outside the garage door
of a cement building
I break no bread
with the silence
of my nose

what a clown

-

the wound’s depth
leads me
to believe
in a part
of my father’s
leg
I didn’t know
I had

-

mother’s pain
is other
pets, the devil

is the devil
forever

-

this egg on my face
is from the eye
of yours
that hatched

I bury the bone I never gave to my brother’s dog in a whites only cemetery.  my wife is safe at home trying on dresses my kids would’ve seen me in had they not been trying so hard to recall their black childhood.  my father finds peace, his speechless snake.  god, god eats all by her lonesome the bird she made small.

my son’s body
is as believable
as my mind
before god-

the autopsy
he couldn’t
perform

Sleep was just here. That, and being godless. I try to mourn.

your sadness ran as a midday special on nailgun accidents in my area.

if I stay in one place, my mother will die of sleep.

ideally, it’s the image I have of realism.

in a small attic
a boy
on all fours
being weakened
by a spider’s
dream
is putting
an ear
to the roof
of his sister’s
dollhouse.  for making

the wrong
sounds
for animals
poor sister
was lowered
into the baby
you were born
to lift
by two
scarecrows
you’d think
were separated
at death
for the way
they don’t
carry on.

I pray to god for good things and to the devil for bad.  the focal point of any daydream is a crow.  in my father’s mind, his mind returns.  in my mother’s there fires impulsive searches for lonely teeth.  at the sound of anything overhead, our dogs are trained to dig for confetti.  I have an odd request, I say to my neighbor the cat person.  I want to talk someone out of suicide.  the cat person is on her ninth vicarious life.

I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.  

I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail.  told mother
it’s not suicide

unless you ask
to be born.  I had a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
for good.  had dolls
over which

dying
out of character
held sway.

after leaving its memory to the hibernating bear, the insect died.  I don’t know what story you’re trying to tell.  the angel has three fathers.  the angel was born to blackmail a ghost.  this bald ******* thinks I need shown how to chew my fingernails.  the mask is my elevator and the pig my coffin.  I have a sister was made to make an egg disappear.  a father who’d shave to give the thing in the stomach time to plan its escape.  the angel vomits into a pink wheelbarrow.  shows affection.

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

[untitled]

today I was outside
holding my son
and hummed
into his neck
a man
resurrected
to faint

-

childhood
animals
deeply
unhurt

-

this machine can detect silence

this stick
if stones
are gay

~

[tenderness]

it is there
in the way
my father
refolds
a single
grocery bag
for a cyclops
that never
arrives

~

[having a disabled child]

means:

there is a tent
being studied
by dream.  

missing
more than snow
the ashes
of snow.

footwear.  and checking
our food
for holes.

means keeping
dry
a diver’s
eyelash.  and leaving

to finish
absence.

~

[jesus]

an unhurried ****** whose character development was orphaned by ghosts

~

[high-dive. dusk.]

as if any father
could heal
a cigarette
or remove
for a grey-eyed
newborn
the stitches
from a dream
    
~

[mother praying for two]

tooth fairy gone to salt

shell of a bee in an empty lamb

~

[/ yyyy]

doll burns its tongue on a teacup breast

at your abuser’s
costume party

~

[later meaning]

my eyes meet in a tunnel beneath the museum of things that belong. sister moons the moon. mother she buries the ironing board of a crucified dentist. childhood starts at the top. the painter of stomachs eats from a footprint. egghead shreds a pillow in the madhouse of snake.

~

[eremite]

the frog in the hood of my coat
has I’m sure
a later meaning.

my brother is on his back in a field he calls helicopter.

I know my father’s mouth
by its embrace
of doom’s
unconnected
dot. there are sounds

I can’t make. like that of a boy

squealing
as he rubs
a toy tank
under a blanket
for a god
whose mother
a face

could love.

~

[highs]

eardrum the airbag stomach of a lonely doll

brain
a blue
parachute

~

[handheld]

somewhere between satellites and baptisms

grief
the daydreaming
thumb

~

[days of bread]

the image
crucified
for its lack
of focus.

the loud music
over which
you hear
make
your blood.

the weakest
electric chair
this side
of moth.

father’s grip on a rolled-up magazine.

crow laundry.

an out-of-shape
coat hanger. & (and)

the news
that my nakedness
has died.

~

[possessions]

i.

chew toy
abandoned
at the throne
of old man
scissorlegs

ii.

a claw
from the lottery
of hands

~

[promising]

the girl wearing a scuba mask is not on a skateboard. this, after all, is church. I see what you see- the writing suffer. I’ll wash, later, a pair of black socks from the minefields of the one we call birdbeak and you can be the puppet with a needle in its arm.

~

[last names]

he cracks the motel room door from inside and ****** from wasp to spider to spared cricket.  he can smell the baby’s back as it begins to burn a hole in the pocket of a bag-headed hitchhiker.  the earth is 42 years old.  a car in the lot below moves over a body and stops.  the woman in the car is ******* a tooth through a cigarette.  whatever god put in her cake is almost gone.  

