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.

as some things incorrectly have wings, we stamp a chicken into the hood of a cop car.  the groundskeeper on break inside the church wonders aloud how much is left of the lord.  a boy not part of our boyhood bikes over to us with his feet he’s named individually show and tell.  the cop chuckles but straightens out when he sees what I’ve made of my hand.  the boy says careful it might stay that way for good.

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.

I open out from another’s dream.  I think on the word deflower and the terrible way we use it.  my female wife- this much is the same.  I’ve been here before.  nothing happens.  she makes coffee with her phantom limbs in a story of yesterday’s news.  this morning I’ll drive past my daughter’s daycare and my daughter will wave to a secret building.  the heat that gets to others is god.

visiting hours are set by a god who knows I smoke.  leaving my mark means I’ve pressed the barrel of a cap gun into my brother’s temple because the ****** keeps scooping into his ballcap the same toad.  my two fathers are here to bounce things off my mother when she prays.  sit long enough and ***** will dry them together.

footage
of evil
things

whose people
are sometimes

asleep

-

father, footrace, fistfight

-

uphill
you’re such

a yo-yo

-

the bike
no bones
is beauty

cruelty gets an ulcer.  this is my first *******.  this is your kid making my kid sick.  I have achieved total comprehension.  you are so vignette.  your kid is a licked window.  my kid is two feet can’t touch the belt of a treadmill.  my kid is love.  is *notaltogether lostly.  is if you have a pain in your tongue like a nap.

when I was old enough to come home from school and take a nap but young enough to be the only born, I lived with my parents in a black house on a block no longer known for the brightness of its children.  we were there for such a short time not a story burns from its recalled exile.  no, not a dog digs in the dollyard of my adult sleep.  but there are nights when the bones of my most afflicted boy are the bumps that stir his siblings to spoon each other and in the morning I tell them how their grandfather, propelled by the moth in his mind, walked three times into our door to rid his head of his god, of his wife, and of the secret knock they shared.

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.

take my children

who at their most vivid
recount for me
my childhood

who disappear
from trampolines

if my brother was too long in the bathroom I would begin to think I was handsome. fairly early on, I was able to square myself in the mirror and land a couple good ones. at the height of my endeavor I lost a tooth that had been loose for three days but I gave it to my pride nonetheless. from there, I hadn’t much hope. my brother was less and less able to stand himself and the bathroom became more and more mine. when my arm muscles began to bulge I was afraid I’d hurt myself and so I let them slacken and went so far as to draw on paper the plans for a homemade stall to restrict my movements. my brother had always been the artist and so I entered without knocking and found him face down in the tub. I shouldn’t have been able to lift him. my parents were good people and worried gently about what I had seen. I thought they must’ve known I was ugly.

after the gifts are passed out
three remain
under the tree.

I wait for my mother to fall asleep,
for my father to carry her upstairs,
and for my brothers
to go outside
their fingers as horns
on the sides of their heads.

I open the gifts.

a stuffed squirrel, a nest with broken
bluish
egg, and a mitten’s
thumb.

our mother
was not one
to make sounds
above an infant
in another’s
house, no, our mother

our shepherdess
mother

would have us flock
to god’s
epizootic
nostalgias

******

god the claustrophobe



clean

as rainclouds
pause
beneath
the disoriented
heaven
of our
beloved
thinking woman’s
fireman
a cat
grooms itself
in the manner
we’ve been
to vanish



object permanence**

rabbit
named
vertigo

if you put the future
in your mouth
you will eat it.

I lasso the calf just before it makes the ocean.

overhead, a helicopter
from my past
spins.

my son says
to himself
this isn’t
your father’s
sandcastle.

luck is the stone
that marks
the dream.  dream

the stone
that marks
the dead.

the below is a tentatively titled and finished companion piece to my recent chapbook, infant cinema (**** Press, dinkpress.com, April 2016)

infant cinema can be purchased here: http://www.dinkpress.com/store/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock



shut-eye (in the land of the sacred commoner)

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

~
it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.

~
existence is the wrong inquiry.

