I am driving barefoot.  my brothers are crying.  
my mother’s wake

the wake of my mother’s powdered cheeks

is over.  we pass the house my shoes are in.  they run
to one side of the house which makes it lean.  

my brothers to keep from crumbling are sharing bread.
hansel dum and hansel dee.

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into
by lightning.  

when I was a boy I sat a whole week in plain view
with a diecast car behind my teeth.

if you are one to dislike ‘in the end’ and ‘when I was a boy’,
you can hate this all you want:

a nightmare is a dream the heart is having.

death is make-up for the interview.  when I get to my mother I plan to visit the city.  I hear a gang of young girls operates there trafficking middle aged men who act old.  I hear what I want when I delete emails.  I lost not touching my mother soon after she stopped being an actress.  she fled my father who at the time was known as her live-in stunt double.  I put my fist in the air and waited.  some told me I was being cinematic.  still some told me I was being cinematic.

the blood
the spiritual
eyesore
of the woman’s
body
mirror

-

here is what it said, it said
I think
I have
a mother
whose hands
he tells
apart

-

christ I’m close to my face

a son holding his breath
above water

his reflection
swam through

unseen, and ruined

film.  prayer.  kittens in a box.  serene nudes thrusting the skylight.  trinkets in a first floor gift shop lifted by a man dreaming beneath a decompression chamber.  a one use snowglobe.  ash.

hole in a rabbit.  a woman who talks once a year to firecrackers.

earth on earth.  a baby without toes applauded for having two heels.  a pregnant person who’s played on god

a simple hoax.

i.

satan is livid.  says the hamster wheel was a gift and asks you not to be fat on account of his nervous energy.  


ii.

     dear puberty,

the body of this letter confirms the messenger
is god.


iii.

thing is
I thought I’d never
see it again

     (I thought I’d sent it into her belly)      

even I made a hamster
noise

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.

women march

wrapped in foil.  my daughter is afflicted with eyesight.  while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank,
the moon is the bottom

of a prop
tree.

I exist to keep the image of my suffering alive.

my father is a cloak
that mows     the lawn.

the roof over his father’s head.

the rain.

the guardian angel
and the imaginary
friend
loving
over the loss
of toy.

his brothers on the roof
playing possum
with a possum.

her.

her and her mother
separated
by a grocery
aisle.

by litany.

his father sleep *******
on a secretly
fed
dog.

crop circles.  eyeglasses.  his monsters
led away
by a group of mimes

the genital
mimes.

in separating the health of a child
from the child itself
it is an uncommon
godsend

to be given one
to practice on

fake interviews with fake people*.  the wording lures them from the fattening of babies who talk early.  my silent uncle dying on a bed was asked if he had any first words.  I was going to slice bread but pointed the knife at my ear hole, held it with my left, and slammed it in with my right.  a man writes a song and sings it to the belly he thinks houses a son.  his daughter stops a bullet from bruising his wife’s spine and is delivered unmolested but in high school begins to smell like gunpowder.  she joins the KKK but doesn’t tell the KKK.  I wake up behind the wheel of a car just in time to kiss the driver’s neck and the driver makes a fish face so horribly a child giggles in hell and pretty soon.

inside me, the baby
is eating
snow

-

the phone is on
in my turned
off
home

-

at the top of the hill
a boy means
to hop on the disc
with his dog

-

bring back
a memory?

I am too poor

you write like a tricycle that hasn’t been touched in thirteen years.*  as an infant, you were no more than a dot denoting an absurdist birth.  adolescence was in the blood left to your mother.  self harm is the gateway wound to pilgrimage.  you can’t say god is everywhere in the presence of god.  factual events have ruined the world.  you are here because hating you is forbidden.

it is not always with me, this burden.  its balefire that is my brother’s body.  I am without him and I am without his power.  I introduce him as my twin, identical, whose power is to disappear when I’m around.  it is like failing to impress you with a metaphor for metaphor.  I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.  imagine being on the same side as metaphor.  a man in pain calls you from a payphone and speaks instead on the joys of a predicted parallelism.  in pain like no other only because pain is treated with a redundancy.  in John like no other.  pain is unlike pain.  a baby is a man’s son and this baby of this man lived three days in a body blessed more and more with lesions like black treetops over which the man could only hover.  I am as angry as any shell company employee.  I have a belief in being Jesus and teaching myself to walk on water

on my hands.  you believe in my brother.  I write him letters when my power is to read.

