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

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

the contact high I get from sleep.  an illness

that comes
and goes.

I write to the church about the orphanage and to the orphanage about the church. I write that football is the end of the world and that I owe my death to someone. she’s in the tub getting sick on her brother’s back and thanking god for sign language. our boy has an illness that lets him tame, elsewhere, ants. surprise for me a crow. disappoint.

I don’t know who it was
told my brothers
to stop
drawing
rabbits
to look
like ruined
footprints

/ I was washing my hands
when your water
broke

blood comes to me from a country of dry-****** trees. brother

as a ghost
with a snakeskin
kite. eye

after killing
the camera.

hunger is a clock devoured by worship

the rabbit hole
burdens
abyss

/ horns make zero sense to the boy tossing horseshoes at a rain puddle

we wrestle sometimes in the junkyard over who gets to guard the lullaby machine. we share an image of our father making a throwing motion while above a necksick dog. of our mother dropkicking a pumpkin to egg on the nothing y’all can come and get. we aren’t close but chew together loudly and lip-synch the hymns we know. spiders forget the sea.

the past disappears to haze the same childhood animal. touch carries non-fiction to belief. earth lands on earth and is somehow loved. there are dolls to skin and there are dolls contagious. any mirror is a fishbowl from hell. she was a good swimmer but was not eaten fast enough. lazily, I remain born.

in one dream, a carousel horse. in another, a stomach.

–

dream is a shortcut

boy finds
a plastic
fingernail
and suddenly
he’s a rat
surgeon
washing
hand puppets
for god
in the birthplace
of buzzard
fiction

no knife in the dog of absence. not a scratch on wind’s throat. winged things that belong to the tooth in your shoulder. lipstick. the unhummed ribs of your wrist.

the form
obsessed
image

-

the bad
back
of god

I pretended once to lose my memory-

the same day

you

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

and, beheld, she imprisoned the god
seen by those it changed

dream won’t have me

kid says
they eat
hypnosis
the extras

of silent
film

seeing the cardboard box for which her blood became popcorn

it gets so you can’t throw a rock without having a baby.  not all of us talk this way but you have to hand something to the ones that do.  I’ve seen voodoo dolls with more personality.  had my mother’s god been my father’s, I would’ve gone blind from staring at my birth.

a collarless dog fetching a grounded kite

trauma’s original boredom

the search parties
wind and blood

you’re dying
when someone
closer
dies

how to bathe
a red chameleon
from the childhood
of Moses

memory
to the mailman
with a bad
back

is a crow

carried drugs
for stone

I am born
back to back…

god removes the mirror from my mother’s mirage

had a child and began to see people

/ every bandage is a red-haired ghost

most days it would try not to look at its clothes. there was the night it spent at a friend’s house where it puked in the bathroom and spoke to the glass door of a dryer. where it saw it swore a mousetrap catch only the pregnant mice. where it heard from a wall the names of those against making a ******* from a smashed spider.

year baby was the year the strippers fled tanks and were later shot safely from cannons. the year it suspected déjà vu of bringing food to the same stomach.

A squirrel eating a star in the mouth of god

the flame
the phantom
limb
of my
informer

pain
as the upkeep
of amnesia

my arms had ears
hundreds
of baby
ears, crop

of silence…

don’t itch
what the brain
can reach

open a clock
with your eye

it is not hard
it is not like

choosing
which eye

to travel with
which eye

to leave
for spider

but maybe
you are afraid

I, too
sleep

forget
that nothing
while there

was worn

we know he’s sick. ya body, ya body.

an angel of nonsense, this dying…

god’s
inability
to memorize…

/ I will say to the maker of doors

your mother
gave birth
standing up

I’m sorry you have to see this. if I could starve invisibly, I would. my son’s surgeon worships ventriloquy. do you dream of the sleep you’ve already gotten? or of a thing so sad it gives birth? my abuser talks as if one can lose track of a mouth. in god’s favorite book, my ghost gets a hobby.

this story again
my flat
brother
on his bike
with baby possums
eight of them
under his ballcap-

the mothered vehicle
of home, the doubled
kindness
of road
and ****-

how taken
from heaven
we lived

[entries for meaning]

/ the past can’t do this anymore

/ the brainwashed narrator of my absence
he will not explain
fog
to snow

/ she will not sleep

with it
that says
word
for word
I am my mother’s
fear
of the male
body

~

[entries for transformation]

i.

is there blood in something born outside,

a history that works in one ear?

ii.

time touches nothing. is the *** of my bruise

/ a scar

~

[entries for children]

remember, it is dark and memory is god painting with the blood of those he would create

[in this life another is you]

father paints an abstract jesus.  my sister bites at the shoulder strap of her bra.  my brothers

to keep from crumbling
are sharing
bread.  

-

I draw a violinist.  a dog

at the neck of its owner.

-

in our imaginings
gutted baseballs

became

the skulls of small animals
through which
the wind

called heads.

-

in heaven’s garage
they’ve yet
to make
a horn
that works.

the kids have gone two or three years now without being raised.

the match
unlit
by your tooth
is paradise.    

-

a refrigerator rocks in a junkyard.

either the door has jammed, or she

is pregnant.

-

a cement wall
scraped
in passing
by one
with a stick
is the love
we have
for father

-

depression is a dog whistle.  I miss dinner sounding it out.