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.

~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.

~
and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

~
it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

–

god’s color has returned

–

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

–

first

~
I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…

~
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet. he says mouth.

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag

and your mother
is the outside
world.

~
the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

–

I want your work to matter.

~
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…

~
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair

~
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

–

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia…

~
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

~
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
book
for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love

~
I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ

~
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
birth
built…

–

can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double

~
hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

~
nakedness,

give it time
to recover

~
into something from his childhood
a man
is born. never

far off
what crawls
her way.

~
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

~
church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.

~
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.

~
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.

~
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.

~
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?

/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:

~
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.

~
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.

~
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.

~
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.

~
praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.

~
this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake

~
for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.

~
when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god

~
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood. inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean. a boy whose mouth

was never
here. all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.

~
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark. I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.

~
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between

~
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return

~
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.

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.

i.

a river.  a sister born without eyes.  a sponge that is not your mother’s mouth.  

commonplace is a toddler’s map.  memory an unremarkable trauma.

I sign to sister how there’s no hot water in the house & count father’s burn money
where you can see it.      

ii.

the son most likely to catch a program on flamingos
thinks of himself on one leg  
and of a land
covered
in chairs.

iii.

a man is standing on a kitchen table gripping a broom.

his inbox will fill for three days
before the dogs
are his.

iv.

memory does not serve the woman
all out
of labor.

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.

the cruelty
of the nightmare
is not that it surrounds you
with the hallmarks
of your fear
but that
in the infancy
of your terror
it banishes you
to populate
yourself
in a bed
some have seen
you rise from
     and walk.

said they had seen my father waving his arms and that he’d been eating something raw because it was on his lips and he was a different man. said that many were screaming their mouths onto the windows of the subway or dropping their heads between the legs of weak children as if they were to carry on command bowling ***** to the sober dammits. said they and said they so early my ear I had to put it on the table next to a spoon my father used quietly last week everyday of it. began god his forgiving of bears being seen downtown and began I to get very hungry to hear my father mock blowing mock broth to keep it in the bowl.

I am not well liked.  no human will admit.  having a kid puts ***** on a scarecrow.  what happens after Christ stays during.  a dog’s mouth runs into my mouth and I am alerted to my preferential treatment.  phase one puts a headlight in a deer.  phase two will be there I promise I tremble.  a bad shadow of a bare tree by artist.  naked down it like a fire pole on a day I toured children.  the womb depends on where the mother points it.  she can’t just end up in heaven.

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.

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

the mother
is unclear
who it was
put it to her
this idea
that remembrance
is unreliable.

her son was so beaten
he gained the memory
of his father.

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I don’t have what I have.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  my eyes are male and impossibly warring.  I am trying to talk to you as a child who was read to.  I have seen only the future my parents memorized.  I can see her nodding off at the controls of my sleep chamber.

as I search
the mirror
for the size
of god’s
fingernail, a hair
of mine
goes grey

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.

he picks up another
heavy book.

lets himself
**** himself
all boy.

duster of crickets.

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.

town crier

poems March 2014
99 pages
pocketbook style publication
8.50

preview of book is book entire on lulu site. the spine of said book has title. front cover, back cover, are purposely blank.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/town-crier/paperback/product-21548368.html

---

Talent is a mime on a mountaintop said he who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon.  He had said previously other things but this was the first to which my mother caught me listening.  She took my ear and me with it outside and shoved two cigarettes she’d been smoking in my mouth and told me to chew.  When I did not she worked my jaw herself until the tip of my tongue bled enough to give her pause.  Neither one of us cried and the cigarettes were salvageable.  The morning speaker then joined us obviously hoping for a drag.  The moment my mother hated him passed and she told him what hope was.  

