when saying her name, mother would insist the curse words were silent.  for swallowing secrets, father had his throat professionally cut.  I remember wiping my nose with a shirt darker than blood.  instead of good washrags, we had words brought about by having company.  mother ran wild through my sentences while father bent to kiss a pillow for sleeping with my stomach.  apocalypse came and came.  the act was the act’s debut.

as ahistoric
exit
music

plays

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

-

themes for prey

-

infant cinema

[childhood (i)]

the body of jesus
pulled from the sea

~

[childhood (ii)]

I am, in the dark of an unwashed submarine, kissing his head

like it had
a message.

~

[lost priest]

I come from a place where a school bus hits a dog and the bus driver barks and all her kids play dead

~

[poem]

remember to rub them, the hands of the slow learner.

and to say their prayer

the one for the bald princess

& her child’s
perfect
somersault

~

[each ear is an only child]

shaped
by a scarecrow
barber
known
to cut straws
for quiet
angels

many times
when I lifted you
I did so
thinking
you
were a cloth
I’d folded
for god’s
swollen
eye.

many times
I pinched you
so hard
you fell
asleep.

in all scenarios
god promised
me

the world
would not end
if he talked

about

your weight.

as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue

dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine

go on, birth
take silence
from a baby

after sharing her son’s birth story, the woman comments on the oddness of hearing it aloud.  she closes by saying all words are her last.  she is at least as old as the brother I’m told I have.  when told, I believe the one speaking is speaking to the room I’m in that’s been entered by the likes of me as into a place where a manuscript has just been finished.  I continue my brother as a distraction in the form of a man trying to erase a cigarette burn from the arm of a typist.  man makes the sound I have on my person that both my parents made.  instead of taking her medication, the woman imagines herself homeless in a part of town she’s passed while having ***.

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

I watch with my son a slasher film and we become unknown at the same time in our revelation that the poor would time travel to the exact place of their exit might they be more creatively poor. I am furious still that attraction in Eden began to matter. My brother hates the human body for what a machine can do. I don’t think my angel knows I’ve died. Don’t think my brother.

(v)

she prays to food

food
be gentle

birth
still leaves
me out

(vi)

she recognized

the poster
from the boy
she’d been seen
by dogs
with, her mother

was gone
her father

grey as water’s
last
meal

dyed
the wigs

(vii)

one woman’s sorrow
is another’s
intermission

bread don’t break
not in blood’s
backyard

acne

illiteracy

(viii)**

she is holding the bird up to the phone
she is crushing
the bird
can your voice
and mine
caught swimming
swim…

I think of my mother in her block of ice summoning a curling iron and of my father sending a robot to prison. of a leafblower named mercy hugged by my brother for outing my sister’s electric chair. of nakedness, poor nakedness, always playing itself in the story of had I not been invented I would’ve had to exist. the black eye how it quoted swan.

it doesn’t take a genius but it does take my brother to see the frog’s been tortured.  he splits my friends into two groups, telling one he has a month to live and the other that I’m dying.  he pulls me aside and asks if I’m up to finishing what he’s currently calling The Mourner’s Guide to Interrogation which began *a month is a long time to the instantly bored.

the man lost his voice threatening to smack my mouth off.  the woman unplugged the tv.  in its own way, the game was on.  it was the night jesus went from being indifferent to being abstract.  the night someone’s dog let the ear of another from its mouth .  as for the baby on our doorstep, the same someone brought it food.

it’s a bit early
to be
reincarnated

son, this illness

it takes
our death

show me
a devil
can enjoy
lightning
and I’ll
a worm
an inch
of its life

as he prepared to leave my world to the memory of a man addicted to god, my father was stung by a bee.  this matters.  bees carried the scent of absence.  bees spoke to mother.  mother was the woman it took two like my father to make.  mother swallowed to bruise the body of any dropped thing sounding itself out in a nightmare had by children new to infancy.  mother swallowed and called it singing.  there will be a god.  this matters.  perfect, now, the nothing you say.

far be it from you
to be cleared
by god
of invisibility…

part of the curse
is the lifting
of curse, the ability

to lift
home
from the house
of already
where

to save
a chicken
from its head

the boy

who once
drilled
for crow
has now
fashioned
from a license
plate

a crude
guillotine…

not now, memory, I am this close

to conjuring
the shape
of the man
whose son
pulled
from a bathroom
stall
my daughter
to ask
was she done
growing
a tail

for the unreal
attentions
of my male
competitors
I created
a woman
based solely
on my mother
patient
zero
of perceived
consent

gesture 6

enough
about me
these gaps
in your grief

I like everything about your story except where it starts.  a little longer in the dog’s mouth.  I couldn’t separate the gnome’s suntan from the minotaur’s heart transplant.  maybe your parents could write me a letter?  how many missed meals does presence eat?  it did make me sad, the snowball fight beneath a boneless moon.  and the daughter born to fake her pregnancies.  look, we all have a brother who can’t move.  who puts a clock in a time capsule.  suicide?  on other planets.

within the beating
there were smaller
beatings  

-

delirium, the haunted sandbox

-

in his, my brother could taste the rib of a mosquito

in mine, I could taste
my voice

-

them kids had time to fetch

other kids
there was

no hell

anomalies, brother.  we are not surprised.  I speak for myself when I say it is beyond me how this is déjà vu.  

