a flood rescue
helicopter
tracks above
a submerged
limo.

a shepherd leaves his field
while quoting
his dead wife-

one anxiety
under storm…

you
keep secretive
as a soup kitchen
the third act
apparitions
that are
your children.

a horse has nerves of horse.

grief is a manger.
I set it down.

I lift baby onto my back.  baby is twenty nine years of outsider atmosphere.  baby swallows and my stomach becomes the pecking in my stomach.  baby is distracted by the attention eternity demands.  baby drops and my mind enters a snowball disappearing centermost of a dark summer pond.  baby’s mother rafts workaholic to where work suffers to invent for the harmless

today this trap door
for an unfinished
fly.

she is not crazy, the mother, this happens:

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

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

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

each day until her daughters are grown.

this dog, the stump of a great tree possessed by a kindly demon.  a woman cradles the homely thing and shares a dream with her husband the poor man’s empath.  I squeeze my infant son so lightly his age stops.  one day yours will be too young to remember impressionism’s grocery.

a father and son argue outside a small town barbershop in windless ten degree weather.  inside the shop, which is closed, the barber’s wife is clipping away at a wig.  nearby, and quite by accident, an invisible man uncovers a fainting spell before which some will disrobe.  namely, women declaring that the eye is always naked.  who are these women?, ask my teeth, which are snow.

younger times, I’d lose some of my hair when bathing the sick.  now older, I am not a private person.  I foresee helping father with his winter gloves and him thinking I’ve returned his hands.  if sick, one shouldn’t be grateful for the inclusion.  there’s a **** son in all of us.

i.

in him like the sewing needle of god’s mother; is lightning.

in you a koan.

ii.

now that she wants the surgery removed
they tell her
the womb
is a hook
that looks like a womb.

iii.

everywhere work.
stalks
pitch

the golden blood
of brooms.

iv.

mother in her rocker
her eyes
tire swings
her tongue

a cat’s tail.
 
v.

fourteen
my sister
martyrs herself
under the monkey
mad
in the stoplight.

vi.

in a church
hangs a coat
with a man
in it.

vii.

does not break loose
like they say

all hell.

empty imagery

the head itself was an afterthought.  had god not allowed the soul to come up for air, beauty would have been spared our invention.


empty imagery

a single mother is a twofold mirage.  please argue above her quietly.  her legs collapse.  her child comes first.


empty imagery

your sister is the only person I’ve recorded to have been born without a gift.  I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal; the size of which escapes me.


empty imagery**

it wasn’t until my father lost his job that I began to go hungry for myself.

my father knows a ******.  it’s not my fault.  the two of them share a cigarette outside of a house they’ve never been inside.  it’s winter.  I scroll across Ohio on a sled with makeshift sail.  I associate sorrow with the very short.  I associate my father with sentences that end abruptly.  I wear the mark he meant to leave on the world.  I understand.  it is forgivable.  there are harder things to get in the way of.  a mirror, perhaps.  a hand on a bible.  my own hand, which tells mother I’m adopted.

was you could wrap a wooden spoon in aluminum and press it to the tongue of an infant. was you could smoke at work. was man was an act other men would surround. was your body would make of soul a ghost. ghost in a balloon holding its breath. was every stone was the head of a stone child. impossible. was vacation would yield vision a shore spat whale or a girl your age absently wiping the blood from her finger onto the leg of a bored white horse. was a woman would know she was pregnant and by knowing would be heavy. was gender was a kind of solace.

     was you could climb a tree wearing a dress and any looking would be a gift given to kite. was a rag for worry and a rag for pain. doubling as bath towels. was we understood the Bible to be written very well. when the saying of we was more specific. we without healthcare having also said amazing things. was my mother went to prison. was tomorrow your father would visit. might she turn, be your mother, and love him.

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.

you have let
again
small birds
land

on your collarbone
to gag you
their empty
gullets

or

you've again
swallowed
a red
insect
and it

walks.  the ink

of your looking
seems
a hammock
but you say

far off
a raccoon
is watching.  a stick
 
out there
separates
on its own

like taffy.  your hair

has mostly
fallen.  three shadows

I will never see:

under leaf, coffin, or strand

of your hair.  when I hold a glass

the faucet
tries
so hard
for milk.  I can't kiss your neck

and that's okay.  I don't think our boy

would've been
silly.