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.

magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.

a bird, a high window.  sound of a brain cell.

hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.

as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.

bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.

harm is harm’s audience.

a cyclist avoids a dog
but takes out
a table
of garage sale
figurines
as a drought
pamphleteer
reprimands
a child
for *******
on a hose.

     I haunt my faith.

according to my father
my father
isn’t alive     my father
eavesdrops.

except for talking
he’s been silent
until

in pictures of her
as a young woman
his mother
is dead.

umbrae

for Genevieve

your prayers include a terrible notebook, an invalid friend, and a man believing separately that we are here to place turtles upright. when you walk into the ocean you walk into the ocean on your hands. you do this to protect your knees. many think you are magnificent and these many you are on the verge of telling about the Saturdays that bore you and about the spider you repeatedly squash. the resurrected spider that is not a gift. if you could you’d give your youngest son a woman he could either swim through or swoon inside. a woman who could put him to sleep and rock in a chair the boat of her belly so untroubled to be thinking twice about twins. you’d be sad, or sleepy, and get to choose.

before I go to war

     the dark readies in the oven.
my father washes with a wet sock a knee exposed.
my mother

wears one dry sock which she removes
and makes into a puppet. or an oven mitt.

both
silence the hand.

idolatry**

a red wheelbarrow, maybe-

but not
so much
depends

on a poem
about it

I am three pages into the most honest letter I’ve ever composed to a brother when I realize I’ve been writing with my finger.  I tell my daughter it isn’t crying if you’re drinking.  she’s asleep.  it’s there she hears a piano.  sees a typewriter.

this home
where sane brother
and ****** sister
ate sliced apples
played pool
and swam only
at night

a home so inadequately haunted
we invented a previous family
mother, father, a lame child
all three suicides

it was the lame child
we dwelled on
so much so
our real mother
sent our most current father
to the backyard
with a shovel

brother went mad to see it
and sister began to throw up
in the mornings
then disappeared
and left two notes

one confessed pregnancy
and one bulimia

I lied, too
but am not poor
and will not say
a brother
went mad
overseas

start with your mother’s handwriting

I love my own because when her children
were naked
saying so
was a sin

instead, she called them

rare

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

the doctor
wore secretly
a nightgown
and poured
a glass of milk.

     his wife

disappointed
she had not seen
a ghost

     remained his wife.

-

( the wellness of my mother
  does not need
  my mother
  nor does
  the wellness

  of yours )

-

if you see a white mouse
in a dark city

a light
for which
I have kept
vigil
goes on
in my son’s head…

a potbelly
scarecrow
itching
its backside

on a tree
in a wood

where aliens
grieve.

sad prom music** (i)

the boy is wearing heels because he doesn’t live with his mother.  his right ankle pops and he breaks his nose on a puddle of evil.  a machine with a baseball in it shudders.  we throw cigarette butts at a girl jumping rope.  the boy stops what his eyes continue.


sad prom music (ii)

movie on with no one in it.  you scratch your son’s arm.  he is made of train sounds you make yourself.  the movie is terrible but is surely just as terrible far away.  you are not waiting to hear anything god hasn’t said better to doctors young and old.  you’re not drunk but your eyes are.  a nightlight in every outlet.

my body is a word.

my son
a naked body.

my eden is Eden.

my word is southernmost.

my postman is a priest
confused     in a field
of poppies
who happens upon
a rusty     as created
knife.

my son is sick.
my son is my soap.

my triumph is a stuffed crow
hourglass
of the aforementioned
priest.

church.
entering the body
after a stroke.

milk.
my shadow
made of grass.

cow.
dumbly regarding
another’s art.

