in the oar I broke on my brother’s knee
I found
a human
tooth.

here is a lamb
floating
in the reflection
of a star.

for a god
who body shames

birth

be

ultrasound

be

what is really a group of nudists holding a séance

in a treehouse
in Oz

it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.    

the recent absence
of nothing.

they met after years of sleeping in the same bed

like two peeping toms
in a haunted
time machine

god to slow spread of reincarnation

this, from death’s
newspaper

–

found: nose of the crow-eyed infant

the book is a mourning vessel for what its reader stands to lose.  I have a father for every type of silence.

*** as something that has an end.

evidence of god
provided
to beings
of proof.

I will offer that I had children
because I myself
could not
shun
authority.  post-harm

pick a word
you’ve heard
me say.

there’s no body for the soul to go into.  as a murderer can better tell you where the survivors are, a baby can worship its mouth.  I hear coughing when I’m about to be gentle.

~

dream enters the girl I’ve decided to have.  you know her mother as the doctor of my impostor.  as the one who said the battery is real.

~

I abandon my cane like a robot that wants to climb a tree.  there’s a mattress that’s not the river she pulled it from.

the memory
before I have it
of this terrible
thing
I’ve done

/ and the fish
the flaggers
of blue
runways
are swimming
two by two

/ and god has no one

as I am not haunted by the tormented shallow,
I am not afraid.  a jump scare
does nothing
for depression’s
heartbeat.  
memories of abuse
are not
abuse.  I recall you turned in
early
and the dream
wasn’t ready.  the blindfold
is patience
that may or may not
arrive.  the stick
a stick.

I made for an action figure a family tree.  my mother came apart in the doctor’s hands.  my smallness entered the smallness of my god.  a side effect of ****** recognition.

the bean counter
of cigarette butts
our father
sits on the roof
reading aloud
from silence.

it is mother
has a mind
for arranging
furniture.

it is dog hears digging.

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

–

shade: the folder of my clothes

holding a baby
as if she’d
had it thrown at her
my mother
came out of the museum-

it had stopped raining
it had also
stopped
snowing

and people
were giving me
money

I exhaust my children by going back and forth on god

mid-cigarette
my sister
remembers
to smoke.

god hops
in place
on one foot.

most of our health
is rabbit
health.

not for nothing
the look on your face

boy

when you’ve nowhere
to put a baby.  

also,
the drawings that didn’t make the bible.

she responded to her critics by word of mouth.


never utter anything more
than you can burn.


she carried baby dead to baby dead yet.
she had questions.


never be pretty when you’re sad
nor repeatedly
document.


things have been pretty killed
up in this *****.


let there be god said the heat
the baby
lost.


never is a lamp
unto the world
enough lamp.


beaten silly
this it
becomes god.

as you are sworn
to silence
by the man
your father
skips lunch
to feed

it is okay
to drift
between

(stay with me)

brother
suicide
and brother
note

the twins
of an only

sorrow

take
to the sinking
city
of god’s
jack-in-the-box
a stick

from the wand’s
dream

a demon with three days to live is given to my father’s body.  in this, father finds luck to be neutral.  mother is a good explosion, brother is a bad.  when the dust settles, sister can see the baby in her stomach.  it is my belief and it is also god’s that our food is the food we forgot to poison.  to pray, I am left with little more than an animal’s halo and two representations of what you were not seriously clawed by.  in your sleep, you move me into mine.  a finger shows itself to the back of my throat.

we’ve had trouble conceiving an ugly child.  the stray will come back when it wants to play dead.  name the third mother in Solomon’s nightmare.  places I’ll never be

I’ll vanish
from

I king my scalp with smoke-damaged eggs. a man is here from the church of predictable witness. each sound is worse than the last.

as it had not been afforded the opportunity to go mad, we called it woman.  its baby wasn’t getting any older.  our plan was to use its house blindness to burn the oven but its baby got underfoot and its dog whistled our cat to a boil.  my guess is we were trying to be men without blood.  everything we hungered for began to taste the same.

the one
my absence
ceases
to amaze

who eats
the eaten
way

who cares the same
for bird, for gum

the god of where
the chewing’s
done

were it not a mouthful, she’d have been disfigured by the mirage touched by god to oversee the transformative reading of the trapdoor’s bible of knock-knock jokes

i.

the buzzard my brother keeps alive

ii.

the bowl, a clock

the dogs
avoid

iii.

dizziness

that strikes
the struck

I know it is common
in drawings
to place the dream
above the boy
having it.

the contents of my mourning
include the phrase
I acquired
in secret
from a man
whose legs
were not
crushed.