~

[for Eric]

I’ve held dogs as they die. vet’s office, 1993. a bad dream is a nightmare and a good dream is nothing. is a dog’s rib. I get an idea, here and there. design the same bathtub.

~

[lost grass]

eat loudly, mouse, for still I have my baby blood. loudly else you become a fish. else I jaw ear

from the character actor’s god.

~

[clarion]

heaven is art and hell the artist. regret matters only to the creator of regret. brother hops around like a drugged rabbit. headcount is the nickname given by sisters to the outhouse built on a sandbox. an ambulance from dogcatcher’s dream puts the hurt on a flickering cornfield. our cellar is a mirror where thunder goes deaf.

~

[for daughter]

in a wordless dream I’m nowhere near anyone I can’t be.  my dad’s mirror passes out.

~

[untitled]

snake
is the best thing
for snake.

I know you’re sad.
like a yard, a vandal, a roof.

seeing the future
takes time.

~

[laity]

the unmarried wind will comb its hair in heaven
but for now
in the Ohio
of the weightlifter, that odd
follower
of stillness
who built
on roadkill
tornado’s
church

I made
for a toy
car
a movie
screen

from a sheet
of aluminum
foil...

/ mother worked herself out of a straitjacket

she wanted
to paint

/ my stone-faced brother
had just been born
to mark
the cessation
of all

thunder

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today.  above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having.  we do our jigsaw of darkness.  clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

i.

while still
a butterfly
a caterpillar
landed
on the head
of the crucified
christ
who asked
himself

what can I do
that I can’t

ii.

losing a baby, no, think of it
as losing
your baby’s
hair

iii.

whatever was born had a nosebleed

it’s enough to give a ghost amnesia, snow like this. we’re pretending to look for his daughter while sharing what he calls a milkman’s cigarette. throw a brick, say touchdown. I might have worked for a mirror. I don’t know where we are or how old his daughter is. lamb of the bunch. blood’s haircut.

the sisters compare how many months they’ve stayed pregnant  

/ nearby,

a boy
believes
he’s guessed

from no more
than the image
of a swollen
fish

which alien
showed interest
in our
despair /  

(I am looking for a place to whip my brother that is not a bathroom)

/ my father
he is waiting
for the price
to come down
on a thing
he says
will prove

theft
has no mother
and forgiveness
no god / as a dentist  

dreams
it’s all
in the legs

(ix)

obscurity’s footnote

mom’s
prescription
blood

a lamb
nosing
a bar of soap
into the path
of those

women

burned
by blackboards

(x)

around the time god stopped writing men

I took
a ghost-like
custody

of a property

a ruin
of melancholy
trespass, my father’s

dream-ending
stomach

(xi)

return is the first stage of a life’s work

god
loses
eden

every so often
I use my breast
to open
the photographer’s
mouth, her hair

alarms
the dead

the singlemost mother has heard of a skin cream can turn one into darkness.  

a bar of soap that reads palms…

-

on display for the poker face of birth, you are the vision footage dies for.

-

you have this father
leaves
no stone
unseen

this brother

haunted
by surplus
aftermath…

-

before it was an ear, it was where

she scrubbed

at birth, your life flashes before your eyes.  you have a brother and with him think that if one could record the exact moment of your mother’s dying, her death will disappear.  the drink in your glass is made from the skin that couldn’t bring itself to be your mouth.  some of it is crying but most of it is putting the word **** in its place.  out of necessity you create a crow that you might be warned of its crow-like replacement.  your hands stick to what they know.

the man and woman didn’t feel ashamed until they put on that show for the snake.  hell, it wasn’t even a snake but primarily a rope that couldn’t facilitate their double suicide and then it was a snake from one’s imagination, yours or mine, torturous.

after punching me in the stomach
my brother
would put his hands
behind his back
and ask
the fish
in the bowl
under my shirt
to forgive
little miss
handcuffs
for making
god

I slash myself to recreate the map of shortcuts your mind blanks on.  under sky, some doctor induces the angel our mother became.  two boys, while still in our underwear, are witnessed putting their heads together without knowing it is okay to be so by any father whose madness works from home.  hell, the baby with its ears could be saying look at this ******* flower.

soon
is a baby
studied
by the scholars
of now
who
in their prime
predicted
that jesus
would be
in the scarecrow’s
future
the darkest
bird

the past doesn’t know what hearing is.  it sounds in sick animals we won’t eat.  father, at the hill’s bottom, waits for a marble.  impossible, but we’ve somehow stopped the spread of presence.  a boy is a moment.  not any but the one before he finds his mother’s **** stash.  alarmist.  satan has one ear weighs nothing.  on eggshells, the future joins the scarecrow’s timid young.  grandfather had a pipe he smoked and a dog he couldn’t beat.  grandfather has a pipe he can’t reach and a black man he means to set upon a woman in a prison yard.  god is a tent for the wounded but ain’t no one come by.

the white man came out of nowhere

we’re talking
the biggest
white
man
ever

     I have friends married to men
whiter

this is what I’m saying     about my mouth

it lives nowhere

Ohio maybe, Ohio has just
the four
seasons:

spring, summer, fall, your mom

beneath the tethered astronaut of his dream

the impossible boy
misses

something small

the human ear, its recent
brush
with whale

licking its wounds it is still an animal.

what does it mourn?

the lack reach of my tongue?

me / me I have

lost my sense of a peopled earth.

