I may have lied about being pregnant but I know my ******* kid.

her father quells *******.

ants are quiet.

-

his teeth make sense.

our yell is I’m gonna shoot you in the blood.

-

elsewhere
is a light dusting
of downfall.  sleepily

legal

are the sunbathing sad.

Drinking in the First World, The

sinker
of water’s
heart-

spotless thought
free of bird-

weakener
of hill’s
resolve-

kisser of my enemy-

tireless swallower,
impossible drink-

who don’t
I think
I am?

[entries for the unmarked]

i.

swimmer was a cornfield baby

ii.

fox clock, always

noon

in the egg thrower’s
aquarium

iii.

playing tag

no blood
allowed

iv.

her bones
disappear
when pups
nurse

[entries for travelogue]

on his belly to **** on his tail, man dreams of getting laid in the birthplace of tunnel vision

/ my son he keeps showing me how to find the same animal

died of different
things

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

I go into the garage
just before bed
and overturn
what is my version
of a rowboat.

by morning
the man on top of me
is made of dirt.

her mask is not god
but godlike
in that it has
no ears.

she removes a bruise-colored diaper.  autopilot.  on foot, she passes a bike her bike has beaten.  the spatial awareness of a previous male has her wanting to buy batteries for toys your son has buried.  below, in city, in a silent film’s ambulance, her son expires.  she collapses on the wrong side of satan’s ear.  on hand, her father’s body in a hammock is god’s arm in a sling.  her mother’s last memory is second to none.  is of a baby being the size of a bullet.

newly
with the knowledge
of being
god

a man stood
woozily
in an Ohio
field

feeling passed over
like a horse’s
one
thought

and was hit
in the head
by a pebble
masquerading
as a stray
bullet

now, no matter
if he rubbed
the pebble     or his head

he was not given
three wishes
but three
separate
people     to forgive

and chose
himself

i.

one can write
must
write

in a vacuum

but read, no.

many have this backward.

ii.

the winners
of new
essential
fiction.com
win

what is still
a bible.

iii.

the marks on my daughter’s pencil…

oh, thinking
is a pain.  I am thinking

of biting
her ears
when I am given

a branch.

iv.

be afraid.

the most horrible fish
has yet
to walk
from the ocean.

v.

time was here
when I arrived
but hadn’t
eaten

vi.

once okay
the soul was
with being
a copy

vii.

in heyday
of health
the infant
weighs
as much
as a bag
of ice.

here, a bath is drawn
for the burned
in effigy.

viii.

mother & father
if you want to help
there are two
images
left

ix.

on the playbill
I recognize
virginity
as the inheritance
of Jesus

x.

let me believe I can crush my shadow.

summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine.  say it with me this was not that summer.  as a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.

we have come because you’ve been associated with sadness.  try to pretend we’re here.  as a kidnapper mum about being pregnant, you will soon have something to say to the microphone in your bra.  I am the face of this operation.  my lips are whites only like certain water fountains.  thoughts on the whereabouts of the gun you own are superseded by images you dance to of babies born wearing mittens.  in your father’s abandoned car you will be asked to recall the location of the buttons on the dashboard your brother showed himself to press.  we love your brother.  he invented a game, what was it?, kick if you’ve been muzzled by god.

the boy
relieving himself
in my front yard
thinks
he’s *******
into three
bowls
of soup.

his blackness
a hole
the earth
refuses.

my neighbor
is a white man
whose toy
phone
works.

what statement
can I make
that isn’t
a cup
of tea
gone
cold, the doll’s

version
of a surrounded
star?

my father howled my sister down until she became a voice in my head.  I go to where she might’ve been so I can be looked at as one asking before her.  men have for me two syllables that form a coma.  women stand in final stages of nakedness holding jugs of water but leave me to flower and to mull on them as incantations of the tin man’s great calling.  if I am romantic I am romantic in the increments my mother measures to dream herself to sleep.  beauty is the prop scale I rule from.  none are the mourners of gain.

in the video about how to give my son
a bath

that’s
him

-

the woman beside me
takes her health with her
wherever

she goes

-

my wife prays
for a boredom
much like
the boredom
of the baby
Jesus
whose hair
my son

lost

what seashell does for ocean
my pillow
will

for hunger.

oh dream,

insomnia’s
wiped out
city...

is this
a stone

or the mating
call
of grief?

my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower.  

at home,
my mother
puts a clean shirt
on the bed
and jumps
from her death.  

the brother  
you are most
tired of

taunts
a cat
trapped
in a phone booth.  

my son is sick.  

the moon landing
was reenacted.

if death is merely
the end of the message
why live
only to improve
its narration?

no one loves the sound of my voice
but you.

god is a recording.
talk, suicide.

it occurs to me that my brother’s intermittent addiction to waiting caused him this insight: your real life comes true.  it occurs to me he remains a telepath.  a telepath whether or not I write as beautifully as he remembers.  he sleeps without a pillow claiming it gives his ear nothing to do.  he scratches his cheeks and says look at these they are the ribs of a pup I am caged in.  

     the future of war is war.

the ****’s failure to stay awake in a laundromat.  the suicide of the copycat toddler.  nine types of catfish.  a worm’s tongue.  god’s last name.  the orphan’s timekiller.