I can hear myself seeing.

memory
of god
make
no bones…

I thought
water
slept

/ a pair of handcuffs
from the mermaid’s
dream

this black tooth

my time
as a ghost

the man says I can’t seem to get out of my own way.  the woman says I have a child inside.  the girl at my bedroom window says it’s the same rock every night that hits her in the back of the head.  the boy says he is silly with love.  he says this as his eyes cross then close before I can see them touch.  I am told by all four my mother and father live just down the road.  that at times they are not made for this world.  and at others, not ready.

I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.

uncle has been all day figuring the teeth of his that will never touch.  he has this riddle he calls code for what to get the man who has nothing.  if I can get him to stop biting his wrists I might be able to chalk something won’t need moved.  when I was born, I was small enough to fit in most mouths.  uncle is not the tiniest bit mad.  he holds babies only when they are hungry and he is not.  those with angels think those without are selfish.

I am with my wife and son and we are drinking from the shell of a turtle a soup the locals use to dilute a rain’s grief. I kind of know that something bad is going to happen to both twins.  my wife is looking for a wheelchair and then for a place to hide it.  my son is saying grace in the only spot he’ll ever be.  some of his white pills turn blue as a laugh track denies three times the thunder’s loss.

/ barn etiquette. a rabbit a volcano’s dove.

sadness
is suggesting
I use
the email
of someone
I lost

the give in my tooth makes me think my father has two left hands.

the give
in my brother’s
brings me
to the tree
that took
his last.  to that day

he sang
god is glove
to the hose
that broke
my mother.  I am at the end of my blood.  

there’s a rareness

to him
not many
see.

in the blue church of my father’s thirst

I wear it

(hunger)

like an eye-patch, and emerge

starless

from the uncooked blood
of my shadow

for Kazim Ali*


two sons
share a pencil
then trade
ghost plate
for alien
stomach

by the time the robots believe in god, some of us want to be here. Misty keeps ripping her clothes off to make us think she’s cutting herself. I am not in love with her.

–

my son
his stomach
is a nightmare

–

Misty says making it hard is like pulling ticks from an owl. Misty says it is up to us to find the woman carrying the statue of her frozen brother.

–

a. act like a baby, not an indian
b. eat the way eating was born

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?

as I hope to one day hear
the heartbeat of hell
I’ve sent my son
to save a land
of giants

when I think about you

I don’t

my mother she applies a silence to her lips.  I don’t hear her go but can see that she is gone.  my brother falls asleep trying to remember the last time someone carried a tune.  the movie of his life is left by yours.

my mother as a young woman once attempted

in the car of the train her father took to work

to eat her hands.

it was a story she put an end to
but not before
I lost a tooth
putting my baby
brother’s
feet
in my mouth
to keep
them warm.

my brother as a baby
was far
too small.  one might say
he had the brain

of a snake.

in a ******* on fire
the arsonist
fills
the mouth
he is trying
to leave

(it is not hunger that eats the horse)

I am past the age of what
in a former life
I died as, a spoon

is a fork

asleep in the hand of god

a mother cuts her hair in the house they’ll drag her from

/ my hands, proof

I was born
at night / it is normal

for a woman
to have lost

to a vision
from Ohio
her speaking

part

dreams my dialect coach never had. birth and the boring outcomes of immediacy. oh grief, the first to mourn the fast learner. it’s your story, but you can’t name it resurrection, your spacecraft, without considering the mortality of your audience. I sleep crooked while watching ugliness. I love my brother like a leg but he brings to choir exit music for nomads. what does god think of the future? we carry the virus that killed our ghost.

what in the history of blood
has blood
discovered

mom is hanging laundry from the future

regret is still looking
for a god

I learn cocoon
and boyishly
cross my legs

the lightning
when you saw it
was it clean

no
was my son’s
seventh
word.

I had asked
permission
to record
what I grandly
thought
to be
the rhetoric
of the ****.

my ****** daughter
had grown by then
to say
nearby
that heaven
is the distance
to heaven, and god
uses
too many
birds.

no ear
nor entry
in the diary
of my mouth

ached.

the map my birth destroyed
for trying
to mother
place

-

the swallowing sound my father starved beside

coming he said from a stone

-

mourner at the tomb of insect

the language
I use
to warn
my voice