the path of least woman.

not even
my kind

of violence.

father’s faith needs some time alone.

she’s had work done.  

the headaches
are real.

I drop
down the back
of my brother’s
t-shirt
a wasp
and for years
he has
dry skin.

there are words
our mother said
that we’ve used
to protect her. this day

(to that)
gunshot
means gather
eggs. sleep

is your shepherd’s
prison.

the loneliness
that schoolwork
provides

is god

his body
is your body

has nothing
to leave

coming up
we are
with names
for time
machines

the only
animal
recognized
by the magician’s
one-trick
pony

/ touch
giving itself
a childhood

/ an alien’s
crucifix

it put mine on backward
the creature
that switched
my mother’s
feet

if the ear said anything
her ear
said

that’s the kick
of a twin

the zero courage
it takes
to be
in pain.  or to be

for that matter

born.  it has devoured

by now
my son’s
vow
of silence.  but he had

didn’t he

a moment
while the animal

ate.

“Everyone you see
lives somewhere.
How is this done?”* - Franz Wright

I am wearing a bomb and she is wearing a bomb.  we are going to the same empty place.

[dying brother with microscope]

last night
a horse
left Ohio
and waited
seven seconds
before
clopping back

(all cats had my sister’s tongue)

angels
had fingernails

and fish food
taste

~

[palimpsest]

illness
as diary
we

are underwater
where eating
was discovered

(this is our
joke
that on land
god is waiting
to cut
a birthday cake
for the non
born
the non
below...

our grief comes in pairs
to the animal
it looks
most like

~

[easy]

a ghost and an angel compare childhoods

(we’ve all
let our food
get cold

my daughter is seized by a dream to endure her mother’s preoccupation with death.  while waiting for his pillow’s heart to stop, my son resolves to keep the mirror’s brain.  that each might skip the parts I’ve memorized, I read to them from a room I’ve put on the spot.  when we pray, we’ll pray we were here to the idea we are.

My clothes burn in the dryer. No one is drinking. Hurt mice turn dreamside up to sigh footprints away from a naked garden. I flicker motherly through sight’s obsession with possessing my eye. Your elbow clicks. Your elbow clicks and it’s still genocide. Forget the spine that moans my son to sleep. We have to see this angel getting sick on a birthmark.

kiss me like I’m not here

like my belly
is

think of blood
as the author
of bruise, of the baby

you’ll not
see
blue

that first darkness

dad
walking backward
while puffing
a cigarette

/ the click
of mom’s
fractured
foot

poor death, sleep
the shoe
that never
drops

and poorer
dream

mine of a foot being nailed to a seesaw made of light

yours
what the rabbit
did
to its knee

is the twin bed I go to hell to make

choking
inside
a whale

/ sucker
from the world
of hands

thunderstorms
reported missing
by some
verbose
orphan

and there I was, sad

my robot
giving hell
to an elevator

and I was forty-one
and still not there
the day that kid
got beat up
for keeping sadness
close

and I was never the poorest
in any room

is this what being poor means or meant

grief
that we can brush at the fossil
of grief

notes will be notes from when I was alive. all men, amen. oh infant, teacher of spiders. the future of adult bookstores. yes they are dreams and yes they go to church. lose a finger, it becomes a ghost. a paw and the children think maybe their mom is having a mother. I’ll sleep with anyone. doctors each from the birth of my past. animals denied the policing of crow.

I imagine it puts a hole in a demon, this combing of underwater things to protect the toenails of painted men. mom is this void the last of its kind?

as a stick figure on a forgotten gurney dreams of one day washing a flower or of drying a wet bird, I run the bath to put the tub to sleep then use my body to bury the water.

with what she’s learned online, she puts her age between nine and twelve.  

-

based on the following, her attacker

walks.

-

(that’s funny, he didn’t sound invisible)

-

how do you pray
for a clock?

the mother is not so human as to be beautifully flawed. the mother is too perfect. take her poems. they are good somewhere, but translated. wound comes to me in a headlight. her visions return spineless men

their undrawn
ovals.