the first time I can recall a teapot whistling in the manner I’d imagined

a teapot
to whistle

     my brother was cutting himself in the tub, gingerly, a test run…

-

the whistling scared the **** out of him, the bejesus

-

being made of nothing allowed brother
to volunteer
in New Orleans
after Katrina

     he opened a few refrigerators

that’s all it took

-

without my brother, I’d be in his words

beside myself

     some ****** eared stranger mucking up a white door
listening
as if to a radio
announcing the missing

     blow up dolls

by name

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

made mostly
of wheelchair

a skipping boy, maybe,
a parent
should holler at

better yet

a boy who cries
on the inside
of what

collected
by absence
his body
a truant hobby
pursued
by career

my father
built himself
a darkroom
where he’d often
retire
to adjust
the variances
of a single
delay

to pace
as perfectly
as the many

visitors
he was wont
to follow
with a great
and private
affection

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

my brother is the safe environment I’ve created for the history of my lord.  political awareness, I mean, I mean, is a darkness.  my eyeglasses tell me you’ve been to see a train station.  do animals wait?  several impatient years later, two blindfolded mouth-breathers walk cheek to cheek in an Ohio fog that combs forward worms the length of a screen name on craigslist.  I am nearly pronouncing krokodil until my tongue disappears so I can pronounce it correctly for my mother’s not frostbit ear.  as for the two, they are mistaken by the disembodied poetics of local policing as the trophy nose of an odd-for-these-parts moose.  any re-enactment is my father the victim of a spirited birth.

i.

a child’s edition of your father.  in which

the unused
scarecrow

is found
hiding
the *****

mags, the cigarettes

of a sister’s worry, and other

inanimate
markers

of accounting, meant to be

traded
for fireworks, for fat frogs
not given
to snake…

that is, had the boy
lived
to unsee

the water
he didn’t
make…

ii.

(my handle on death)
is holding
a book.

an overfilled
pauper’s
grave / transcends
its archaic

reference
to belly.  all mothers

are single.

because I wanted to see something other than my mother blowing out the tip of her finger, I paid two drunk brothers the same amount to turn and stare at each other.  after a couple gay jokes and while I abused myself with body language, one of the men became blacker than seemed possible and the other man sang him a song.  every day of my life is yours to believe my ears.  

I love my mother but her sadness is that of an invisible woman with the power to shrink herself.  suicide doesn’t exist until it happens and by then it doesn’t matter.

a man has eaten a nail.  he must bed before it’s too late a woman with a breadboard back.  the man’s brother is married to such a woman, but does not know it.  the brother’s tongue is raw and wouldn’t know good eating were it a thumbtack in a lover’s heel.  the man decides to lounge hungrily in the slim wardrobe of his brother’s shadow.  the man will drink it like milk and let it slosh in his gut for three weekends.  the wife will shine more and more light on her husband; she will bend reading lamps around corners and forget she has things to do.  she will have well lit dreams of a man she can sense is behind her.  her husband will run from the light and she will jump on his back.  the man will come to this empty house and he will be angry and because of his stomach he will need to call someone.  until then, imagine we are in a box held by a thief.

morning my grandfather wheels with one hand his chair and with the other dips a net into the many tops of a pool.  he taps the rim of the net on the walk to better appraise the wet calf legwork of a grasshopper.  he lets the net touch bottom then releases it wholly to its listening.  he will avoid feeling like the net and instead allow his hands their errancy to the tugged down caps of invisible boys.  a healthier man, a more nervous man, would smoke.

he rolls his sleeves and can better see dropped pipes, freed hammocks.  an ant in the low, upturned hill of his elbow makes for his palm and is quickly there and lost.  not today, but others, he has heard children skin their knees at which point houses appear for them to enter.  

from the chair he lifts his forgotten buttocks and they hold for only a moment their dream of sitting.  he circles then the  cement sides of the pool and then it’s dark.  so dark that when he is visited by two bright shoes he believes they are alone and so ties them underwater.

And his wife would dab at the foreheads with a steam cloth and she would murmur leave my sons and he would count his sons and come up with four. And he would keep it from her that this was the bruising work of the fifth whom he had beaten in a hidden room and left for dead. And he would leave the kitchen walking backward and his heart would try to stay.

When finally God spoke it was not with mouth but with hand if one can imagine an emperor of puppets.

The heart it jumped back into its rightful cave but was not afraid and could no longer beat.

And the man took the boy by the ear into the room and asked for a quarrel and one was provided. The boy though was protected by an upturned glass and watched his father bat himself as a puppy will its nose.

