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.

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 day the crows
flew into

youtube

the thing
each crow
stood for
stopped
advancing
as did

god’s future
but the men
and women
of god
kept eating

animals
and kept
praying

for individuality
to come from
being
the first

to gut
a mirror
and god

himself
began to write
a poem
with nothing

behind it

I prayed, yes
but in
a dream-

ghost
was a book
with pictures

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

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

the story of her brother’s drowning
her father’s
haunted
toolbelt

told
separately

to the arsonist
who

while pulling
her by
the leg
from the house
of her sister
the fasting
mudwrestler

said

dig, you

tunnels
torch
the dark

no longer
a god
the male
finds mother
hard
to worship

-

I am
what I imagine

eaten

-

who the eyes

undress
in Eden

accepted
an illustration
for her father’s
book
of madness
called

a shortage
of recent

absence

the woman who doesn’t believe in light
can fix your mouth

-

I have no double
to love
my triple

-

the man with no teeth
borrows
a ladder

having one word for my voice, I would read to death from the book death borrowed. my armpits were those of a mannequin thrown from a horse. I gave no birth. I ate what I could of the kidnapper’s dream. upside down fish. crippled fish. boatloads of black sheep

puzzled
by the eclipse.

the homeless woman pokes my belly and says in all creation I’ve got no middle.  says she catches herself sometimes pretending to be homeless.  says we ought to stone god.  says we do with prayer.  says the first spider she talked to could speak but didn’t.  says she has the two jobs my dad’s between.  says she can hear mom or mama in the radio of my brokenness.  says angels can’t go mad, can’t parallel park, can’t feign surprise.  says she eats with her ears.  says she can stop anytime.  says I’m someone’s sugarbones.  says sound is what god knocks over looking for his mouth.  says it could speak its name and it wasn’t spider.  says to hell with speech though it be our singing’s salt.

unreal as it may have been, it was a trauma only he could imagine. recovery is a prison run by fish. light’s one song

the past is bleeding

Dear Ethel Cain

Despair is a food group. I had to read the line again that said my brother’s hand was eating out an angel. Cannibals surprise their mothers in Eden. Is skin still the longest dream? My fake sleep is not your fake sleep. I thumb my own eyes in the shepherd machine.

she remembered
not
his suicide
but her brother’s
cough, how it ruined

not
the scarecrow’s
silence

but the etiquette
of the crucified

comb sick
in the dunce
cap
dark

my son
means
to impress
his hair

Letter 081124

Dear Ethan Hawke

I don’t write to anyone. I am hated. In photos I am the photographer’s ghost. In the dream I wear a girl’s bathing suit and someone shoots me in the foot. This is how I learn to swim. Thigh is a perfect word. The way it dies in the mouth. Mouth is dead. Who can tell. Only god. In Ohio at every fair the young say eat me until I’m young. We make jokes about crowhio and about the baby’s stomach born without an inside voice. The spider in my ear comes out a wasp. I don’t want my kids to see me do anything. Spiders get toothaches and angels, erections. Wasp is on its own.

was the fruit
made them want
teeth

the boy
all
of eleven
years

pauses
somewhere inside
his eleventh
cigarette
to say

earthly life
is god’s way
of telling time
and

as a father
who exists
only
to the kids
of others
I ask him
the whereabouts
of his
but hell

I know
before he tells me
the *******’s

with
my mother
writing ****
for his boy
to say
to girls

you’re not small enough to be alone in the world.

old ghost-brain
gets a bike.

a small fire
in the room
with all
the pigs.

a school
without
a shooting.

lost
like you
my memory
twice

days after **** is celebrated for having

no

anniversary / mom

stops looking
at her feet

~

days before I keep it from my ghost that I am in the wrong

person / dad

tells me that if I concentrate hard enough I can get god’s fingers stuck in a bowling ball

he has the look of a woman with a place to die. he grounds my father with a sickness reserved for flying creatures. he owns nothing. his people are a hospital my mother calls one too many. his prayers replenish absence. he counts in the garden an invisible populace whose dreams my dreams were having.

[sailboat]

his sister, three years away from leaving social media, has a boyfriend whose depression is a feminist. darkness lands again the role of weather. on paper, his cough is somewhere between cricket and cross.