...

radio.
grandpa cursing outside
then inside
the barn.

distance.
two babies on their backs,
one a boy and one a boy-
their mothers

one of them truthfully
says bingo.

pyramid scheme.
I am sleeping
on you, on your
insomnia.

protest.
a man without sin
and his two
******* birds.

unison.
proving
your half
is also

unicorn.

crow.
we don’t use the crow.

...

infatuation.
what a knee
has
for its other.

owl.
pillow
for which
the night
has long
been looking.

yawn.
moaning
into mother
my father’s

     swimmer’s

ear.

high-dive.
or a very
private
room.

...

worry.
a thesaurus
the men
don’t use.

work.
for every right hand
a left hand
denier.

ants.
pieces
of hell
burdened
with pieces
of hell.

...

***.
two
as if they fear
a third.

poetry.
thoughts
before I have them.

house.
where mother
took place.

father.
all gods
talk
in their sleep.

body language.
writing
about yourself
with others.

the future.
every now and then
one is given
now and then.

suicide.*
might I record
this moment?

everyone called him Moe, and not just his friends.  Moe, he didn't believe in beginnings, but his wife would tell people when it started.  it started, she would say, when he stopped eating his lunches.  and he guessed that was about right, as right as a wife can be.  he'd come home from work with his pail and set it heavy in his wife's right arm as the baby, the youngest, would be in her left.  he'd say, no I didn't, maybe tomorrow.  then he'd go out to smoke but he wouldn't smoke.  he'd leave the cigarettes in their pack and walk out to the yard and think about putting his fat neck in the tire swing.  he'd come back to the house and put his fat hands on his daughter's shoulders and say he was home and he would be home tomorrow to eat with her and her brothers.  he wouldn't be, though.  not right away.  on the weekends he'd sit on the step with his oldest son and watch little men die.  such a small drop, from that step, not enough to **** a man.  his son would just look at him and take the man from Moe's hands and place him on his back again.  soon the day came that he left work on his lunch hour.  his daughter said thanks and poked his belly.  he could hardly move in his pants anymore but he managed to sit down.  he asked his wife for the special and pinched her leg.  coming right up was a plate of canned ravioli.  **** ravioli he said.  but he didn't say it mean.  he said it as if he'd just asked for permission to hate ravioli.  he said it again.  he said a lot of things just then, his mouth full, his wife opening cans in the kitchen.  he addressed god directly.  after these many years, he addressed god head on.  he made for his truck.  god, Moses here.  it's the ravioli, we have too much.

insects have imaginary insects.

if you listen lightly
the lit match
becomes a match
again.

you were ahead of your time and I was distant.

strangers have more grief than candy.

the doll learned it would be buried
with its clothes on
the moment
mother
used her inside voice.

I thank god in my sleep
for respecting
my privacy.

a reading from the book
of letting the dog
dig in the yard
you take it from:

have your father’s eyes
looked at
by your smartest
child.  have

boys.

i.

talk myself outta church.

ii.

ain’t sad enough not to goof on a tricycle.  jesus.

iii.

nuns in garters.  I can’t remember
or be expected to
all

the titles.  but that one, we’d out

our knuckles.  

iv.

she slid under me.  it was like
she was able,

had space.
 
v.

I loved a boy for his dog.  broke a ruler
for my ****
in half.  after that,

did things to my knee.

vi.

are afraid most water snakes of water.  spend they
lives

being fast.

vii.

to keep us from being poor
my dad
kept us

in one room
at a time
so we’d have rooms

all over.

viii.

batman’s mom had pearls.  made it hard for me not to be
******-up.
 
ix.

storms don’t have doors.  imagine my talk.

in fifth grade, the boy submits a report on being stuck with his unborn brother’s teeth.  the boy’s intent is to set himself apart and perhaps place a hard comma after the crush he has on his teacher.  as the teacher reads the report she dreads that by its end she will become convinced and so stops halfway.  she brings the report home and instead of grading it she daydreams about the sister she never had, that she surely ruined.  by sixth grade, the boy lowers his blood at will into that handheld thing where resides his anger’s only foe.