After which the insects began to land but always the blood would come back to the face of the boy.

And the father was made to spit on a cob and with it brush his teeth. And he called them his sons what were four spheres of water.

wolf, pig, childhood.

a bit
of brother
on

the creative
side.

all in my father’s
imagination
were other
poverties

(where mother
assaulted
no one)  

(but faced)
with a poverty
of disguise
the dog
ate homework
I couldn’t
finish.

hunger my contraceptive

blood
my wristwatch

someone to boil
the mannequin’s
pacifier

we stomp the child monster.  my blood goes so far as to break its promise to leave my body.  a dog with a broken jaw whimpers beside the unthawed baby of the odd seamstress whose love of bubble wrap is genuine.  god says in the same voice step away from the vehicle as a boy close to his attacker touches himself under his breath.  The Jesus

can’t hear in the dark.  the last thing I see is making this up.

a thought
a ballerina
might have
of smoking.

a chicken with its head cut off
takes part in a melodrama
fit for a swan

-

both halves of my daughter
live thinking they are survived
by the other

-

mall nuns.

just nuns
taking a shortcut.

-

my daughter uses a pencil
when pretending
to smoke.  

nesting failure

makes her sad.

-

I spend my days seeing things.

as if
youth is a museum

-

poverty isn’t

triumvirate

the fulsome    
curse word
that deformed my tongue-

the teeth
in glaze
of remnant
soap-

and the shadow
my mother’s finger
left
inside my cheek
which I coaxed
into cigarette

and scrubbed with.


divine instance*

regarded by a daylight raccoon
a man tries to think of nothing.

the raccoon’s eyeful of hunger
a far off religion
the dead of which
orphaned only
a few.

the bent pipe of its back
the gnomic antique
of a raided circus.

its claws
the common salvage
of row fire.

    so fully raccoon
it might’ve been
earlier
what now
it would fight.

don’t worry, because here is worry:

a stone in a grounded bird’s nest.

it is easy to say, I guess. to come up with
the fed multitudes.

hell is to be in two places at once that are both hell.
see above.

see below:

shade of stone, kind of bird. knowing, here is knowing:

the poor write good.

the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

ageism

mob mentality
of the boys
you were



faith

in these
the footprints
of a left-handed
boy



doubt

unicorn sickness

as so

rumored



gentility

duster
of my father’s
bookmark

identified

by her picture
day
invite



final resting place**

god already underway

the man
I’ve only
just met
sober

     but have
     arm in arm
     week one
     through week
     three
     been jolly
with

is

     for the sake of his mother

revising

his life
cycle
from

****, sadness, balloons

to

sadness, ****, balloons

---

     it is either my attention span or my nakedness
in concrete poetry
that keeps me
from god

     (when a scar of thunder / outs itself / I am blue)

or bluish

     (like a sock in a blue
      coat’s
      pocket)
      
---

     by the
of a sudden
time
the man
is tolerable
he ha(s)
a number of

rethought

balloon

~ the director

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.

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.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs meant for his father, he made walking his home until it called itself 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 saw his brother took from the cake, the plain basket
as it moved
with his mother

from bike
to bike…  

~ transmissible

the stomach remains dumb

the way she finds this out on a school bus

the way her mother
after losing
a child  

~ ephemeron

cornfield visionaries, they sat around the ball as if it were fire.  I myself was tired of magic

so we played four short and the ball was a fact.  a hard period planted in mud

or a long quote
buzzing the ears
together.  

~ alleviant

of all places a park bench will do for the man not yet reading but planning to the children’s book with its cover of mother and child and kitchen and some kind of batter on the child’s face.  presently the man is alone much as his mother is alone in one of his fingers.  two men nearby are drinking from a water fountain and in turn are each palming the low **** for the other.  they are friends but only by length of service and the man can tell one is aggressive and the other allows it.  the book itself is disappointing.  the child is just ***** and the mother is just angry and they learn only to be themselves.  the men at the fountain become two men on a bench and the reader scoots over to hear about the voice of god as ****** children take the park.

~ amends

your house in foreclosure and you leave it and you are holding two bags of cat food.
  
sometimes a tricycle is a particular tricycle
trying to clear
with its back wheel
the low cinema
of your bare
foot.  

I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.

I hope we can meet without talking money.  this story my mother gave me
about the world’s first invisible man
is a keeper.  he was born

that way.

your mother I saw her setting the patio table for two and I looked away but could hear
no one
beating her.

we can talk about your cat.    