I bring with me
to put
on the moon
my webbed
foot /

father for soap has been known to use a magnifying glass

brother he bend a tooth
in the temple
of the spoon

sister she is fixing a screen door
when her child’s fish
moves
its bruise

for the noise
the angel
makes
at the sight
of blood
the toothless
take
a knee

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

the babies
team up
on a sad day
for skins.  I am not  

the same person
we were.

for fainting
in the afterlife

as long as others
have food
there is grief
to imagine

give praise
god’s ashes
are still
collected

its mother
has it
born
the day after
it stops
talking

it is the animal
gods
miss

[fealties]

mowing the lawn
dad swallows
a bug.

sister is folding her eyelids back
and brother

his diaper
stays on.

mom on a small map
is making
noise.

the animals are what god sees
in animals. soon

a birthmark
on a tooth.

~

[would you say, mouth]

that god
made a deal
with nothing

~

[god is silent in every language]

mom is driving. mom is washing the spider that closed her mouth. sister has a stick of gum but says she doesn’t. dad is half-asleep and cutting the fingernails of the babies he dropped. there’s a scab on my arm that looks like my brother’s nose. we pass church after church. sound horn for buried bees.

ask god how long it takes to decide on a language. remember the dead bear. the sleepy spoon. ask the soul about its weakness for image.

gender,

a ****** woman
for every
crucified
man / nostalgia,

a baby
undetected
by the mother
we see

born
there
to a sleepy
projectionist

listening
to the ear’s
brief
spider

taste of bread
in your mouth

and in dreaming
of what to use
for its body
and its blood

the devil
began

to starve / when it snowed
it snowed

on a tooth / this was in

the same
Ohio

where brothers
ruin
now

with hiccups

games
of hide-and-seek

/ anyway, sister said the crow had it coming

and I made this face we called

god
as a boy
tasting
a star...

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

the quiet woman mothers a silence gone rogue

and names
her kid
to death

god
is for tying
the tongue
in the blank
face

it passes
for meaning

kissing
is how we kiss
the nail’s
brain

A ghost sets itself on fire with a cigarette once lit to mark the end of emptiness. No one cares about my body. Touch still doesn’t know that skin is the god of touch. I hide my daughter’s mouth in mine and wait for the angel of those on suicide watch to notice my teeth. The ghost is so still it’s looking at hell.  

( or maybe I hide my daughter in a ghost and these are the ghost years lost to the god of fast food whose son is a hunger pain whose son is a hunger whose son’s childishly staged crucifixion shocked time into a fomo that found eating to be a bone from an extra past where I practice chewing upside down get pregnant for no one

a creatureless forest
in the minds
of men
with shovels; a field.

/ birth outgrew its crooked coat

my sadness ran off
with some guy-

well ****
it wouldn’t be
would it

depression

if one could find it
in a baby.

it doesn’t kick
but you can
if you love me
make its brain
purr.

them dead, them mothers
sang
by song.

am giving the balloon a head of hair and my brother his skateboard a set of teeth. are we teasing the same creatures, yes, with mom’s eardrum. all our birds have one father and the father foreign concepts of farewell. sister is urging us to hug but we know from stick that river had a nightmare.

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

because time has to remind itself to be invented

the holy spirit
still calls
it a rubber…

movies, mental illness....

(arms

twisted
by children
of the blind

i.

brother
while slicing
an apple
changes
his name
to earshot

ii.

an orange eats everything
but its mask. there was no ocean

iii.

until we hid from the storm. ticks are crickets

iv.

that belong to the poor

dear apple
in a paper
sack
there is
no

tornado

mother’s inhaler is what you called the mirror mother held to size her mouth.  I was in her purse when she was taken.  I don’t know how it is I know things.  bones in the stomach of god.

a bowl of soup bleeds to death
in the eatery
of my praying
hands

to find
in the moments
after
the vision
that yes
you’ve eaten
everything
in sight, that a baby

yours
or not

is asleep
in a somersault, that you worshiped

prayer and fell

for hunger’s
childhood