-

my kid is a television show.  a sorcery no environmental issue you create

can create.  I am going to have

a brood.

-

forgiveness, forgiveness tracking.

I have what is called my father’s face.  my son has a hand because my son holds a stone.  the mother stomps her feet in the name of the holy ghost known for running the orphanage into the ground.  the sister sees god but does not see god shove a dead bird down her brother’s pants.  the brother believes in god so god will cure him.  sitting on this swing has made me fat.

[cognate]

to build something inside the church
they had to close
the church

those who wouldn’t normally disappear
were said to be helping

shape began its story
with veal
and ended
with the man
dad choked
for nine
months

I imagined
foreign
injurious
objects
and my brothers

spoke
from a sandbox
of seeing

a late
deer

on the roof
of a nursing home

~

[supplication]

is voice
the shadow
of song

swimmer
whose blood
has feathers

~

[notice]

hooked on silence, oh sleep

/ long before its descent into me

~

[apple]

in defense of snake, this is my mom’s curling iron

/ ghost
a vacancy
I cannot
dismiss

~

[we got our hands on some fingerprints and did not feel poor]

the invisible man’s ghost, them polaroids

of sister’s
feet…

dream differently, microphone

~

[god and time are the same age]

a child, an oven

how both
distract
touch

~

[annihilatives]

go home, sadness

–

of exposure
to birth

~

[no kids in Eden]

door to door we are selling knock-knock jokes

I am the body
travel
came with

the woman knows she isn’t the one her angel wants.  god says we can do this all day.  I chase the car until it runs out of batteries.  mother needs little.  an extra night to sleep on the loss.

wherein
the white soup
of thought
that could not
sustain
the brainless
pilot
of paper
airplanes
was drawn
from my son’s
unheard
ear
might memory
attend
foresight
the church
of loss

in the house
of the toddler
famous
for pulling
from a dryer
an entire
scarecrow
the soon to be
dad
with his one
bad
blind

eye

puts a rock
through hell

whenever the doorbell rings, father says it’s broken.  the outside world must be a quiet place to lose a baby.  wow.  the scratch on my memory makes me think we had a cat

or a mother
with time.

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

this
more than you
will hurt
my neighbor’s
doll

the fireplace is on drugs.  get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

-

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold.  jesus-on-a-stick.  the crown of thorns, extra.  I close my eyes.  I dare the brain.  the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

-

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful.  I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams

dreams only

-

everything happened in 1985.  words don’t mean.  numbers mean.  tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

-

the wind is asleep.  it sleeps outside.

no trick to being poor.  

the beauty of our entire football team
sleeping
with the same

person

equals
that of mother
saying
that she can feel
god’s head
touching
every hair
on hers.  I can hear

my dreams
over

the soundman’s
perfect
fly
bursting
in my brother’s
ear.  never

did I have
an idea

come
to me.

the parents he doesn’t believe in tell him he is god.

I ask him
if it’s true.  

for your own good,
two people meet in person after person.

convinced of its shadow,
the heart
beats.  

I ask
before I ask
again.  the holiness

of my disrepair
belongs to a city
where none are killed
by my son

for being
possible.

[inspected musics]

with birth
we’ve bookmarked

the awestruck / god

still hates
his artist
sister / her flytraps

hang
in hell

/

[access musics]

I have a friend whose father called every basement the devil’s treehouse. a friend who’s here today because she hid a knife. whose brother met god too early on the path to god and whose mother would jump from anything to fix a tooth…

there are people who don’t smoke
who want to

when it rains

/

[thorn]

the dream
bread
of insect, horn

of dust

/

[Ohio musics]

a call-in radio show
whose listeners
are asked
to describe
loneliness
in their own words

(******

farness)

to a coal worker
or a clown

/

[corpse musics]

bread leaves home and food / comes for all / in animal / metaphors / favored / by god

/

[remote musics]

I write in this tongue and pray in another.  

we sleep
and are kissed
by an ear
in three
beds:  train, cow, frog.  

if you’ve seen one roach,
you’ve seen them all.  that’s where they come from.

I couldn’t sleep without first notifying you of my whereabouts.  

they tell me my son
is my school-age
son.  

they tell me his health belongs to a sketch artist.  

     animals of the poor, it is not my life to give.

i.

deep down, I’ve always wanted my brother to knit as if he too would be beheaded

ii.

mother chokes

on the pill
the dream’s
light switch

iii.

I have also seen
the opposite

a ghost
into
a person

iv.

the late swimmer, the fossil

moves god
to brush

odd prank
the minimalist
pulls
on death

the having
of a slow
son
whose mother
reappears
in the grocery

storm

God is being tortured to tell us where we are

[I still bring snow]

I think mom’s new dog must have the bones of a kite. I have a lover, now. a he, a beekeeper. a she if she saddens in the nearness. a nothing, a dowry. ghost china. spacesuits for stillborns. under this blanket, a puppet reads to a doll about light. under that, the shape of what goes blind in a poem. I miss you. plural. I don’t wash my forehead. I still bring snow.