~ homology

the empty raccoons by their emptiness have kept the priest awake.  the church dumpsters wheel themselves into the world and he watches.  he tells his mother it is the silence of god.  she shrinks from him more and more and eventually fits through a door he cannot see.  his house fills with garbage and he becomes convinced he is wearing gloves.  we do not argue.  he raises them with his hands to take them off with his teeth.      

~ fiction

my age, father paints an abstract jesus.  mother has the kitchen to herself and sits.  mother watches my brother lift a chair and leave.  my sister lets a train pass and bites at the shoulder strap of her bra.  not my age, I draw a violinist.  draw a dog at the neck of its owner.  at my age of apple and rope, I prefer god’s early work.

~ monodist

online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.  in house, I dreamt not of my wife but of a grape being rolled by a palm gently toward a grape the dream could not see.  as it is in heaven, I was not all there.

~ signage

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs.  my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened.  soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I startled that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad.  I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of the man who’d fathered the boy whose fist had found so recently fistfight heaven.  the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise.  everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now see as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance.  I told myself I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly.  the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine.  the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but went quickly back to its original.  I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button.  I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and that boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.      

~ discipline

somehow sweet in his want of no trouble, the unwashed man goes hand in hand with your father to the backyard where they wrestle as if hurt were people keeping them apart.  your father’s jaw comes loose, the man’s ear seems held by too small a magnet.  at window you a sickly child with overbite and a scarecrow’s pipe stroke the puppet-corn hair of a sister’s doll and walk it cloud to defrosted cloud.  amidst this bartering of vanished weight your mother is being made to balance on her bare stomach a glass of lemonade.  in three days the man will come back, your father a bit healed, your mother less angry about straws.

~ the rabbits

the head of a shovel enters the earth of this southern field.  there is no more give here than in the northern.  the burying boy has been long facing the wind and will be longer.  in walking toward the boy, the old man’s knees have locked.  the old man is seen by the boy and the old man waves upright in the wind’s gnaw.  the tops of the boy’s legs reach his stomach.  

~ archaism

a man carrying his dog stops to kneel.  for my distance from him, I am disallowed any inquiry that would flower.  he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god at the simple chore of placing those first shadows.  I am holding my son nostalgically, almost forgetting how my tooth would ache and his tooth would ache and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.

~ sincerely

the males had in them a sloth and a jolly fog of sportsmanship

and in the females a mistake was made.

against frogs, and against the dim leaping
of frogsong

I had this friend

broke his arm
while *******  
at the wheel.  

I put my arm in the grief of my arm.

with one finger in his mother’s belt loop the child lowers then lifts then lowers again his free hand without touching once the grocery’s tile.  the long front pocket of his jacket boasts from one end the upper body of a woman whose ******* have been covered with one stamp each and from the other the woman’s bare feet I’m guessing won’t make the trip.  the child’s two younger siblings recognize me from last week when I halfheartedly rolled over them with my cart and they graciously go stomach first to ground with their fists under them as if they’ve been given charge of a rose but are unsure which has it.  the mother looks at me like I am long division to be avoided much the same as I was looked at in my prime.  I have no cart this day so instead I mock stand on the boy and girl making sure my balance keeps me.  the mother says enough and presses the right side of her nose with the back of her wrist which upon removal has on it a spot of blood I follow to her hidden belly button at which the transference clings and then reveals.  I want to tell her my brothers never retrieved a single bright kite from a tall tree nor did they ever pull from their loose and ***** jeans any kind of toad that lived.

a costume party in my father’s house.

     my mother
in her Sunday best.

little old
hermetic
me.

loudest brother
in the attic
with a stick.
in his mouth.

     my most housebroken
sister?

basement, on a stack of bibles.

other siblings, non locals, dogs, my father…

all in the mind
of your private

nudist.

not as common
is the dream
stuck
in the man.

not all wounds
report back.

I’d look for my father
if I knew where
to begin.

with my mother
it’s like my mother never happened.

I am the man whose missing woman
was bedridden
first.

I depend on my safety.
I worship a sleep that worships.

my brother feels no pain.  a characteristic
he blames
on my sister’s
begging
to be interrogated.

not on speaking terms with a former self,
the dream is god.