I pick a child to bring with me.  it’s Sunday, and we need bread for the week.  the market’s been gutted since the lot of them were born.  I used to errand with my wife but it made her feel alone.  we starved together for months before receiving notice we were no good at it.  in that same notice was an invitation to attend a symposium on regulating orphanhood.  we decided to go and at that to go arm-in-arm as a grandly private joke.  we came home ready to be serious and went about choosing six, all sent from heaven, as we thought they’d been kicked out.

or the last
to be

invisible

for Noah*

my brother was blinded by a crow.

I’d tell you the story
but know
you hate it.

*******.

brother’s darkroom
became
the crow’s.

i.

I put two boys to sleep.  before they go, I ask them to picture the person living in my car.  the boys, then,

(to reappear in the adventures of father time limit)

are off.        

ii.

it crosses me that the person in my car is trapped.  is this your car, is this where you put it…

I would have to answer
yes.  

iii.

the night she wasn’t killed
is not unlike
the night
she also
wasn’t

iv.

the night it rained I boiled water in the darkness outside of my mouth.

a mattress slid by, out of reach, and on it

something was whiter or something

glowed.

making book covers
in the ****

my brother
my higher
brother

is on
about
some late
film

performance
by a woman
he says

has inspired him
to take a ****
on a baby
in a pick-up
truck
and to drive

the truck and to call his route

the border
of the last
miracle

or we can call it
something else

I don’t think
he knows
really
I am just

something saddened
by sorrow, a frog

aware
of caves, as if god’s

creatures
were a result
of god
imagining
what she’d not
seen

scatter...

longhand
the syringe
of poor
colossi,

wrists
both suicide
attempt
and apologue:

I love
brother

for how

he’d split
himself
into outside

time
and inside
time

that he might
tell
a door
****-off
or a dreaming

hieroglyph
his tale

the band-aid
and the risen
ant

the woman buzzes in and out of her woman head like the thing her husband didn’t swallow and so became

fly
for the second time
in its short
fly
life.

but if I am back to the woman’s body I am in the kitchen eating portions so small the house misses itself only in passing and is able to deceive its ego with work being done on its ego by inhabitants of such stunted shrinkage they collar me as a child and threaten me with residence for as long as my skirt can avoid the breeze

and
or

cover the insect that holds my water for the blunt force trauma of self preservation.

they’d say his head was hard because it was too small for god to kiss.  when he’d come into town, he’d leave with children we’d not seen except on  posters.  his welcome mat was a napkin spotted with blood from a Q-tip.  save for the tiny matter of Jesus, our parents gave him little to do.

[parade for sorrow]

I miss
blinking



[imp]

the man digging in his yard is looking for his dog. this is my lucky window. in this much silence, a baby could get a tooth. a mom a finger if a car door slams. the man digs and the ice comes for its heartbroken road. wounds move in a deerless world.



[born]

disguised
as

as if
I would know



[access verses]

a classroom, a house

but never
the ghost
of a church

–

the boys
they play
scarecrow
loves
horse, and the girls

the shepherdess
on a boat
names her dog

–

hey, distance

lose
the baby

(says
the empty
box)



[holding the baby]

a deleted voicemail of a boy asking his mom how to prepare a past meal. my handwriting an insect I want the best for. dream and the moth it won’t finish.



[vespers]

them raccoons out there is tarrying

up

yr bible

–

tearin

–

border: my eyes can’t stop what the back of my head is eating

mirror: a godless hyphenate

–

my man is a body whose moon is vacant

–

they is out there to flood

sightseers

with basilisk

****

–

in the valley of my choking
the fingers of my father
are going
dog’s-collar
purple

–

out-the-way churches. and acne



[declination]

in forgetting how many to save, god wants to know

are you still
seeing

things…

I remember the animal, the appropriate

mask…

once held, is the baby
less
wild

is the room
in the room



[sympathizer]

the many plain
sons
of god
their parking

tickets



[the mud on god's cheek]

at birth we are given a ladder we can’t see.

our feet

bare



[animal masks on the floor of the ocean]

mouse, teacup of the missing stork-

owl, lamb of night-

this was god. he was sad and everyone noticed.

it grows overnight too big for its bed.  in dream it hammers at the nail’s head still hidden in the infant’s palm.  when mistaken it is mistaken for the hand it stings with a fastball.  it is all man to the boy with a frisbee.  on land it has a dog that growls in gentle code at the untouched bowls of dogs underwater.  traces of it can be found in the model glue scraped from the space shuttle that depresses your ghost.

it came into the world itching to have one of your panic attacks.  your father

with his overexposure
to abandonment
called its body

bottled water from the town of torn muscles.

fear was a cigarette case and fear was also a lunchbox.  teeth

were part of a shadow
census
operating
in a flood
of milk.

it cheered horribly.  it cheered and a bug bite became a birthmark.

as our rescuer, god could not go with us into hiding.  how many times must I accept my heart let alone stop my brother’s?  your father is ****** through a straw into a spaceship summoned by your inability to dream.  your mother, on paper, lives under a tooth.  I can hear my guts scrape against the baby whose melancholy is brought on by the loneliness of my health.  the world is mostly weather.  we associate in shifts our sister’s body with the inside of a furniture store where nothing screams

you.

my guardian angel was a bicycle.

my bicycle
was a dog.

actual angels were postcards.  