I was
for desperation
a woman
crawling away
from her walker.

I still, gender, have
your raincloud.

/ nothing whispered is a language.

the mouth chews on its ghost.

i.

grief
is the angel
apprenticed
to coma

ii.

dearest disabled,

we’re not here
long enough
for god
to do
the damage
he needs
to survive

iii.

this rabbit hole
we’ll use it
for the shadow’s
mouth

the girl who cries wolf
cries wolf
to three men
whose sons
are dead

it is not suicide to bomb god’s shadow.  I am the dot my father calls button.  my son’s mind would’ve given oxygen too many places to go.  his body happened overnight.

I relayed the lie I was told about paint drying to my brother.  he put his hands on my shoulders and resumed a sobbing he didn’t start.  I couldn’t see the wheels turning in his head but he could.  he drew for me what I thought was a sketch of god’s little tormentor.  it wasn’t a sketch.  our future interactions were followed.

not a place we can go to have my grandmother tell you again how my uncle is born with a tooth.  where slavery just a star watched and watching and **** just a rainbow bent to its work.  where young we are shaken like gifts and we want people and the emptiness of people put to death.  where grey flutes.  where milk is in our blood and ghost letting.  where hope is ugly but don’t tell it.  where a man moves over a woman so that she is equal and equally ransacked of travel.  where in a field this far away one can go out of body and claim finders keepers.  where a bottle as we are speaking makes it to a baby full of pills.

I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist.  I am alone.  I am brief stay of bullet.  god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process.  when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside.  I miss mom.  gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.

pretty early your brother
is a dog
believes it can leap
the electric
fence.  red handed

is the daughter
of empty.  indian rub, noogie, crown

of thorns.  the village suicide

a shill
for whimsy.

the crying in me continues.

I was born called
by your first
hearings.

     the moon is a software I don’t understand.

I created god
before you
created god.

the help, the competition, the help,

the competition.

ago, we buried something here that has kept us calm.  my father lived in a beat-up car and over time he became its radio.  some kids from town came once to push the car and my father got out to help.  one of the kids was my mother when my mother could still see what others could not.  her favorite sound remains that of a severed head banging around in a time machine.  so many kids went missing here that couples make more on the spot.  the animals try but have so far kept god going.

when younger
than ***
but older
than grief
my greatest
ambition
was to give
context
to the left hand
applauding
despair.

now, what I do
for grief
is translate
a passage
from one language
to the same.

when out
of ideas
she cuts
my hair

-

a man who’s been forgiven
has no past

-

my healer
is the main squeeze
of her god’s
pastoral
depravity

-

the plane is coming back

-

at my mother’s cough

the bombings
continue

-

father
retains
his orphan
clout, I lose

-

sight

-

of my hands
that they’ll know

-

what to do

the wife of the man about to be wheeled in has asked for my loneliness.

the dog returned and the doll I’d accused of eating it was wiped down by my father who then gave it to my mother to give to me once I’d stopped being the baby I cried like while the new doll was disappeared until it could be properly hidden from the sister conceived in its absence

kidnapped
I come
as advertised
before god
in the spitting
image
of mother.  

unharmed
on earth  
is a form
I do not
take after.

I saw today a moth so large it could probably replace what it was your dad hit with his car.  the size of things lately has me putting babies on the shoulders of those behind this groundhog-eating craze.  I’ve moved back in with mother.  I’m waiting for her to know.  high note:  they’re okay, my tormentors, they’re not surprised I’m ugly.  my brother still believes his tongue is proof he was once made to swallow an extension cord.  because of what happened, I’ll never be different.

a bird watches my brother eat a parrot

my new diet requires me to have
the same
dream

language is a broom

between the legs of a showered orphan
is a sponge

from the story of her stomach’s exile

you recall
yourself
inventing

not all
drones
dream
of you

as ahistoric
exit
music

plays

you leave
the beast
in the *****
of its
amnesia

-

themes for prey

-

infant cinema

to slow the scarring of god, the man spits into a can plucked from the river that washed his hair.

to hasten

the woman
shaves
her mirror’s
head.

/ you can work here for nine months

/ it’s not like riding a bike
it’s more
like kneeling
in the center
of a stickman’s
nightmare

/ never you mind
the bloated
baby’s
yellow
tooth

/ at least the sick

they confuse
death

[notes from life under bell]

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.                

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller.  the mosh pit is weak.  last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole.  onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch.  dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide    

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood.  some god

seeing me
as a person…  

how quickly birth gets old.  

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma.  genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea.  this open umbrella.  ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby.  a door was a door.  a ghost was a ghost and a door.  the house was possible.  its rooms were not.  baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub.  I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow.  said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.    

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.  

-

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key.  it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.      

-

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

-

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

-

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.

-

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

-

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

-

the disappearance surrounding said event.  a horse belly-up in water’s blood.  see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

-

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.  

-

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.