so often we voice
our want
to turn off
the brain

when in truth
we desire
the brain
to momentarily
empty

that the film
in front of us
can quietly

go about
in the dark

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my newest self published work is [MOON tattoo]

~

and, poems:

~

[opening line from a year with mother]

it crawled out of me and knew your birthday

~

[horseface]

you strike me as an invasive listener. I love your body. loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes. does this make me look alone? like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone? my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with. horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare. earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant. if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.

~

[early work]

the babies my father held.

the hell, the world’s
largest.

the parts of the house
that caught fire
in two
moving

vans.  the bully

mother poisoned
in the dreamy
media
of religious

thought.  the daring

suicide, the doubled
god.

30% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code of LULU30

my newest thing is called ‘four’-  it is not a whole creature but a combination of my last four publications.  clever title.  I am sorry it’s 12.00-  I am always sorry.  it is available on Lulu, along with others.

and, some poems, from:

~

(---)

a palm reader
with mouths
to feed
does
my mother’s
nails.  I overhear

I love
babies
but god
they live
so long.

-

my brothers will tell you
I avoid

capitalization

eating
in front of others

threesomes

-

who was it
asked

-

from whose memory were you erased?

~

[warm body]

her nightmare
from the era
of hibernation
revolves around
a baseball
made
by her husband
from the cobwebs
found
soaking
in the mouths
of babes

(mouths)

dry
from dreaming
of the sponge
bathed
by god
in the egg
of a spotless
crow

~

[fathers]

to see a stone
as ruin’s
pursuit
of aftermath

one must share
this dream
  
of arriving
on earth

to pray

~

[prose]

god was created to remember everything. so says the rock to the tooth starting small.

-

there is a gallery of unfinished work and a space for the baby to crawl through.

-

her feet stick out of the mirror she’s been using to give birth.

-

lost: frostbite. lost: space suit.

will work
for feeding
tube.

-

holy asthma
holy

crossbones

-

old hat
this human
head.

~

[black sites]

we indeed
are deaf
from going
****

the floor is writing on the earth

it is better
than having
roaches

childbirth
comes to
in a bat
dying
in a pillowcase
for what
the weeping
flightplan
of a drunk
stork…

what tree cannot reach
mother scratches
with a broom

~

[cries]

we are
each one of us
the smallest
person
on earth

one is never too old
for god, never

too old
to surveil
the deaf

/ I know from your palm
what your hand
will drop, mother

cooks only
meat, father

is every
nightmare
she has
of her exodus

from apologue

/ having populated

the myth
of ******

the baby is empty

~

(also, in the non self-published realm of credence, **** Press published in April 2016 my chapbook [infant*cinema], which is available on the **** Press site)

bored as a slaughterhouse

crow / angel

on a skateboard

its father tells god how it was briefly haunted by two ghosts that began to see each other.  it doesn’t mention by name the who’s who of having babies.  by the scar of milk in its belly, god accepts on cruelty the continued presence of the left handed coalition of something in the water.  a good mother burns what’s been devoured.

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/ from [shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~

[untitled]

hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

~

[untitled]

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.

~

[entries for giants]

not a thing born
nor a thing
howled at
no
you are not
again
these things

the baby
it continues
to purple itself
where it can

it crawls, but is mostly stunned
by its own
vocabulary

the dog has the tongue of a cat

this is new

~

[the exact]

father became the man his possession foreshadowed. mom had a purse full of spoons. brother bathed any form quiet enough to make the kitchen sink. I began to believe. I began to hear in the rock

the thorn
it spoke for. over the nest of a bird,

the nothing to eat.

~

/ from [MOON tattoo]

~

[catastrophe]

I am differently
afraid
of each
cigarette

-

thematically, father hopes

to operate
on a clown

-

compared
to his

my hunger
is having
a flashback

-

wheelchair, oh

to its dog
door
bliss

~

[moon tattoo]

birth, or god’s
way
of erasing
our memory…

this
more than you
will hurt
my neighbor’s
doll

father would later say he did it

not to smack the name out of my mouth
but to give it a good limp
on its way
to my heart.

I think of my blood as an evening wake.

my heart
as this woman
one day buried
with a man’s
cane.

I am

in that sleepy
window
where lives
double

crushing pills
for the scarecrows
of trampoline
graveyard

/ suicide, it lowers
a shoeshine
chair
in a spotless
interrogation
room
for pregnancy
thing
of the present

instead of running the orphanage, your husband has been going to movie after movie.  he no longer acts like a child in bed.  his crying seems attached to sadness at both ends.  his mother keeps calling when he’s not home.  she’s never met his father.  his father calls from the same number.  you want to tell him but need his son’s blessing.  your own kids are full of woe.  they laugh so hard about it their poor stomachs skip meals 101.  when you visit the ATM it’s to put money in an account for a friend who married up.  it’s not you on the cross where your water breaks.

