she says
three times
the word
brain
to her stomach’s
blue
mirror
and scores
sight’s wardrobe
of rags
in earworm’s
dream

dreamt
I was ****
on rice
beach

-

dreamt a mother had gone to the desert
for fish

her son’s
fish

could eat
while swimming

-

two martyrs
share a camera
both

call
touch

-

dreamt sleep
was the eye’s
blood

relative

hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

[repairs]

the past
misses
your child
also

~

[beauty]

you look like someone
who’s not
famous

god

before he died

~

[campestralia]

i.

hailstorm a midwestern cairn for cracked eggs

hiccup
the small
afterlife

ii.

figures, maternal
step naked from a.m. houses
scream
to be
collected, we’ve all seen

the rooster
reenter
the clock

iii.

birth, go to heaven-

god
is time’s
way
of showing
history

that death
has no
experience

iv.

and the pestersome
bats
are asleep

in the cross
of Ohio
crows

~

[tongue]

a prop
fingerprint
from the object’s
dream
of being
touched
or a pig
that gets
fire
to keep
a diary

~

[empty]

grief
has a swimmer’s
stomach

I have no memory that is not a silence we sang in unison

is this a ghost or the future of my teeth

is your dad still a god

I interpret the wrong dream

do you
forget

(-)

how sad?

god
with a shovel
sad.  

/ does your blood
know where
to dig?

the last time my father sees me, I’m trying to resurrect the girlfriend I hid him from who made me believe I could do anything as well as a man.  who kept a memoir of how she came to own certain dictionaries.  who ordered pizza and had it delivered to a house on fire.

naked, I photograph your bed.  

it takes me where I stand
the low joy
of jumping
rope.  

birth has become a boys club.  

I can weigh two things
with what
you broke.

and god, feeling

left out,
cornered
the present
and waited
for back-up.

Adam was Eve’s great lie.

I eat
on purpose.

the son of my enemy
has an overdeveloped
sense
of absence
and hates
all cows.

gesture 1

The white crow of lost memory warns the wrong past. A baseball shrugs into my brother’s ribs. I fear Jesus, and weep for Adam. Make my knee in the ghost gold sea.

daughter, you reached
your age
and your brother
reached his-

instead of kissing
a nearby head
I became
a kind of writing, a television

inside of which
a cigarette
signaled

to someone
I couldn’t place

that he or she
return
the bar

of soap, the short

life-

I bathed whatever creature
you could get
your hands on

whether it be
your brother

or not, before

or after
abuse-

I beheaded the parents
of thoughtless

children
in this
I was early

when you were with god, I alone doubted the sincerity of your absence

when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft

spot
for god

when brushing them, she asks god
for help
her teeth
are puking.

later, when caught
smoking,
she says
she can’t
keep
from wanting
the cigarettes
to be
shy.

because of who she isn’t
I’ve had to baptize
many
dolls.

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

in my plainness a seesaw

in her dream jaw her dreamboat’s jawbone

in our daily belly

in the church of rolling our own
a film
ghosting
a film

in a rug made of bread a tooth made of bread

in mannequins where small things kneel that are living

in claw-marks and in jigsaws of the crucifixion

in

crows balloons of the strangled

sadness
in something
my brother
ate-

retrace them all

the found
poems

the bottle takes what it can from the baby’s mouth.  the stirring motion delivered to the hands of a misfit prophet.  the knowledge of my father’s people that god is too old of a lover to get satan’s attention.  the silence my mother kept quiet for.  the second afterlife of a single breast.

a harp
is the imaginary
secret
a spider
keeps
in the clockmaker’s
eighth
dream

the ball is not red. now stare

at the ball
that isn’t

(my half of the seeing eye dog

for yours
of sickbed)

oh,

our abuser’s futuristic nudes…

/ the angels
want
their dead

any word is the memory I have of it.

god’s gift to god is all boy.  is doomed to repeat melancholy in real time.  is punching his *******.  is trying your hand at territorial absence.  is not feeling it on the day of the mime’s vigil.  is bombed.  is local.  is thought to have opened the book of sticks.  is not swallowing.  is eating from the angel’s dream the only fish that can stop at nothing.

[confession musics]

I planted
a gun
on myself
in a dream, also

dad
I was faking
sleep

sometimes death

~

[blank elegy]

after death
nothing
(oh citizen)
of god

~

[phase musics]

not all of us have a sister and not all of us have a sister whose first job was to run security for a petting zoo.

not even in dream does she have her own room.

her lifetime of sickness
god’s
hidden fondness
for

/ the tattoo.

when she gives birth she gives birth in a field
to a thing that records
her lost
nothingness

& we visit

where ****
we cricket.