I saw what I could
of actual dogs.  warpaint,

I saw what I could
of the newborn’s face.

until I found her cigarettes, my mother was a giant. is there something I can say online that will give me hands? leave an empty laundry basket in a cave that’s crying. rain gives water a church.

the madness of the couple
is a broken
showerhead.

the slimmest volume
of collected work
is a drop of water
lands, a drop of water
lands, no memory

is erased.

in time, I’ll prominently cover
the same topic.

tied a string to a stick and called the stick dog.

for this, the boy received a beating
half of which
he shared with the dog

     so he could eat
in peace.

it is not my detail to bedevil that she had on her person three library books when she vanished.  this word vanished like a **** toy most kids get for not shutting up.  then again I can’t even pronounce half the people in Mosul.

our fighting
determines
which of us
is more
sonsick.  

relic child, town crier.

I take what I’m given, beating.

cerecloth, snow
on snow
before and after

it buries.

me of course
as I position
myself
to hum

above
a basket.

me as I marry homeward
and kick

ball, stone, stiff
bird

stiff bird in death
doubling as
the rat
of an angel

yes
kick
for reasons known
to another’s

pet cobra

skin to skin
in an unmarked
life.

there’s the god I remember.

I’m fasting
for two.

she has put her middle name up for adoption.  her middle name is syllogist.  you will be reading for the role of first applicant.  you will die of natural causes each of which have been previously cast.  in the two accepted versions of the story you have a son your husband beats.  in the third and final version your son seeks out his real father and doesn’t need you as much.  in real life your three equally tall sons lift you privately from a parade honoring your **** scene.  this is theirs.

I had a dream you came to me in a dream to tell me my book put you to sleep.  that a book is no way to live.  you showed no signs of being sick and your apparent health was disorienting.  a man stood behind you whose sole purpose was to know who he was before I did.  it bears repeating that over time I’ve added an all white parrot to my shoulder of choice.  on the one year anniversary of these dreams ****** preference can happen to anyone.

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
that birth
built…

–

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

as if god had poured oil
on an egg
about to hatch
I was up all night
sleeping
like my mother
before me
whose future
went on
forever
and I saw
again
the temple
of that hellish
artifact
from the first
suicide
yours
inspired

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

if none notice, pretend you are waging a campaign of unawareness.  this goes for suicide.  hold the scarecrow like a protest sign.  look kid, your eyes have to eat.  what is low hanging fruit to the man on his back?  you can lose someone to illness even if that someone survives.

prayer
as the horn
the car
carries
into
a tornado.  touch

as ventriloquy.

in the end, she was a pair of beautiful hands and he was mostly a heavy head.  in the beginning, she fed him too eagerly and wore a short dress of one color.  his own hands were hearing things and she’d put them on his ears.  he was either an unknown writer or a bill collector.  he scripted for her the last lovely times of the empress of bullish desperation.  as a young fathoming she knew him constantly.  I’ve ghosted for them since I can remember but am open to the possibility I haven’t.  touch is not touch but is where it’s hidden.

he beats the mother and calls it practice.  the washer breaks and he throws the clothes into a full tub and stomps on them while smoking a cigarette.  he provokes my image to send him back to his rightful nose.  my thick skull is high on my spit.

says poverty
someone
at this table
has nothing to hide.

says father
touching
a UFO
cures frostbite.

says mother
open
the stomach
of the winning
monster.

I named you once before you were born and once after.  your room was blue for so long.  you’d kick and I’d press my thumb to your father’s wrist.  my hand is still wet from putting jesus as a baby beneath a nervous goldfish.  I know what happens to people like me.

someone is kissing the top of my head.  the garbage disposal is a thunderstorm that’s taken my tooth.  the woman who introduced a kitten to a cat named birdbath is painting my fingernails white while the man she’s admonished for pacing is warning me about using a hand for a pillow.  came all this way

did the raindrop
to highlight
a stone.

I don’t have any last words that aren’t interrupted by one parroting my father’s belief that god was a temp.  had it been hell and not hell abandoned when it began to grow in our minds.  as created, satan couldn’t live with himself.  without piecing together how it fell into his lap, we found his umbrella, it wouldn’t open, and we did our rain dance on the earth.

(-)

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.