I fear most
the silence
of god.

more than that,
the silence
of gods.

if any one of you
marry
a haunted man-

die first.

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage.  we have been writing in unison instead of eating.  our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.  we are dying in two of our mother’s arms.  our mother is elsewhere repeating after the man who does our stunts.

Free mail shipping or 50% off ground shipping at Lulu today with coupon code of SHIPWEEK16

~

these are from my collection, {MOON tattoo}:

[portion]

christ is a boy armless in christ. eats his corn

his teardrop
corn.

thinks he’s been given
by *******
the power
to spy
on a fish. thinks god

is part
food. hears

from a demon
touched
by snowfall

that the boat
is real

but first
starve a crow
that is blind.

~

[mud times]

satan began possessing squirrels

he did so
in the name
of footprints

my sister
the poor girl
was pregnant
with a people
person, she waited

with me

for my hands
to look
like mittens

~

[pinch]

mother
as she
unrolls
a tube
of toothpaste
talks
of a crack
in the lord

these empty
things
I’d rather
they not
look it

take your father’s
drag racing
or a fork
with you
when you bathe

I was scraped, she says

your cheek
to me
a wounded
dream...

it doesn’t last
the prophet’s

grief

~

[clearing]

god
my path
to meaning
nothing

-

she had a sock drawer and a  pair of secret hands

the hardest time
with houses

-

what if the end stops coming

-

what if

from one cannibal to another

it is extra
this bone
from the horse

Moon
ate

~

[curio]

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

~

[mesmeric]

the fish are biting and my father is wanted.

thunder the size of a seasick dog
has crushed
again
my sister’s
baby
for crushing
pills.  for every

hunchback
goes
to heaven

there’s a shadow
passed out
in a dream.

he trades his doll for her doll’s eviction story.  

I bring them tea
and hope
I have a son

I don’t know about.  

-

I was born to believe
I was born
because I’d set
my mom
on fire.

-

you call *******
on the body
belonging
to one
whose inheritance
of sorrow
can be traced
in origin
to a future

event
a father
attends
as god’s

plus one.

was this bug was biting me into house and home

/ the baby it was my belief
had come out to give me
a knowing
look  

/ I couldn’t
so to silence

eat my way from a wet paper doll

you strike me as an invasive listener.  I love your body.  loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes.  does this make me look alone?  like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone?  my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with.  horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare.  earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant.  if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.

as the idea
is without lord
it will outlive
god
and be nothing.

artwork is clarity enough
I suppose
but the drugged

they alienate
the unthinkable.

the soon to be mother
has a new man

he’s good with kids
because kids
are weak

his sister can keep a secret
like nobody’s business

the mother will have a boy
with spiral
fingers

that belong to a notebook
I can describe

you have children.

they come back
with people.

playing dead
for my shadow
this
could last
longer
than that
choking
fit, *******

bone

my estranged
ghost
imagined

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

a hobbyist
who impersonates
god

attempts
to make
from scratch

a parasite.

-

I fail
not her

her nakedness.

-

she is not sad, she is climate.

-

in a sense,

it doesn’t take long
for the lifeless
body
to latch
onto
the idea
death
had
of a baby

slowed
to a crawl.  

-

if you must, harm, harm only

the touch
she projects.

I am half
the survivor
I ate for.  

I took my son to a bowling alley and gave him an egg.  

my daughter’s sense of touch
was so delayed
she lost sleep
thinking

of all the things that had turned into her hands.  

communion was god’s plan to leave heaven.

I am differently
afraid
of each
cigarette

-

thematically, father hopes

to operate
on a clown

-

compared
to his

my hunger
is having
a flashback

-

wheelchair, oh

to its dog
door
bliss

i.

love is not blind.

ii.



iii.

love is braille.

into something from his childhood
a man
is born.  never

far off
what crawls
her way.

one of my eyes
is my father’s
alcoholic
eye.

says anonymous

a blood
dipped
balloon
is not
the baby
the angel
had.

says mother

into moral
isolation
the hands
you bring
are dry.  says hers

sleep
orphans
fatigue.

how sad, my cheeks, to fight
for shadow.

the last robot to name its baby.

two smokers
back-to-back
in the high
corn.

the spoonfeeder’s ferris wheel.

litterbug’s
shadow.

girl speaking.  my father is no drunk.  not so long ago he chased his head away from hell.  he was on a binge.  he took to his tongue with a pair of pliers and wrote with a ****** finger and when it stopped working he wrote with another ****** finger and finished the sentence I don’t want to be a snake.  the pain meds put him on his belly and I brought him water he thought was drink.  he beat my ankles.  when I throw my head back my mouth is on a stretcher.

you haven’t touched your food.  

the soul has windows
it doesn’t need.  

failure to thrive
has come to mean
the growing
you do
at night.  

when jailed
I thought of nothing
but my cell
and I thought of my cell
as a crib
without a heaven.  

your mother’s dark hair
is hard to swallow.  

