the untouchable redness
of certain
rabbits

the sunburnt scar on a fisherman’s arm

mom works nights answering the phone for a nameless thing

/ which sister
gets
the strawman, or

a narrator’s
struggle
with pica

/ what example
we set
for sleep

my father
is like my father
on acid.

mother, she cleans
house
by hanging
a painting
of a floor
in the room
where the floor
exists.

the dog
is an outside
dog
dangerous
to some.

god’s alright
but escalates
quickly.

historically, I am the boy
my presence
requested, the great

stranger
who prolongs
the body
of my birth
and death.

I show signs of having been alone beside a machine.  I can count on my fingers the fingers I’ve lost.  I am not like a newborn.  my feet are each one smaller than the last as are my meals.  like my father before me, I have a hard time being drawn to what attracts me.  like my mother, I cook for those who’ve gone in and out of the eating disorder condoned by the church of sleep.  like sister, I watch as my brother sets forgiveness as a trap for god.  not every animal I see is an illusion.  my eyes open twice to be flashed by the same short life.  anything I name I give a prime number.  appear to the sick I remember.

my brother the mud wrestler wants to know if we’re any closer to finding our father.  I examine the droppings and say someone is feeding you in your sleep.

ask a man what a rabbit hole means
he’ll say
logistics

/ everything I had was in that mirror

the kids
they are calling
the girl
my mother
an oyster

-

all elbows
they are calling
them
my privates

what I think
are teeth

-

what I know of bees
can fit
in the bee
my brothers
lose

-

lost

but for this letter, the word is silent.

you are not yet
my maker.

his observations
exhibit
decline.  hers

display
animals
that forgive.

everything buried
is buried
in god.

the brain
as it designs
a plotless
thing.

a man
home
after exposing
himself
to children
of late
life
blindness, the man

we bike to
while able-

the suicide
of a different
man, a changed

man-

the two men
briefly
neighbors

both refusing

for the non
emerging
newborn

my mother’s
failed
cake.

language keeps us from understanding the world.

spoken, it is god finding god.
spoken, it is the white male

white
emulation-delayed
male

writing his father
of this thing
that’s a thing-

infant wrestling as a cure for road rage.

a baby screams because it doesn’t know that anything is wrong.  

the wind has no past.  

when my brother kicks, my mother says

hands off
he’s getting
a haircut.

the false
gods
of god
were simply  
evacuated

noises the poor can’t make

and mugshots

my lord

lists* (iii)

with what there is
of my tongue
I think
to reach
the back
of my head

-

televised

offsite, a cat
bathes
its softened
image

lists (iv)

a bruise
on any
visible
child
is

the father’s
jump
on winter


lists (v)

the rare
the black
the eyes
come in threes

killing the firstborn is so yesterday. let’s be lonely. maternity leave for clowns. ant farms on airplanes.

place a wet diaper on a skateboard and send the skateboard across a non-busy street. we call this summer. the older kids arrange on a stretcher the pieces of a woman’s bathing suit. the older kids come for the skateboard. our tortured turtle is bad with names. the tractor has yet to reach the deer. this is also summer. the orphan keeps two diaries.

15% off all print books and free mail shipping at Lulu through the 31st with coupon code of SHIPSAVE16

my books are there.

~

some poems from books available:


[male music]

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

~

[afteresque]

what bone am I, stillness?

what can I tell my son
I carried?

what is it knows me
that isn’t god
by the humans
I am
in my sleep?

infancy, what overtakes
your period
of mourning?

~

[pocket]

I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined. nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave. the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube. my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his. mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost. I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog. I have not heard of the spoon that has a past. something in my stomach wants to see a star.

~

[church bell]

the waters recede and god

good for him
saves

with the carcass
of a deer

mama’s
parking spot

/

unrelated, I have begun to see

the fat kid we surrounded for pulling a knife on a bird

to have named

the animals
and later
to have only
two boats, two people

you’ve known-

older poems

~

[dream’s fossil]

dear eggshell belly. dear mother. dear church of my father’s owl. dear Ohio. dear owl the deaf bee’s church.

~

[the lost]

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread. her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on. her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours. her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door. when the door opens, any dog will do.

~

[men hermetic]

the crow
the fine print
of nowhere.

the bomb shelter
the rumored locale
of a mother’s
laundry room.

the bare cross
the teething
toy
a baby
bypasses
for the neck
of the woman
waiting
for her junk
to fall.

the mare
the anxious
bike.

~

[cessation psalm]

the less said about god’s addiction to brevity

as heard
by the angel
of birth

~

note: 15% off all print books and free mail shipping on Lulu with coupon code of SHIPSAVE16

the narrative that haunts my flood story never has two words for the sticks I rub together.

the mother treats her mouth like a net she’s failed to eat through.

no one is talking to the pregnant angel who can’t ****.

film 7

Angels cut themselves in invisible changing rooms. Ohio covers god’s tattoos with ice. I am watching on my phone a television lose blood in front of my son’s old breathing machine. Fire isn’t everywhere.

when what we thought
had entered
our father
left

we used him
as an alarm

god is coming
and mom
is vacuuming
stones

(xiv)

/ seen shoving a burnt doll into a book return

the nobody
birth
reminds

(xv)

puppets for dental hygiene

god
the animal
on auto
pilot

(xvi)

the overmedicated bear cub

and the jawbone
from snake’s
nightmare

/ driven by flower

this moving
van
of loss

(xvii)

orphaned by imagery,

the vision
comforts
foresight.

writing
is a non
event.

ghost? my one

for boredom’s
three.

