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

[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

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.

she began to drool
and removed
her shirt.  she was still
growling
when her face
returned.

I was nightmarishly poor.

     in her thirteenth year, she met her double.  in her fourteenth
she recovered
from no more
than two
illnesses.

she assured her acquired stutter
it was just
an old
friend
of god’s
come to collect
a hair
sample.

fragile
as in
opaque, she leapt
from a balcony
over which
I’d pretended
to flick
cigarettes.    

I ate dry cereal in the dark and thought of spiders.  she called me ****.  I called her toes
air quotes.

she was involved
as a passenger
in a car
accident
on three
consecutive
days.

she predicted herself
saying

the world isn’t after me
I am

after which

I couldn’t
win a fish
that would die.

instead of the *** talk
I play for my boys
a song
that says
****
while they
bleep themselves
into the seeing
of a thing
thought to be
a fear
of apples
when in fact
it’s the worm
they’ve not
witnessed-

the worm
their strong
stomachs
are based
on-

the same worm
that turns
into a spider
spinning
cotton
for nightmare
the one
where father
leaves
for places
part
Palestine
to be closer

to a rock

what is it
dissolves
in the mother’s
foreseeable
presence?

faith
a flashback
god
is having.

she puts down the book once it begins to read like it remembers being written. it’s my book. do you know this man? his sight returned while he ate. boys play freeze tag to sadden birds.

I am at a word
for loss.

the anxious god of my brother’s mirror

said
to me

trees
don’t grow
on trees.

it can’t all be nonsense.  

shoes are being made
for the born.

no one
was fooled
by your
suicide.  more and more

I am more
alone
than the baby

machine.  we touch

touch
via

because god
knocked herself
so silly
I became

pregnant
with a praying
child.  it entered my story

to tell me another

of bomb
removal
and nervous

energy…

we share
an evacuation
process.

there is nothing in this
or that
world.

I am what’s left to say
to the saying.

it’s as close
to fight
heaven.

days before comet

I bite my tongue
this close
to a worm

my brother
jokes
in the barn
about suicide.

the ****
would eat snow
if it came
from a cow.

I ask him
does he think
mom will miss
two cigarettes.

she’ll miss one, she’ll miss yours.

I am half his keeper.

to the man who enters this poem looking for a gun. to the woman whose animals pray. to the giant with a memory like a model airplane. to the boy burying his sister’s ****** nose. to the bottle-fed scarecrow. to the dollmaker on the bridge and to the doll-god of country eggshell. to the possum and to its babies in my brother’s ballcap. to god’s only with god’s disabled. to a shadow’s early work.

as surgery
is to god

If there is
no god
I hope
there’s not

in one room
a light is on
in another
off

-

I live with my parents
hymn to mouth
delivering
fluency
by hand
to the language
of vicarious
passage

-

gender peasantry
is about
to become

a thing

-

mom, dad

I don’t think there’s world enough left to be quiet in

-

my bad hearing
I take it
with me

maybe he begs into megaphone
too quietly
for sign
from man.

-  

I am in the room that sold everything.

-

you who said
it’s not sad.  it’s money.

for the error
of the foot
the feet
are punished.

the ears
call
but nothing
answers.

one hand
is a hand, the other

the hand’s
map.

I came back
from the dead
my handwriting
changed

I want to sit around and do nothing and I want to have a handful of kids that sit around and do nothing.  I will call myself the end of god and ask women inappropriate questions by way of populating obituaries with written code.  you will want to argue and I will have to get up and we will try together to save the child I crushed parts of.  the face of the child will be our slideshow.  I don’t know who you are but I know who you think.

nakedness,

give it time
to recover

a tooth fairy sitting on the lap of a cannibal has just intercepted the message meant for my sister’s eating disorder.  I like that movies have no future.

self

is what I hold
when holding
that

thought

-

as I await
the cyclical
study
of your

poverty

have this friend
says
he’s still
inside

the dryer
had me

burned

-

I have seen
already
my mother
before

she dies

-

because the thing
is a thing
made of wood
father

as if he’s not held
a crowbar

enters

as if
it’s god’s
dark

the night

-

it is mom
the sound
mom

hears

-

if you could take
one paw

from my dog
and replace it

with a hand

which paw, whose hand…

the number we did on our mouths
as boys
as indians

sitting on the earth
calling

with echo
to a lost

friend’s
child

The angel of the zeitgeist thinks death is a lover of short films.



It was a game I played with my sons. Like this: It was cold, and my brother was dead. My brother was dead, and the music said drink. The music said drink, and I sang god down. I sang god down, and god bent himself to a moment in Palestine. God bent himself to a moment in Palestine, and he was othered by his own brain. He was othered by his own brain.