I am secretly happy
that you’ve taken
an egg

for each day of your life

to a doll
so doll
can sleep.  

as your mother, I often follow
a black
ball of yarn

into the lake
of how
you remember.

being alone never hurt anybody.  I ask online about a coat hanger.  in person about a stork.  symbolism is dead.  it’s not that kind of garden.

error

in the story
a father tells
to blood flow

of how
she became
eyesight / sloth

in the maker
of kites

if you can enter the coupon code without hating your life, Lulu is offering 10% off all print books today with said code of HUMPDAY10

~

below are some poems from ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015):


[tautologies]

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

[first appeared]

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

[notes to abuser]

I have had to tell time using only repetition.  there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t.  I can see what you see in me.  none of my sounds echo.  I have a son.  I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own.  he has three rooms upstairs and three down.  when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

[immersion]

your attacker has a history of being baptized. identifies as male. was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father. we shot him not knowing he’d already been. his mother says his stutter is an act. she is what we call empty inside. you look like your father.

[onlookers]

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen.  in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream.  in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.                  

[maker]

when I think about you

I don’t

[incarnate]

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

[exposure]

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

[a photographic memory that applies only to acts of eating]

in the oar I broke on my brother’s knee
I found
a human
tooth.

here is a lamb
floating
in the reflection
of a star.

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic

I try to make a fist but my hand is still being made inside the winter glove my nearby father lost.  

I do not go after the boy who’s called me a little ***** for wearing my mother’s Sunday heels.  

I have one of those accidents I am never far from having.

I sit in the bath and wait for my brother who is tall enough to turn the showerhead away.

by my reaction, the water is either too cold or too hot.

errors in care

how many hells does a death need?

the lost mind
the nurse
of the mouth.

I mean to be impossible, oh

/

and dreamt
from sleep.

~

horror movies

because they have no master
and don’t
overstay
their goodbye.

because in talking
we hid
sound. death

happens more
on land.

~

devotions for pilot**

historically, it has gone this way

birth
flashing
the present, my lap

breathing

father’s warning
was be
careful
them crows
is as smart
as a whip.

mine
was for my brother
said to have
a thing or two
left
to shrink-wrap
in the ****** bin.

mother’s was
twofold
and babied
itself
as forgotten.

I will say
I am not my father
and you

     I am not my son
and we will hold hands
until we are
so alone
that I

fall ill
and am replaced
by sickness, a boy

I promise
to write

a non-person interacting with a baby I began.  I am bright
but want to be distance.

inspiring kindness
busies
the kind.

the photo captures nothing
that is not
aftermath.  you can keep

your

to god I tell my secrets.

to be my father
I fight his.

boy spotless, wrecker of the invisible home.  oh mother, scrubber of the radar’s blip.

from [shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.


~

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.

~

(all print books on Lulu are 25% off thru July 11th with coupon code of LULU25)

watching a horror film
barefoot
     when the high
priest
of my eight

thoughts    

carries my mind
to a corner
church

Movies
lengthen god

Write high

dear pilot of my father’s animal

dear tree
the ahistoric
ghost

dear space
blood

I am on the train that will take me to my brother and he is on the train that will bring him to me.  he has only just seen the great bird I’ve envisioned since birth.  I make myself in his image and use his inside voice to describe the bird.  my train arrives early.  once off, I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it.  I pace.  a beautiful woman asks me if I have a light and I say sharply no.  I apologize to the woman and explain how nervous I am to meet my brother this way.  she says she understands.  she says she’ll probably see god before she sees her sister.  I offer her my cigarette and she takes it with her.  my bird is getting smaller and I don’t know who to blame.

I choose an icicle to be the mirror’s rifle as brother puts a cigarette behind sister’s ear and calls her transported.  father eats outside before smoking in.  mother does what she does for wind.  hangs a scarecrow’s keys.

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

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.

he drops a knife in her lap and calls her a butcher.  it is beyond cute

the way his stomach
becomes
a third
fist.  her cigarette

is a portal
takes her
to the baby
can ****

the air
from a room.

I must remember
it happens not
to me

but to my son

     that it does not turn him
into someone
else    

lonely

the thinking was

the kids
they’d report
my disappearance

-

I saw two men trade guns
and assured
my brother
that men
differ

-

no one
today
is dead, the newborn

is letting
the lipstick
dry

-

my other movie is a fistfight

-

my other movie is the horse
my drowning
mother
drank

-

my other movie is not the dog
of my sister’s
first

hand, nor the nothing

I taste
on my way
to salt