~

[house musics]

no star foreign, brother kisses a spiderless ceiling.

the diver
dead
our father
loved

~

[untitled]

a sick child can be in two stories at once. anthill. calvary. tell neither. I feel like maybe I am talking my way up the dollmaker’s ladder. eat? I won’t the black duckling. god

won’t the owl. angels

just birds
that faint.

~

[response musics (iii)]

...weigh god in photos. free a crow from the gospel of the negative. (we) revisit the medicines. call you dead and call you hawk gone to curl in the lap of a cyclops. ask (we ask) for what landbound thing did your body carry time? your past, every year, the same spot. thing never shows.

~

[response musics (iv)]

a run on mirrors. lowkey exorcisms.

wheelchair, lamb’s minus
one.

mom and the angel
of last
names. dad

and the snowplow.

dad and the ballet slipper.

yea the shadow
of his yawn.

~

[removal musics (xi)]

it’s always your story to which the afterlife gets added. did you even want children? do crows

hear thunder? no butcher believes in time.

~

[how I want you to remember my sister]

in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down

the ice cream truck
with her bible, or

as farewell

to nothing’s
church
of neither

~

[pseudo]

between the house of the first suicide
and the house of the second
there’s one
with a dog door.

the moms all work at the same ghost jail.

the dads say things like

/ finally a parrot I can hear / & / in hell
nobody steps
on their reading
glasses.

the dream is there we put our mouths on. our hands.
the dream
that was nest.

brothers dressed like jesus
brush their teeth
and sisters
keep a tender
thumb.

~

[takeaways from his speech to the poor about what happens overnight]

horror movies are all the same.

babies can’t get amnesia.

I once pointed a starting gun at the head of a thing that wasn’t looking.

sleep is the christ of the mind.

~

[dream saw and dream tooth]

to be
as asleep
as a father’s
left leg

as a birthday
for a window

~

[removal musics (xii)]

if childless, we call it mother.  

-

how long
did you fake
being young?

-

this part / of her poem / is empty

-

three men remove my shoes

-

translates

to yesterbed

-
  
self-portrait in milk

again
this baby
so okay
with dying

/ I was in the outhouse
praying
for deer

a thumbsucker
sold
on the second
coming
of invisibility, or host

of my father’s
most remembered
midwestern

gameshow

/ and my poems
they would not
flower

/ I quoted mom,

two eggs
to make
a phone

fate
will protect
nostalgia

we worship
not god
but the expression
on his face
as he recalls
being washed
in his mother’s
kitchen sink

before god knew it
man needed a mind

to move a band-aid
with.

for you,

the baby
disappointed
in itself.

for me,

3-D glasses
the mask
makers

lose.

I saw nothing fantastic.

an angel
freezing to death
in a somersault. a mirror

coming out of its skin. emptiness

the size of a pea
no pea

empty

there’s a kid on a bike with a machete and she’s run your brother up a tree.  your brother is taking off his clothes and the kid has a toe she treats like a loose tooth.

-

you watch as your mother tattoos the parts of her body she doesn’t like.  

the cross on her ankle
an insomniac’s
plus sign.

-

I say to the bird of the chipped brain
that faith
is fascination’s

bruise…

-

the food is gone that was seen by prayer

sleep
an absent-minded
saint
in the pallbearer’s
dream
of outhouse

moons

sometimes you see the dog
when dog
was wild

and father
with that straw

trying to take
all
the air

and on the dog’s back
a village
or two
burning…

seeing is yeah

useless

how I still bring water
to the stomping grounds
of jesus
on a walk, say,

for son

via Lulu, 25% off all print books with coupon code of MONDAY25

my newest, MOON tattoo, is there.

some poems from the work, here:

[least]

there I was

lightweight, eyesore

baby satellite
and baby
drum

imagination’s
dull witness

my hair
prematurely
cat-torture
grey

my person
the length
of a sandbox
shovel

teeth
a tooth, a commandment
from the past
lives

of milk


[harrower]

it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person.  if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry.  I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek.  it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come.  the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray.  I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path.  for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises.  also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge.  instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

that my father can sleep, god has me put a pea under the resting body of my disabled son.  my three older children are sober enough to call my mother.  my wife puts a gun to a head that’s not in the freezer.  I jump rope thinking I might move into the land of plague my acre of miracle and find for snowfall the farm machine that once cleared lambs from the formlessness of habit.  night, you.

here she is after being kidnapped from her cage.

it doesn’t matter what you write to a soldier
overseas.  I can’t wait

to lose faith
in your arm.

my little ghost kept its baby.

the wolf in stork’s nightmare
speaks dolphin

what do I miss

my blood
your collection
of pea-sized

pillows

some mirror
waiting
for my skin
to crawl-

some noise
being made

some holy
noise-

some terrified toy

with its toy
lover

in sound’s
blindfold

for Mary Ann*

there are more dolls
than people

remember, daughter, our jack-in-the-box

how it studied
all kinds
of music?

pain is religious
grief
is not