I am at the tail end of being but a child.  aloud, ghost sounds to me like guest.  the dog looks to be eating its paws with its hands and will do so until my hands are gone.  influenced by the simple living of trauma, mother’s handwriting emerges to document itself.  brother he is on the dreamy side of becoming the product of a his-and-hers overactive realism.  in his own words, father is moved by one thing and by what went on in it.  a shadow picking up litter, I love him both.

good for
not much-

dear father I am your son the lesser of two unreliable narrators-

(do continue)

good for
a shadow’s
shade

and for your mother
who wanted this

haunted
by you

bird

I still
kind of
have…

the boy on my shoulders says my hair is on fire. it is our longest running joke. he laughs so hard my ribs fall asleep in his childless stomach. he takes the cigarette from behind my ear...

his cough is a paintbrush. no father can **** god. the resurrected miss death.

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.

Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.

I am reading
the book
that keeps me
from palm

-

during your pregnancy
an interactive
apathy
prepared
an alternate
witness
for the witness
to eat

-

I liked
your poem
the panther’s
boat

this one sleepwalker
hung
our laundry, this other
left mom
a rattlesnake

some man was mowing drunk
mad about church, a recent batch
of runt
lightning, that baby’s
age

we stole eggs

more
than we needed

if caught
our mom
was a widow
and brother

would name
our church

infant boy, god gave your body all the bone it can hide.

bite me
when your teeth
are hot.

your son’s disorder
is used
by some
to draw
a straight line, a sleeping
circle…

-

my soul is eating all my food

-

agenesis
of what
of nostalgia’s

panic

(I know by cobweb)

the childbearing age

of a ghost, that dream

has taken
mirror, and also

that I cannot reopen
the mouth
my mouth

erased

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.

at a costume party thrown by starvation

kissing the baby of the creature
that taught
Judas

alien
that I failed
my boys

are lonely

this foster boy
known for changing
his name
back

and forth
who lit a cigarette
without removing
the paper bag
from his face

has the only
photograph
of my mother
my mother
took

as a word, plot seems artificially unaware of its absence from a book of baby names.

online, abandonment needs a vacation.

/ GOD

comes home to a punching bag in a treehouse. to a breathing machine being fixed by a marsupial. to a son talking himself down from cooking-show fatigue. to a clockmaker’s lab rat

putting a spell
on a boat.

the father tells his children how he is not surprised by how much they’ve grown.  they are healthy, after all, and he is not death. the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  perhaps her pain is political.  her pain is god’s.

a tacklebox in a prison yard

a wasp
from scarecrow’s
childhood, also

nostalgia

the forgetful native
indigenous
to absence

suicide
is death’s
unicorn

we couldn’t get a horse because we had this one dog would fake sick.  had this nurse would sleep with her shoes on.  I don’t know how many of us there were.  I had more fevers than god had footprints to follow.  had an insect to offer worry.  we were poor and perfect when pretending to be.  father had a hat that remembered our names and mother a kite she called the birthday of a ghost.  I wanted to be a girl but my sorrow was too southern.  had a sister and she asked her baby what do angels have.  I never saw for myself the ransom note from hell we couldn’t touch.  parts came in pairs so both would answer.

our forgetful
makers

hunting
elsewhere

tonight, I stole two beers from my brother

two gods
whose vexations
share
a city

I am still not sure
what I’ve requested

asylum
or sanctuary

I don’t pray

I read a book to see a man do nothing

to see a man do nothing to a woman
I volunteer
for sleep
studies
and read
this back

to the lord

SECOND MACHINE

I watch movies naked and lightning tattoos god into becoming an addict.  

BELONGING MACHINE

God
up late
with silent
babies

dropped on its head for saying footprint, the baby begins its work of collecting only those sounds it can scare.  its father mothers otherness as one who watches a film to make the world worse.  its brother hunchback and sister backstroke are viewed as two stomachs waiting for hunger to dry.  because my mouth is empty, I talk all the time.

[otherhood (i)]

loneliness the born artifact of my father’s rented dream. god the hobby of replaced machines. forgiveness the eldest stowaway and mistress of the seasick hologram. the monster you became to attain formlessness. mom a rabbit. her dying frog. hunger erased by what it loves.

~

[otherhood (ii)]

it is not real, of course

the trailer park
on fire, the accepted

field-

wheelchairs
crossing
without us

I thought
I’d abused
myself

it is not uncommon, when placed on its stomach for the first time, for the infant to break a rib.  

man creates the world as something to sleep on.  

some water is trapped underwater.