I lead my cousin’s hand to the belly of a sleeping schoolgirl.  the belly is six months out and could survive a mouthful of prose.  cousin has kids of her own.  cousin prefers the word listless to the word unborn.  the schoolgirl reminds my cousin of someone I knew.  a bodyguard.  a bodyguard as far as school age bodyguards go.  the recall puts me beneath a porch at age fourteen

     giving birth to something boneless.  I am trying to hear it explode in the present.  I ask the lord’s television to lure my cousin from the scene.  I ask the lord for custody of any tornado

warning
scrolling under
a muted
cartoon.

i.

chemo
makes
of each bone
a wind chime
which
in poetry
would be
some first
house
beauty
but  

in the body
of my father

    no

ii.

it is cruel to hang anything above a baby’s crib

iii.

I can only guess
I was happy
in the womb
with how
my mother
looked

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 he had 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

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

terrorism

trading
back and forth
the dead
before they are
and after


pilgrimage

one’s ******
recovery
of a native
alienation


novitiate

I know my mother
by the back
of her hand


drone*

I don’t believe
in being
attacked

because
when mine
stopped

     your sadness
was still
moving.

THE BLOOD
YOU DON’T SEE
IS FAKE

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-blood-you-dont-see-is-fake/paperback/product-21206799.html;jsessionid=6D1872B449D8B58E2A7F503E518273FD­

new and selected poems / Barton Smock / September 2013

from self published collections:

mating rituals of the responsibly poor
Ahistoric
Aggressive Kin
Hallelujah Lip-Synch
in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels

all available at

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

following is a list of evocative baby names.  the least you can do is wait for it.  wait while my brother donates the blood I loaned him.  while my sister decides to believe in war.  believe because she is finally allowed to fight.  war because my brother is dying.  dying even though he has money enough to cover his inheritance.  a disabled twitter account.  that I often quote.  quote from inside my different *** marriage.  where I’ll meet my wife.  and her only child.

online I find instructions on how to make my own scarecrow.  I wake my sister and have her put on her pajamas while I take the overcoat my father is using for a blanket.  when we’re an error of a mile from home I have to push the ATV with my sister on it.  she is crying about flooding and I’m telling her what the scarecrow will look like.  she wants it to have a cape.  because my son isn’t born yet, there’s not much to like.

the memory your thumbs have of mine.

overseas, the tongue
splashed
with milk.

a sister’s arm.  time line of a brother’s
failures.  brother the runner-up
inventor
of shadows.

the only chapter the book recalls.

the book used to swat a hotel mouse
from your slipper.

     assuming it hasn’t been stolen,
your pocket bible
that’s been
to war.

[in the past I am describing god to my attacker]

I don’t take good care of things.

I can’t even give you
examples.

~

[dead child]

the future
the past
both are ready

to talk

~

[late poem]

one can only write so long
about loss
in pencil

find my house,
dog-on-fire

~

[reading and writing]

which one of us did loneliness hear coming?

the boy kicks on his back, which is good for his memory.  
the house does not clamor for care.
the dryer has a thought, fantastic, like a pony.
the mailman, jesus christ, the mailman has caught
his sleeve
on a branch.  the boy’s mother is laughing.  indeed,
she may die.

to half brother
a phrase like
intellectual shorthand
is redundant

though half brother
admittedly
is full
of himself

middle sister
she agrees

     left
for alive
middle can’t
recall
her sentience

not in front of
this memory
of an army
doll

being named
after mother
but before
father

two of my brothers gone to see that witch ohia.  cain, the older of the two, tells cain the younger:

best break the handle of that broom you insist to bring it.  

the neck of a goat pulses lastmost into a fence’s top wire.  

their way is lit by a river soaked in rabbits.  their impetus of road by an exodus of crow.

three ants they formerly would have stepped on are allowed to resume the full carriage of a cigarette.
a man they meet says he needs nothing but this here knife and that there trailing duck.  was the duck  
he says convinced him.  

because they are sad they let the man go and later the duck which would’ve spoken had they.

some of the houses less so but all are violent.  these two they recollect me in kind, an echo’s cough.

the older cain notes the dimming rabbits and pulls one for a fire and the younger cain reveals from his coat
a second to put over the first.  they eat gingerly as two sides of a dark hat tight to a frostbitten ear.

ohia is woe.  a prank of dialect.  how I  
 
could with this list of dry grotesqueries live a good market’s hour.  I would buy eggs and toilet paper.  hope
these two
believe that.

five bodies
in a one room
cement
house.

an inventory
of warm
voyeurisms.

I don't want to know
who's been looking.

it is my job
to approve
the older machines.

add
a second room.

three year olds
not seeing
birds.