he divvies sorrow.
     beats

son, daughter, son.

he takes a long look inside himself.

beats

son,                , son.

the mother fixes nothing so she ain’t gotta hear of it breaking again.  the father saves on the sly for a rabbit.  the brother lives long enough to see one of his eyes challenge the designation of his sister’s foresight

as a miracle
of brevity.  the neighbors argue over whether it’s a migraine or a headache.  what one tells the lord, another tells an angel.  the god is the god that teaches a snowman how to have a stroke.  the animal learns to speak by having none recall what it plans to imagine.

closed mouth
of a shopkeeper.

his finger
an abandoned
cross

the length
of jesus' spine.

forgive
the hush
of forgiveness, forgive
the state
of my house.

we open
early
no light
is first.

we single out
the second
sons
to copy

scripture.
 
the barber
the dentist
good

and absent.

morality
we use it
when two people

or more
run down the street.

we know
it's a bone
rolls down
the roof

     which bone
for years
we disagree.

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.

he wasn’t overseas to be difficult.
he had pain in his arm, he thought

he could find a snake.  a cut-off toe.

our insides were still inside the time
that we knew him.  his arm it sorta  

came like a slug you might see freed

from a puddle’s hinterland eye.  slow

like that, wrong like that.  like these:  

hippies and father time.  a mole enters
an infected shoulder:  yours.  a mole

has been your heart, and peacefully.

your mother doesn’t know about the mole.
it’s not in the letter.

i.

horror film: the last place the poor can go.

our second date- her father had given her chase but in slow motion.

he gave me his hand and I took it because it was free.

I told her in the car while it moved what a cliché she was. she looked at hills

a few of them
stopped rolling. she had me pull over.

horror films ain’t rocket surgery. I knew what she meant.

ii.

mothers and fathers, lie to your children.
tell them the honeybee wants to die for them; that no matter their stillness
it will sting.
tell them each they are a limited edition glow in the dark action figure.
tell them the world is flat;

that when it’s not, don’t get romantic to traverse the banged on ceiling
of hell.

I was an entire baby and then a picture of me as a baby.  I had as part of the **** shaming process a father wheeled in and out of the sun.  here is a boy with a red brick looking for an anthill.  the sun was out.  I brushed from her bare back a piece of straw and it stuck to my leg.  in the barn I built another barn so I could go to both.  here is the eater of stones in the privacy of an outhouse.  I lie to her face and then to nostalgia’s outlook.  the collapse of my favorite cow is followed by the cow’s collapse.

i.

a father doing sit-ups on the uncut lawn of his neighbor.
the father’s two children pushing a broken thing past him.
the shop the children map from the inside. its keeper
who is also the neighbor and knew their mother.

ii.

the grace of a thing could be a frog pushing off.
I am alternately sad in the legs, the body, and the head.
my father regards the misshapen wheel of our manmade
pond- bangs on himself and begins to float.

iii.

small one she wins a rubber thing at a firemen’s ball.
some flying creature her grandfather becomes.
his top teeth tremble like worried pilots in a silent plane
weighted with unknowable freight.

alone
I can cover
two handprints.

the rooms my father enters are bugged.

mother is dumb from pretending
to hit her head.

talking is hell.  hell belongs
to a little
devil

that shrinks.

you throw a cell phone at a dog, okay.
pick up the phone
and find
the dog.

let god think
he sees
our puppets.

we went to soften the dog in the way we’d seen our sister softened.    

when her heart  
was still
a hiccup’s
echo.

her eyesight the sound of a drill.
her eyes
two holes
in a turtle’s
shell

     her eyes for seeing

the food in her mouth.

she lives alone.  from this, one can gather the things she owns.  1970s ****.  she is pregnant.  a week ago she went into town to pick up some new phrases.  while there, she slipped into a house and beat a sleeping child.  our deeds are weary not of a dog barking or of a cat hissing but of the overfed fish.  my belly button is how the marksmen touch me.  she thinks the child’s father followed her home.  she’s about to watch the videotape.

the vacant eye of a birdhouse.  
a tiny black plate
that in a dream
you cannot pinch.  the mute
cat’s meow
in your belly’s
lack wink.  a dry
cookie
at the pursed
fanfare
of mouth.  your thumb    
moving over
your mother’s.  dark foods
untouched
as the shadows
of fish
by water.  your father’s
ear
taking blood
from the tilt
of a baby swing.  the peasant
swallow
of a mannequin
whose ******
once fattened
your brother’s

lip.  the paw print dice.
the ***** nurse  
her long teeth
packed away

like cigarettes
in the shirt pockets
of men

shy
by this
much.

i.

