(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.

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream: a mummy obsessed with what doves eat

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

drea­m:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream: sock puppets on oxygen

it was your
or my
week
with god.

we took turns having a healed leg, a crush

on the same
boy.

all things fish, I suspect, have forgotten to worship the devil.

/ riggers of cow-country staring contests. bread’s ruin.

I was reading beyond my years to childlike fathers in a house named for the woman whose hair was brought to her by boys her sons had wronged.  I was eating what I could of the horse said to have eaten hospital flowers.  I tried to make it last.  the fathers were hungry and oblivious.  they had left their voices outside before telling me they’d need them.  I worried they could sense I was pretending not to know.  I loved equally the horse and the horse we ran out of.

the present happens at different times. fetus, comma, tadpole. surgery, please tell this mask

my face went down on nothingness.

under hypnosis the boy becomes nostalgic for its opposite. we are having for the hole in your brother a funeral. at sea the haunted cage. in a fish the robot’s rib.

the stranger and the magician
walk the dog
their baby
girl
looks like

/ what the orphanage
knows
the nursing home
doesn’t

it is not my job
anymore
to keep
the television
quiet, give

bunny ears
to someone
bleeding

-

take your time, snake, this egg
will return
your belly

natal homing makes me ***

the longer
I grieve

the more

you were born asleep
and your mind
reached a place
where you had
no hands-

your first memory
is of being aware
that someone
beat you to them.

when given
an alphabet
to recite
you count
as predicted
by your father’s
future.

I have known men
to kick babies
with no more thought
than setting them
to stun.

invent nothing.

words end
but end
on a word.

I am the weakest person my brothers don’t know. I go with them under a blanket we won’t all come out of. hell of a word, hovercraft, but not a sucker for meaning. god torches the bathroom then speaks farmhouse to the father of the accident that never happened. I have a tooth or two knocked in by a footprint. a tick I call dust.

[notes from life under bell (i)]

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.



[notes from life under bell (ii)]

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.



[notes from life under bell (iii)]

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

cavity
a clock
dreamt
by a scar.

the scalpel
the ear’s
idea.

birthplace, hide your own.

no animal
harmed
in the making
of god.

I don’t think I was born to see my face. my father looks like he’s about to say nothing. her vocabulary comes and goes.

because in its guts, poetry knew it was born of two miscalculations. creating god was all for nothing. I think I make my parents lonely.

allow me, wind, my unnoticed resurrection and forgive my smaller ear. the *** we had saved to cut the bread of bilingual angels is now a ghost watching sleep improvise. church bell beats dog-whistle and rocking chair empties horse.

“you are the secret watching the private act”
– from Citi, by RA Washington

ruins are for playing tricks on the past and god is the mugshot newborns love. hand is smaller than the hand it knows of. I am here for the nudes of the amateur basilisk. look at me when I exist.

I leave the dream, I come back

this is how
it’s done
there is

a record

death makes two beds

father and son give food a choice

mother mothers moth and math

I count
for a cannibal
brother’s
bugbites

nowhere to go to have stillness removed

the clock in my brother’s room
has a visitor
in the form
of a tattoo
artist
who believes
sleep
is a brand
of insomnia.

my brother is here
because he swallowed
an ant
with his heart.

he wants a doctor
with snow
on her knees.

her mother
left the house
each morning
to work
inside
an animal
that was always
on the move

her father
spent the day
spitting
into toilets
for any sign
of tracking
god

why
every year
she goes
as blood?

she says
until
it’s hers

I don’t know why it is that this thing in my father merely comes loose when in me it disappears, but am grateful that my mother can hear him getting ready for church no matter the rattling of my hunger at the weepy shapelessness of spoons.

first fog
and the speechless
are giving
birth

longing is a stickman’s tail

a boy I know
checks
for his nose

whose father hits a deer

whose mother won’t mention
the puppet’s
bra

{entries for dimension}

at birth
it says
iceberg, and then

crown

–

I have this story that can put
for you
a banana peel

on the floor
of the delivery room, this other

–

with a scarecrow
midway through it

looking all
tore up
like it was used

last night
as a fork


{entries for belief}

ain’t a thing can be crucified that has clothes

when people think
you lonely
you can slip
twice
from your mother

you can chew with your hands in your pockets


{entries for Ohio}

I am to my blood
what ant farm
to ant

–

the mother worries about them sleeping at the same time
the twins

–

the dark has an ugly brother

revenge
a rare
photo

–

this babysitter I know
driven
to suicide
took things
from a movie
set

–

god says
bring her in
the fast
reader

for observation


{entries for intimacy}

things I said when I stepped on a nail
things like
a spelling bee
is underway
in hell
and how deep
it goes
the thumb’s
suicide