-

(when a scar of thunder / outs itself / I am blue)

or bluish

(like a sock in a blue
coat’s
pocket)

-

it is cruel to hang anything above a baby’s crib

-

I can only guess
I was happy
in the womb
with how
my mother
looked

-

the bunk
above mine
I call
deathbed

is

my brother’s-

he has
his own
way
of thinking

showerhead
is spotlight

-

here is a test:  circle
the parts
of a circle

(a sameness)

in the parrots
we care for…

our suicides
fight
for position

-

in the apple
air
of hem
and haw
a pacing
uncle
blank
as a broom
regards
the *******
half
of a doorknob

or

two men
carry a ladder
past a cemetery

one thought
between them

-

this nonfiction
not
what you’d
imagined

-

mother an artifact of paranoia

-

paper
scissors
milk

-

blacktop
pools
at the neck

of a crow.

half eaten
children
limp
home.

an umbrella.  a bra.  a harp.

a street we call satan.  

-

water, make your fist.  hold your breath
in a single
fish.

-

delirious
when the lights
went out
mother
would pull cocoons
from the oven    
tell us
to stop
kicking

-

it was a very strong soap
she’d use

a soap that squealed
against

the skin

her heart  
a hiccup’s
echo

her eyesight the sound of a drill

her eyes
two holes
in a turtle’s
shell

her eyes for seeing

the food in her mouth

-

the sobbing ventriloquist was my idea.  mother and father they were taking turns moving shampoo through my hair as I hummed.  doom was a color.  a mare kneeling on a bed of maroon straw.  miles off, an ambulance driver entered a silent film and tried to buy a garage door opener.    

-

children from abusive studio apartments inherit warehouse jobs from problem immigrants.  a bruise of ***** darkens the front of your jeans.  I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat

of exodus.  in memory alone I am alone.

-

under crow
and flat
on my back
in the loft
of my uncle’s
barn
my shadow
is still
she
who upright
confessed
so loudly
that her heart
flew
into a quiet
sky
as she
collapsed

-

on television
the world’s smallest ghost town.  on a shadow

socks match

-

no longer graveyards, I tend what is everywhere resting.  I crawl like a toothache, long with her death.  the voices move from head to mouth.  

a squirrel on fire.  an act of god.  

I don’t think seeing such things is enough to put

vague
& crow
into one bed.  she is asleep

or fingered
by a man
with seven.      

-

in a country store
a barefoot girl
walks on her heels-

long stride and baby.

the store’s owner
happily shelves
popcorn, gauze

     the thought of his father
doing nothing.

-

beating my clothes
with me
in them
mother
irons
a man
from the moon  

(who giggles in us poorly)

for love

-

if my father admits in his bed that some mice are alive when he bends
to the earth
a cornstalk
and lets
fly,

I have to find the mouse
that means
other mice.  

-

wish I could dream away the bad mornings spent cheating on her sadness        

-

illness, assault.

presence
a blank
petition

-

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into by lightning.  

a mother whose hands were broken by recent events.  events that evoke transcription.

-

assault:

maid
loses cart
to stairwell

-

illness:

a birthmark, a scar, and a tattoo

eating under
a blanket

~

[hospital young]

years back I met god in some nowhere town before I was born to teach symbolism. I know what room I’m in by the tv show my mother’s watching. dear ghost, I hope you like the parrot. from what word did letter come. existence mourns non. grieve on sight.

~

[untitled]

fog overtakes toad
& boys
are born.

ghost yoga. crucifixion.

train is a tunnel
train’s never
seen.

two dead crows- I’m shoeless again.

~

[food (xiii)]

while pacing the hallway of a floor that elevators skip, an amateur eulogist pictures an error-prone barber in a bath of milk who gave as a gift a rocking horse with a bad stomach to a child healing a cobweb for a starless bear.

~

[untitled]

after seeing the girl I have a crush on sign my friend’s arm cast, I spend the weekend jumping out of a tree, trying to land on my left, in the backyard of the last person who knew to hide the head of god. I break nothing but the blood from my nose could fill a football. vandalism starts in the face. it’s dark. I treat my mouth like a scratch.

~

[notes for insect]

I will never know a ghost story

god does not

Even loss
gives up

when there are no mothers, I will crawl toward the one sitting with what her legs couldn’t burn and I will ask my blood to be the same fish

your hair looks like a missing wig. dream is comb in a glacier. sleep an ape’s thumbnail.

a rake
the scarecrow’s
broom.

ugly makes you easy to find.

our mom
to alien
you need
some clothes

/ scoop roadkill, look

marionettes
in the mouth, read

to the healthy
from a pop-up
book

on birthmarks, yeah

we spit
in the dark
let god
fish

it is not so exact
this language

both parents thought to report the child missing

god is weak
but can address
the outdated
animals
of
your poems

without me
stones
meet

god’s brain was devoured by a stone.

I saw my father. he was on his second bird.

his teeth were yellow.
or yellowish.

little doors, little me.

a room of real yellow.

I’d have gone grey
smelling
his hair
and he
to smoke
during the gospel
of the bruise

god closes the food truck and waits for his carefully chosen **** to buffer.

even
over this
a star

i.

the ghost
suddenly aware
of sleep

goes on
to be
the same size
awake.

ii.

will never bite.  never ask
someone
taller  

to bend
the branch
down.

iii.

as far as hands go, these are very large.

as touch explores its past

what is the baby doing on the floor

this tv show
about shyness
wow

she makes weight, auditions
naked
for the face
of god

is death
still known
for its one
mistake

out loud, Ohio sounds like some kind of eating contest

-

a mother here is partial
to prose

to the ovenly quiet of a spotted tornado

-

oh human
thumbprint
in a horse’s
ear

when was it
that emptiness
left
the sea

-

is meal
the most common
bruise

if I am harder than most
on god
it’s because
he’s mine

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby. a door was a door. a ghost was a ghost and a door. the house was possible. its rooms were not. baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub. I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow. said the redheaded tooth fairy.

whose nights come to them in food

wrote lullabies
for cocoon
and stuttered