~

[nymph]

yesterday I sent to my mother grief as an attachment

-

it continues to matter
the spell
your god
is under

-

(what began as nostalgia is now

~

[concern]

I pass my son in the hallway

instar
and throe  

our unpracticed sleep
our elbows

he learns this way
of my mother, her father, the nothing

time does

because there is more than one city, my brother falls asleep in the back of a taxi he’s pretending is an ambulance.  my sister remains close to father but not closer than he is to the mouth he used on the woman who reached me before I could get the neighbor girl to eat a rock for cussing at the egg she’d given my baby’s name.  it’s turned up again, the dog whistle I buried.  my brother likes to say he is no later than the man his dying adores.  I still show faith my signature move.

poetry and suicide
the two left feet
of a child
forced to play
horseshoe
horse
a waste
of strangeness

for Katherine Osborne*

falsehoods
I was sure
to say
to a horse, things like
god is sending
his middle
child
to collect
a drop
of my daughter’s
blood, or

it’s a sin
to be
1989, things I felt

I owed
the horse, that were
horse-like
in their stillness, that went
nowhere
when nowhere
was

come fly
or flat
earth

the dark’s
*****

I’m here for the music  

-

you can keep
your baby
I’m here
for the swing

-

I write
on the days
my son
is sick

-

if heard

I overhear

there was more
to him
in the womb

-

no dream is strong enough to put a hospital
on the map

-

in heaven

the past
is the present
that left
for earth

how am I not a dream? I am not a place. I can’t say rabbit but can robot. my god knows one story. those I count when I’m sad are those I count when happy. grandfather means pipe-smoke and grandmother an outdoor pool. their daughter is a lamb-haunted horse. I see Ohio as an ear but still I ask what happened to the ear in question. I don’t sleep unless I need proof I never. I am older than the brothers I scare. travel is my sister’s vehicle. my dog is chewing on a rubber hand. it can’t be dark in both.

cousin
she pierces
her own
ears, her mouth

a rubber
toad
maybe won

at the fair

/ uncle
wants
we save
the blackest

marshmallows

might he see
again
his alien
dentist

/ an animal
with no
stomach

I am at the beginning of my rope.  my son has run out of nostalgia.  in photos, I look most like one who’s forgotten everything.  my son disagrees and says I look like I’ve seen a ghost.  I think this is our first fight.  we take it outside where none of our punches land.  it isn’t long before we are throwing rocks into a darkness that’s just arrived.  such rocks come back to us in birds, or as.

I appear to your helplessness

I don’t know how to feel bad for people no more.  I’m 40 now but grew old near some woods that had in them a creature whose name came outta nowhere.  it brought babies to those close to me to have them raised on stories of missing children and by the one movie we were allowed to watch.  not since stone number three have I been a spitter.

you’re not beautiful.  night

makes a mean
eyeball
soup.  

hell is a chicken-scratch.

ask not, spit not

the low
milk
of absence.

see red for crow.

the boys are off to hang a turtle.  I didn’t know I felt nothing.  her father impressed a piano from puppet heaven.  but pregnancy was all god knew.

acolytes of the short leash, light

has more
to say
than god / think of me

angel
as a hand
from a haunted
house

I have gone without god to see the hands of my hands.  

I tell you they were there.  

I tell you
I am the same
distance
from

my eyes.  

christ, kid.  

the present
alone
takes three
ghosts.

god

is the beast we believe has power
over
the dog
that answers
to bloodbath

the name
of a child’s
fish.  

(I can only speak for my daughter)

how

when her hand
to her
appears

a white man
gets a typewriter.

for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son

in scenario’s territory.

I either have to **** my father or keep loving him.  a friend of my brother’s says she can get me cigarettes, a knife, and two cans of beer.  says her own father was a doctor up until he delivered a baby with a serial number tattooed on its arm.  she doesn’t know what her father does now.  her mother is in the dark.  her mother is obsessed with the three the disciple lied to.  people want me to back up but a man is never the same sadness.  define people.

easy on the eyes, her parents
invisible

in the white-haired dream of stroke’s snowfall

–

her other, the apple-diver gone AWOL from the priesthood

her twin, tapped out
of being
born

–

the grey bullfrog
god of her brother’s
swollen
neck

–

what else

a fat kid
hearing
how he won’t
hang himself,

a sleeping bag
puking
on the topmost
stair

to those of yours
who’ve died
I give
my prayer
of being better
in one-on-one
situations.  if god is god,

let me become
the woman
I got
the idea
from.

I borrowed a bike from a haunted woman

a frog was asking me
what my mouth
had done

I was bound
for the orphan’s
shortcut

animal then man then woman. god was the god of grief. one saltwater thing to another

why
a garden?

–

shadow

you unusable
rag

It hurt
Being made fun of
In the bathroom
That way
I got myself
Back to class
A whale
Shrinking the ocean
With sleep

Last night I told my wife
There were little hands
Tugging
On my jeans

Small enough to die
Please
Pleaser

it was your
or my
week
with god.

we took turns having a healed leg, a crush

on the same
boy.

a disabled
child

and the chance
to destroy
my body

(xviii)

I am the least, no

I am

–

look what they’ve done
to the lightning, dad

to your scarecrows, mom

–

all the toilets were in the trees
the trees were taller
a flat

bird
how
the ****, roadkill

was on
the moon

(xix)

a chicken with two heads. a burning bush. a cane only a dog could love. a barber whose hair, nevermind. an arm cast bearing the hangman’s faded autograph. invisible milk

and the nothing you bring to my godless poems.