{entries for music}

while I kept
scarecrow’s honor
my elbows
off the table
and ate
to practice
swallowing
mom she put a litterbox
on a piano bench
telling dad
dreams
are the paws
of god

in our own way of toying
with the disappeared

we name
weekly
a new

inside animal.  

that something comes when called
separates

the lonely
from the missing.  if it matters to god

let it matter
to god
the eraser
of lightning.  in this Ohio

one is always a day behind being destroyed by the past.

let surgery leave something in your mouth.

weigh them as a whole, the clothes of the smallest person who died on your watch. the blindfolds. the dreams of your stick population. down the pill

yet inside
the black
sheep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbhgB9GVnM0

afraid of its shadow in a previous life. the drowning of nothing’s

*******
child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf3qVTWRwxw

mother, mine, in the footage god used to justify creation.

swallow the egg before it explodes.

everything but the barn is red. the barn is the shape of red. one can jump from its roof and never land. deafness, my proven

ladder, puts her mouth into words. she wash in horse

her father’s hands

/ of a grief misplaced by loss

brother drinks water enough to shock the devil.  on the inside, he’s all doll.  I shake him for show might our sisters travel in pairs.  I used to talk but had to close my mouth when the soft spot on his head kept my mother from her toes.  it’s the second stone that really lands.

says he been seeing things after they happen

/ aims to bury
for free
bomb squad
dogs / thinks hell

if a scarecrow
can miscarry
in kite
country…

the past
the one
event
a life
is known for

abuse has no before,

no after.

small windows for unfeeling birds.

the right hand of god squeezes a bar of soap until it becomes a crow.  

there’s nothing wrong
with your son’s
black
heart.  

before I had a ****
I told everyone
I had a tail.

my sadness is broken.  my mother sits beside me on the top step as I **** with the laces of shoes I’ve had on for hours.  I am trying to place myself in front of the woman who while holding a bowling ball asked me to **** my cigarette.  mom has been falling asleep in front of a tv turned on by a mind of its own.  I don’t want to be touched.  god for now belongs to the hand that went crooked and circled every date on this month’s calendar.  after eleven guesses I say jesus mom is he gay.  I don’t see how this will become me knowing all along.  my father is a man of many words he can’t pronounce without some stranger getting knocked up on the radio.  there’s nothing in the water, nothing in the air.  I get my people from the store and bring them to a carnival that exists because of food poisoning.  I think my belly button is a cigarette burn that makes me want kids.  I have a brother who will wet the bed well into his ninth year.  I include him here as the brother around for this.

keeper
of fields, clean

destroyer
of rooms
where the boys
of murdered
women
single out
a spirit
for doll

crisis…

-

the world of the reminiscing
earth

there was a radio somewhere in the basement and we knew this because it would click on long enough for us to cover our feet and question our savior’s second go at amnesia. if I wasn’t there, I was probably trying out my father’s fastball with a grip he called the ribs of my neighbor’s dog. not long from this I was holding a baby and said what a vague hiatus. also in this order I may have said you look like a ghost and then not my finger but a finger does snap into place when I smoke.

a statue of my father drilling for scarecrow. immediacy as elsewhere’s double. my mother’s dream to play pool on an empty stomach. blow-up dolls for the drowned christ.

he is born without stones in his hands.  she waits with him outside the mother.  the mother is their belief her history supports.  speech is a passing back and forth of names dogs don’t have.  before they desired stones, they’d egg the front of my jeans.  the pair

I wore.

to sleep
on your son’s
insomnia

the phantom butcher hides another pregnancy test

–

an egg reminds me to bathe my teeth

the boy
whose first
computer
was pain

they put something in his food
to make
him drink…

-

one animal
out of how
many

-

marries

-

to avoid
god

asleep
I am headless
in a clawfoot
tub
the half-awake
boy
on my chest
the disoriented
pulse
in the hand
of god

I lose
at times
the names
of the boys
I hid from…

not an angel, I am allowed
to love
the baby

sister
breathing
on my food
in the church
of the plastic
bag

if the clothes
don’t fit
you’re under
a microscope

his brother’s
dreams
are made
of wax

dancing
badly
in a small
eye

–

by beehive
what churches
know