He who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon would not often be seen by my mother.  He and I were late in our waking and she’d be out gathering types of dead bird from the bases of cornstalks.  I’d sit in my highchair and watch him shirtless as he prepared the tools of my art.  The hairs on his back would grow before my eyes and need bitten at the follicle.  He would turn and put his finger in the garbage disposal and pretend it was on.  On was something he never turned it because he said a mantis lived there and what would bite his follicles.  I wouldn’t be hungry then which was good for my show.  He would laugh at the misery of my scooping arms and be full of it and tired and he would ask me to rub his belly while he went to the couch on his back.  His belly the single most reason to keep him said mother.  I’d put my ear to it to feel myself kick and never did stir him from sleep.  Pretty early in this routine some of his belly hair started to grow in my ear and my dreams from then always had a banquet in their midsection.

Careful with my dreams.  Mother said they are kittens and one can bite too hard.  It is like her being stubborn and only calling me boy when most called me boy and girl in equal measure.  Sometimes when boy got the lion’s share I’d long to nurse and have to slap the ******* sound out of my teeth.  For saner things I’d walk the dog with a dog in it.  I had names for both and both were names I would’ve called my brother had I been born.  I once found a sipped at wine glass on the roof of the pharmacy mother later burned with lit stalks.  When the turkey buzzards skittered themselves nightly across the horizontal track of my looking for god I’d imagine my brother skinny enough to fit in the parched tube of his swallow.

Now that I am returning to Shudderkin, the welt left by my larger than life father whipping his belt across the tailbone of Ohio, it is clear to me that what we called a dog was correct only on certain days.  The mongrel keeping pace with my bike, the second name I have for my brother, is not the physical dog a city knows and not country loyal as country wants to, and so makes others, believe.  It is instead more like the talking when one is sped up and words get put together and then are stuck there.  Dog of Shudderkin.  Its tongue does not droop or even wag outside the mouth.  A pinkness has always gone on without me.

in my father’s car, father driving, my fingers curled as if readying themselves for the wheel.  father small talking, his dark chatter, my hands like jaws left open, horrified before the heads god plans to put them in.  heads not to scale.  heads trial size.  

I worry the heat in my eyes is permanent.  my lids worry as well and retreat.  burn pain is its own person telling me I am long term its most bearable memory.  

the hospital seems a distant campfire lowered by the sleepy laughter of the still beautiful.  my daughter.  who as a girl melted the faces of two action figures with the bulb of a reading lamp not to upset her brothers but so the figures could kiss.  

I begin to make sense all by myself and nod to the dog shaped thing drowsing in the car’s murk just beyond my feet.  politely father asks if he can help and I okay him asking me anything.  he chooses the health of my sons.  one in particular.  I stick to the dog.  to the puppies it ran from no faster

had they been aflame.

a memo on the origin of coming full circle
     reaches only half the population.  

our name for what is not here, is Michael.  
Michael hears himself buried.  
my boys make myth to call him Murmur.

my boys keep a ghost farm as more than a hobby.

in such times, it is constantly 2am.  a friend pulls carefully at your ear.  a friend’s thumb is a hologram of a thumb.  you are being told that what you’re about to be told is highly confidential.  because it’s dark, and because your bed is the prize winning bed of a formerly dethroned insomniac, you are nothing if not empowered to listen.  your friend’s tongue redacts the parts of your body that have been marked.  this is done in secret.  what you’re hearing right now was scored some time ago.  when things were the same.

a mother’s motivational silence
speaks to a jesus
who at this point
has been alive
longer than he lived

-

I am of two beasts
when put in the mind
of my brain’s mirror

-

while doing the same thing
day in and day out
my father suffered
various indignities
commonly associated
with babies
and naked women

-

it is childish
how much time
she thinks I have
to touch everything
in the store

-

no offense
to your proactive
vacationing

but this

this, is dying

for Aidan, Noah, Mary Ann*

The boy lived in a town by himself.  Because he didn’t know his own name, he did not name the town.  The town had one street that circled the town and there were no houses or buildings.  The boy was never hungry, and if he was, he’d never been hungry enough to know it.  He was thirsty often and because he’d had a dream about his body being full of water he’d spit in his hand and open his hand to the sun when the sun was out and then drink the warm spit.  He was not afraid to leave the town but still he did not leave it.  Perhaps he was its bravery.