~

[diagnosis musics]

what moon
were you on
when you lit
that match

when they could still be made

the sounds
that choke
your son

~

[prognosis musics]

get a rabbit.

put a penny in the microwave.

run.

ask
for a third
breast

any
size.  burn

on a kiss

your son’s
foot.

pretend every day

it’s just
for one.

~

[known musics]

as a birthmark
on a fingernail
the boy
is young
and scratches
into mother
the unauthored
south
of illness

-

photo is a color
is a scar
raised
on or by
(**** it)
the moon

-

I have my health / can hide

from god

not all of my childhood was spent in a stopped car listening to my mother wonder aloud if the monkey in the light was okay.  not all of my childhood took time.  I was the tooth my teeth chose.  my father was a magician because his hands had a terrible memory.  he touched only those things that had turned into what they were.  stone is the maker of stone.

a mother

as if
merely
on leave
from that place
she never
once a mother
was

begins to write
stories

populated
by illiterate
men
and men
meeting
to her knowledge
in a misplaced
fog
that god
recalls
having
on hand
might his people
blame
randomly
his wife
on a childhood
disappearance
which exists

as a recollection
of sorrow
at birth
in a town
of vandals
and caricatures
with no need
for immediate
representation

[response musics (i)]

what nostalgia is to angel, eyesore is to animal

most mothers
hate
being filmed

there is the way I hold my son
& there is
the way I hold my son
while running
in place

tornado means
I am touched
in a house
with no
basement

wherever it is your father goes
the postcards
there
are small

oh to see jesus
walk at all

~

[response musics (ii)]

I thought girlhood the boyhood of grief

childcare, handprints, the failed hearts
of octopi

toy / on a stair / left there / by doll

god (memory)
making its way
through the useless
infant

myself
an impressionist

(because all

my mothers
faint

~

[a prayer for the tall mother whose cigarettes void brevity]

piano that disappeared
milk
that didn’t…

feather in the stomach
of my angel’s ghost

~

[cleaning the body small and boy]

the brain a ****
in the remoteness of god

~

[removal musics (ix)]

what a quick study
addiction is

this longing
my father’s

(her childhood a pinning of morose insects)

no horse but maybe
one
that pillows
a tree’s
broken
hip-

this poem, lonely expert
in a town of goats

~

[guest musics]

sand in her ear
she goes
as a seashell
her small
joke
a way
of living
on land
with the ghost
of her unbathed
child
her mother
calling clothesline
the scarecrow’s
scarecrow

~

[how to make a body]

sleep
until you feel
it passing
the slow
mattress
drowsy
and afloat
designed
for god

throw anything
you can find

stick, stone, nest, honeycomb

bird
the weight
of wasp

- name
what lands
with a friend
you can touch

~

[being alone went by so fast]

we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,

inventory, very motherly.

this one-man radio show about a father looking for his mouth. this tornado.

my first owl was a bee-loving tick. my first milk
was jigsaw

milk. being alone went by so fast.

~

[musics, other]

mother’s
farsick
palm, father’s

pack
of disappearing
nails-

our goldfish
insomnia

~

[toying with object permanence in kidnapper’s invisible world]

how
to unfossil
the mourned
boy
kissed
we believe
on the wrist
by
(we don’t)
the last
to experience
déjà vu

~

[lawn musics]

books on arson, grammar, vandalism…

god, multiple owners.

a typewriter
touched by father
at night.

the electric chair my brother imagined
& the hair
my sister...

adam (who’s never known the age of eve

when father heard
it said
that god
reads only
to children

he began
talking to himself
behind
his mother’s
back.

a poor person
sad
about pillows, a stick person

sad
for a match.

snow, we let it fall. our cigarettes nod off. ear shaped mouths fill with cake. our mothers open windows, and worry. lovers leave a bed, unmade, on the moon. a stolen truck swerves to miss a charging bike. a young boy, mid angel, says he can feel the blood in his body. he says it to a girl and she punches him. I wish to remove the clothes of every figure we drew as children. a blind boy with acne makes light of god and god’s face. we call the boatman’s wife from different hotel rooms. our sisters refuse towels and we put our hands in and out of a glove. our uncle

we can hear him ******* on a broken lawnmower. we pass our father and **** him for taking, already, the cat’s frozen head from the madman’s shovel.

the tree was gone but its shade remained.  he told her the war had a humble middle.  they bathed together in a mattress on top of the shade.  they agreed to avoid the uselessness of their youth by forgiving animals.  she had been a writer.  he would be a bed of one nail.