Time uses god to tell time.
I drink myself to life.
Nothing outside of Ohio

is there.

father smokes to make something disappear.  he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected.  when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil.  mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears.  terrify no one your childhood knows.

it’s the day after jesus dies and father is a nightmare. I am the right size to change out his cigarette and I’m good at it. people in handcuffs pray over his legs.

father is a dream. a tree you notice in the dark- mom said that. mom says also that an ant’s heart is everywhere. everywhere in the ant.

jesus wants to be human. my brothers lift his body because my brothers do not yet know that neither will want to put it down. I mean to see them off but am rooted in what the future for a moment believes.

mother is not two people but she does go up and down the stairs as if she’s visiting two museums showing the same coffin. for every other step there’s a step that’s not. if my mouth at night is open, she sleeps outside in the ribs of a tree.

your sister is made of money and silence. has nocturia. death on other planets, oh. we're just poor.

its child
reenactment

and *******

audition

is it okay
to rename
a lost
dog?

mom in the hospital is asking a half-lost boy if he knows about the band-aid keeping her skull together. the boy is afraid and I get that. her hands are confused or small or both. I give the boy a cigarette but yank it back when I see he’s been here before. could god maybe leave a thing untouched. behind us a mummy with one ear

still visible

is crawling with parents to a place.

the water here, brother, is flat. drinkable when it weeps.

what you hear is a mom moving her baby.

god / you can switch
him off
like a bug
in a coffin.

I saw yesterday
your daughter’s
eyesight.

I saw today something using its gums
to open a briefcase
and something else
its teeth
to crack
a beetle.

I was your mother. on television, one could see what other televisions were watching. I tried to tell your father you wanted a bird stuck in a frog’s body. that a sleepy afternoon is the poor man’s insomnia. he hated that I wrote down your thoughts on thoughts. by the time you get them back, you’re someone else.

as for these eyes I’m supposed to get in the back of my head, do they come in like milk?  do they hurt?  will two of my friends suicide each other first?  what does it mean that I’ve seen a boy with a broken nose and bandaged mouth?  how can I tell him it’s okay to follow me to the third floor where my father knocks icicles from the gutter into a bucket and dumps them into a hot bath while sharing again how one got away and barely missed a stroller?  what good will my seeing be if my brother in my mother’s stomach looks as they say like a piece of gum spat into jesus’ blood?

pain is under the impression it’s on the move.

the brain
a fire
that cannot
spread.

in a world of non-competitive
seizing
I show my son
how to waste
his hand
on the hand
signal

that called away
vandalism’s

angel.

the Ohio storm has avoided god.

my son, his rain rake
are both

out of two
of my hands.

but for the death grip
she has
on a popcorn
necklace

the underdeveloped
character
from god’s
desert
memoir

would otherwise
stuff
her face

as if eating
above
a crow’s
grave

had ever
brought back
food

the ten commandments

the blues

my sister’s hair

rubber thumbs

/ bedtime
for the bathed
foot, for the bee

we started

the brainwashed and the blindfolded will then switch children
and you will spend a year
a year
at least
throwing a slipper
at a farm machine

dream: grief a mile
grave
an inch…

you won’t eat much
and your eyesight
will trade its crow
for a bar of soap

your father will fake his death
to distract
room service
from his country
roots
and an insect
inside a stick
will die
and the stick
will live

the future of my ant farm
is the mirror
delivers you
as advertised
to satan.

in this version of my father’s bully
I am always
a boy.

I kiss my son’s foot.
his parachute
does not
open.  I am taken

from the dream
by childbirth

just a face
I make
at god.

the handcuffed man is not two birds.  he says as much on body cam.  his family is one woman howling offsite at those clamoring for an open forum on the etiquette of howling.  his sister desperately wants to ask a question.  her god pauses before speaking.  her god begins with god as my witness.  her hands are done being raised.

for Franz Wright, late*

~

the hand
I don’t wash
has never
been touched.

is the last
woman
on earth
pregnant?

the children are burning
yet

my son
is not enough
to fill
your nose.

I saw god
he was crawling
away
from a clean
diaper.  it would be my only regret

to miss
the encore
of death.

[entries for creator]

to keep my son safe, I invent hole and hat and await the rabbit. in the meantime, I watch videos of daycare workers beating on food as if kids could betray starvation. but really I’m just sad no one knows anymore how to make a fist. say Ohio aloud and you’ll not notice

a pattern.

[entries for undoing]

he go to water
to form’s
disciple
where last he saw
his mom’s wheelchair
momless
in a net
made of spiders

[entries for restraint]

lightning, keyhole, the forgetful
giant
blowing kisses
from bed
to the eyelids
of nostalgia’s
immortal
messenger…

is this how I am beautiful in an airplane bathroom

is this the mother burns her own
ears
to get
god
talking

/ stop reading
you come
to crow

word gets around
the schoolyard
pretty quick
that my father
drove his body
off a cliff
so god
would have a nail
hot enough
to touch.  

I have a tooth
can make it
snow.

the second machine
though equally
godless

deepens

our understanding
of the first. mother

under

the dinner table
that doubled
as the operating.

it’s trash day in ghost town. mock scar, prop mirror. mom wants to make a footstep. dad a mouse. dad a flower. sister a hand with two tied behind her back. me a sound. brother is on his stomach trying to catch something from a snake. from god. the private life of recognition.

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

she can’t stop herself
from knowing
the fleas
are burning
what with
her passionless
baby

its biological
god

her eyes

loot
the imagination

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  he is so happy to have a listener, his microphone could be the ant I lost my voice telling.