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

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

whale

ii.

a son

I always say

a son
for every
sadness

iii.

one dreamless mule

in the only finished scene
of my father’s
documented
seizure

a tin woman
eats a cricket
before a paltry
congregation
of children
hired
in spirit
to distinguish
an aerobic

from a cerebral

doom

aware of my body
as if my body
is on a raft.

a creaky deceit
I call
rafting in the ****.

     last night in a very safe garage
I promised a friend
I’d mention
the moon
in the period following
my last
idea.

my body eats me.
god dangles the body of my son
in front of my son’s
next
memory.

some are born
born-again.

     current trends include cloning.
the first person to recall dying
will be held aloft.

as if
the news
of your marriage
is still
a secret
kept
in the mouth
of your bride
you go
to fill
your own
outside
while slapping
to your palm
a new box
of cigarettes
and see
a man
with his back
to you
his pack
half gone
most of it
spent
listening
for beauty-

your daughter
clopping
in heavy shoes
toward some
distant
thing

you’ve both
come to miss

there are men in my life would find it **** to look in on a woman bathing a puppy.  they are good men, and wrong.  I met your husband in the waiting room of an abortion clinic 101 miles from where you live and 73 from where you work.  I know some intimate things- you were driving, your son was playing the flute.  I know the damage a flute can do- it does a number on the lips.  I was moving my hands in my lap imagining film trays of broken water as if I might guess with my knees the weight of a newborn.  your husband has a wobbly right knuckle.  with that face he could be a mime.  he could be armless.  I tried to think of my belly as a balloon with a manageable amount of candy on the end of its string.  the night last to this morning I put a pillow under my back and tried to fall asleep but I have one eye insists to understudy the moon.  pregnancy as idée fixe-  moon and balloon.  your **** daughter wants a puppy but where would we put it.

this home
where sane brother
and ****** sister
ate sliced apples
played pool
and swam only
at night

a home so inadequately haunted
we invented a previous family
mother, father, a lame child
all three suicides

it was the lame child
we dwelled on
so much so
our real mother
sent our most current father
to the backyard
with a shovel

brother went mad to see it
and sister began to throw up
in the mornings
then disappeared
and left two notes

one confessed pregnancy
and one bulimia

I lied, too
but am not poor
and will not say
a brother
went mad
overseas

start with your mother’s handwriting

I love my own because when her children
were naked
saying so
was a sin

instead, she called them

rare

the brother was my age, not a looker.  my parents were nervous and slicked his hair back lovingly.  their hands touched.  I had other presents but I was thinking about the blood in my body and about Stephen.  Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from.  his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found out he had no manners at the table and would have his older sister sneak up behind him and hood him with an empty feed bag.  I went in with Stephen once saying his sister had called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough that they soaped her mouth in front of me then tied a string to her seemingly always loose front tooth and then tied the escaping end of the string to the **** of an open door and slammed it.  because of this honesty Stephen and I were allowed to watch a movie where a white man and a savage pressed their wrists together after cutting them.  the movie looked away from the cutting so we improvised.  it didn’t make us any closer.  the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up without having to ****.  it was my dad found him days within the week making boxes a mile gone at a pizza shop because he said his name was Billy and would work for free.    

I looked at the brother and couldn’t see it being so without my blood.  but the brother pulled me to him anyway and I could feel in the heat of his elbows all the time he’d spent mourning the loss of Stephen.

under the boy’s pillow
she slipped
an empty pack
of cigarettes-

the kind
her teddy bear
smoked