivery drone over a likeness of mother.  to the church of the secret church.  nightly upkeep of cross.  torture **** as paper cut.  in conversation, my medical supplier.  no one enters a burning house to retrieve the word of god and she’s not poor enough to have a baby.  to self-healing.  the gaming profile a ghost logs into.  a syringe plucked from a lucky raccoon.

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.

free home
to a good dog
other

signs
quite neighborly
side by side

as emptied
drive-in

cars-

pop away, corn-

care
in the world, pop away.

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.

I skin my knee.  I skin my knee a total of three times.  I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake.  he demands nothing.  he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference.  he crookedly shrugs his shoulders when I curse.  it’s the shrugging that pains him.  it is his hope that one day sin will be a pet peeve of mine.  so that we can share.  he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long.  my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become.  I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother’s wafer-dry tongue.  how she takes it with her when she smokes.  on the roof.  in her Sunday beast.