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.

self-harm

a nostalgia
that suffers
touch…

assault?

a hobby

the ******, day one:  I have every photo I’ve ever been in.  mom is a wreck.  her and the dogcatcher keep mailing each other the same knife.  death worries it will be made to visit the ghost it promoted.  dad lets christ use the oven.  I can’t get over this idea I have.  an entire language to mask a word.

Look at what god was given. What did you do with your last silence. You sharpened yourself in a whale and let your baby die in an owl. Yourself has no world in this place. None of my cousins are dead but I'll never see them again. My sickest son has no hell. Have no hell.

I call this piece

mime
reacts
to roadkill

I guess I was eating
on very little
sleep

sister was here
she pointed to a crow
saying

best tell
that bird
brother

the power’s

out, what it felt like
to her

us laughing

was that god’s
chosen
alternate

had made a stomach
could turn babies
into commas

as if night
knows when
to sleep

my roommate’s father lives in a skipped year rewatching a tv show about what poor people film with a puking man I call future

poor, yes.
poor in that
what he does
more than once
is considered
routine.

there is no one to do the abandoning.

the last of a kind
had all these
thoughts
and first
choice.

she turns her back on beauty
and is abandoned.

I put god under my wing.
he makes it real.

my dogma for his koan
for my koan
for her.

it is not struck
after all
this tree
where the lightning
bolt
starts.

higher birds
strike a chord
in god’s hand
on god’s fork.

it’s no small animal that the world came back for us

two birthmarks

one
temporary, one

invisible-

when god
was young

my mother speaks
to those
I silence
in tongues.  confesses

she is not
an animal
person.  when drunk, she knows

to push
to the right
the stroke
ravaged
newborn.  as a word

barren
is a man’s
word.  as a thought

it’s a keeper.  if one asks

where one
beats a dog
I answer

in front of children.  it’s the question

leaves a mark
on the heart.

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire

I am looking for the mark on my body that will tell me how near I was to you when I fell asleep. we can’t know where touch has been. the third animal to which I pray

was it always
deaf

this poem
is for
my daughter.

for the longest time
it was called
the hand & the dark.

I want her to think
it was written
quickly.

the people are looking for something that tells them what to show.  my father can’t hear the storm for the honey on his knees.  at birth, a blown eardrum gives the kid a way out of making friends.  a sermon about washing a mountain with a rock takes a word from my mother’s mouth.  grief is a good listener.

[on seasickness]

my father saw his first ghost and his first UFO on the same day    

-

canoe

of heartbreak

a wound

is

-

a fish
occurring
to fish

~

[tooth musics]

I patch my son’s nightmare with the shadow of a fish

-

Cain
had a sister

he wouldn’t
****

-

raise mosquito
the lost earring
of christ

~

[existential passivity]

sister
a loneliness
for which
I was framed

~

[removal musics (xv)]

whose purple thumb is found in a grey ball of yarn
has remembered
every baby

~

[removal musics (xvi)]

have you written slowly enough for things to happen?  lovely

wrist
I will eat
what is there.  a flower, a clumsy

angel

touching the nerve
of a ghost

~

[reading]

inside
an apple
by the light
of a tooth

where nothing
has belonged
to god

~

[starlit]

after staring all day at a birthmark, father asks can he wear my glasses. done growing, sister breaks her nose. shadows mother from birdbeak to mudmask.

~

[stopping to pray]

how angelic
the nervousness
of insects
offering acne
to god

/ to glacier, crow is not
yet a thing

~

[removal musics (xvii)]

those first animals
were angels
who’d either
slept
in their clothes
or caught
god
eating

/ has memory
always
denied
being young, do I look  

shape
like death
is an idea

shape is waiting
to have…

~

[cont’d]

I am tired of being curious. what I mean is my son is cheering for a photograph. what I don’t mean is you can’t drown a ventriloquist. here is what I remember: his body bouncing around inside the ambulance as if the ambulance wasn’t there. what I don’t

is that first, that invisible, pill.

~

[moth to moth]

a shadow
a ghost
lost
to drugs, hey

you wanna
later
touch
the blood
with bug spray, if

say our stomachs

have the same
mother

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

the bear and the elephant

the last
believers
in the integrity
of suicide’s
memory

/ nothing speaks
to a brother’s

fascination

with stones

/ for light

bend it backward
the baby’s
thumb

i.

to be called forth
from nothing

how perfect

/ no melancholy
is fair
to insect

ii.

would that we could be separated
later
by birth

that we might enjoy
shape

/ the darkness of being remembered

I didn’t say it was good

this idea
for a child’s
mask

/ it turns
what I know

the stomach

in more
than two
nightmares
now
I’ve been
towel dried
by a father
whose baby
was given
a brick
for sounding
/ scrapegoat

this word
at mirror’s
grave