I accompany the peddler
to the widow’s house
hoping to get a glimpse
of my mother.

on the way
we share coffee
from a thermos.

his car rattles to a stop
in the small drive
like a dog     I remember
then don’t.

in places like this
nowhere     lacks
a middle.

before we get out of the car
he tells me
not to worry
he was born to sell
grief insurance.

at the door
I begin to think
this is the life
then it opens

and there she is...

as far as she knows
she didn’t hear us
knock.

oh recite
to the same
snow bent
tree

for which
the roof
of this house
waits

this wish
to attend
sparsely

the box
of dreaming-

for the sleep
we need
keeps us

so long
awake

that in the morning
we send
our sons

I wanted to help my father

finish the book-

     I could see he was thinking of a title

by the door light
of an appliance.

-

later

     my mother admitted it was not unusual to find a carton of milk in the dryer.

-
  
illness:

he began to speak of his favorite tree
which appeared only at night
when he spoke of it.

-  

also later:  he was reading, not writing, that book.

the story came to me abridged.  like birth control is a plant.  like one black family.  she came to me from town.  the Amish are being set on fire.  there are no Amish.  tell that to the people on fire.  she was perfect and so perfect to believe it was done by a *** change.  one in particular was prayed for and I don’t know if he ever stopped touching her.  she had a light bulb she’d taken from a hospital lamp.  she produced it like hearsay.  her invisible baby.

it’s not special. it’s not even all I have to give. its power is that it reminds me of something I had you safeguard in a dream. because I’m looking at the other fathers, I have to massage my gut feeling you’re looking at them too. so there you are beside the random machine I’ve been force feeding the one phrase that frees it to eat for a year. before you were my daughter you were the fortune teller whose teeth I pulled to find out your mother had a girl.

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

some were spiking wrapped pieces of hard candy off a baby’s bare back.  some were burping dolls and making physical notes.  some were shoving their feet into small shoes right in front of a working conveyor belt.  some had aches in their bodies that sounded like the popping of corn.  some were fathers their fathers would’ve prevented.  some were mothers unwanted by pregnancy.  none were disabled.  none were coordinates.  a hash mark, an eyelash, she stood for the death of one man and finished the word she’d been pausing between.

you were a white male and I was a white male and we were young and even if one put us together we were young.  our idea was to give winter gloves to those whose teeth chattered and we knew the sound had come to us both.  we mowed lawns all summer and mugged when we could drunk jocks who sat beside train tracks reading love notes after baling hay.  we bought the gloves and held them until winter because our logic had us waiting.  by then we were not friends and hell was the handbasket.  we divvied the gloves in a sad scene we couldn’t countrify.  today I photocopied my privates and printed two-hundred sheets by accident in a hellish place made special by hell.

I make my daughter see an old tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.
I look at my father and commit my face to memory.
I fall on one deaf ear.
I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.
I inject my sons with the truth of my mostly childhood placebo.
I disrespect the dead is *******.
I name names that are similar.
I sincerely form.
I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.
aren’t you the saddest thing I’ve ever laughed.

choice:  genetic.

soul:  hmmmmm.

boy:  a girl in that pre-vowel morn.

a discarded oven
in a driveway
its door
open.

for weeks, it has been
like that.

the bald woman won’t leave her house
in her car
because the oven
is too precious.

it saved her hair from keeping her up at night.
her hair was eaten by the cat
now lazing
on its rack.

if she wasn’t a looker
you can iron
my hands.

father is cheating death or cheating resurrection.

this is my first video of a mother daughter divorce dance.

easier to leave a baby than a note from god.

I am at the movies to see one.

spasms even the smallest spasms in the very small, oh.

it is in our DNA to progress, oh.

he is hard to lift.

what could’ve been is not heaven to what isn’t.

here is a beginning:  were it not for trace elements of mirroring,

a dusty toad gives my father fits.
my sisters run through cobwebs.

I pluck ticks from our dog and put them to my ear.
I think of my blood in dog years.

     it is good to be old.

to step once and smallish away
from bare backs and on them the spiders.