you is part lake and some bellies
were skipped

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

the point
was to describe
you
to the image.

to go
in sleep
from bear
to bombed
bear.

a copy of my brother’s hand

a dog door
beneath the feet
of christ

pieces of bread
in a broom, a false

wet
tooth

the man lives in his car and his children live in a store that’s out of everything. his dog has forgotten how to eat. things are on what any good god would call a collision course. he shows me **** photos he says he can’t look at until he knows for sure that the people in them are somewhere naked. he wants me to work on writing with a sense of place. not me, he says. move grief.

I put my sense
of taste
behind me
by placing
a sick child
beside one
sicker.

a crow is not a star.

loss
is the salt
of now.

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree.  a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar.  mom slips in and out of pregnancy.  it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself.  you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

‘sister played outside with a broken arm
and the wind turned her into a constellation.’ – Allie Gilles

a piece of ice
in my mouth
I’m kissing
a screen door
in Ohio

eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate

and doll
the first

eating disorder
in space

my son
created
for me
a world
I wasn’t
in.

in world, no person
was named
that had not done
an act of note
good
or bad.

very few  
cold
standing outside
fancy restaurants
as most
were on phone
trying to make
a reservation.

the world presented
its problems, and one of them
became mine.

I took it by the hand
to bite
what was Timothy’s
finger.

I am walking up a hill the dark is trying to move.  my mother has a way with words.  my mother has a baby.  reading is a kind of crying.  the baby is crying because the baby has lost track of something that possesses nearness.  there are two babies.  one is always blind and one is blind when it eats.  never lose a tooth you can swallow.

I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.

god will die with his ear on my stomach.

a plea
addressed
to the non
readers
of said
poem
to leave
its writer
alone

I clip her nails
whose doll collects
cereal boxes

appetite went from our dog to our cat. from our cat to an animal that had no fight. a tornado took our shoe-store. our sisters were assaulted for no more than ringing dollhouse doorbells. our mothers blindfolded for putting lipstick on the crow. we ****** ourselves and corn set its blood on fire. our weeping our weeping swept.

it is beyond me
why you’d want
to be more
than your illness.

where does one go
when gone
three days?

/ a pair of scissors in one room or a gun in two. a thumb war’s lame spider. four rootless prayers drawn on an echo. four awestruck sisters caressing with their ears the undeveloped skull of an infant. melancholy’s condoms. flowers for the arm-wrestler’s inoculated phantom.

overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car

of a minor
toymaker.

radar is getting possessive.

if it’s missing
from your life

know
I’ve eaten

to the man whose face can do things mine cannot, I give my son.  

silence has no creator.  pictures

of god
don’t sell.

satan is a dinosaur. existence an earliness for which I’m never quite prepared.

/ having been to volcano and back, dog

has this look

clown car
too much
for ghost

the age of my exit wound

the order
in which
we die

/ my death I was here to gather proof

/ my children
to paraphrase

had he not been all those years
writing a review
for the last book
in the world
my father
would’ve been
a poet

there are only so many crows
one can see
outside a laundromat
for the drowned, scarless hawks

so maternally nudged
into the travelogue
of my staying

a cricket turns into a frog

the worm it works
for peephole

oh sound, attracted to nothing

what on a raft am I rubbing

whose suicide
is this, whose bloodbath
footwear

drivers of the haunted tank

lose them all, dogface

teeth were pills
god couldn’t
swallow

I babysat for children whose mothers didn’t want to come downstairs. I was driven home by men so drunk they knew my house like a muscle. the children ate what I made. I taught boys how to fake an illness and girls how to ask for pets. I could change a diaper and smoke at the same time but then it got away.

they wanna put my teeth on a billboard. mom doesn’t care.  cremate the moon.

it crawled out of me and knew your birthday

we’re not allowed to be in the house past a certain time. we read in tongues from the book of that’s how babies disappear. we hide the insomniac’s handsoap. our fathers do impressions. our mothers the bulk of the digging. we waste little. blood, paint. from our dream supply.

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

speech, the blank
drawn
in paradise…

the parrot, the bone
left
for madness

sing they

god
can I get
your suitcase

pain passes out. boy is almost

body.

the hangman’s bike shop goes under

it’s been
grey apple
a slow
year

in the newest version
of my brother’s
suicide

he says
he’ll be back
with a note

so
perfect

yeah madness had a motorcycle
for every
drive-thru

I believe my mother when she says we are here to forget the girl god was trying to impress. that we are to follow starvation to its wrongly named foods. that breads are condemned

birds. scissors the writer’s churchbell.

dear halloween
I’ve been talking
in Ohio
to gas stations

the first thing it feels
is not again

~

/ and, a note:  30% off all print books on Lulu thru October 10th with coupon code of OCTSAVE30

my most recent is there, titled **depictions of reentry

the hands
they look
unswallowed

but (dear hate)

I’m the same
person
I always

wasn’t (tree

with frozen
stomach) (the wrong

grave) (movie)

that ended
god

are now’s
nostalgia

the house knows I’ve been sleeping in my car. my son opens an empty fridge. no one in the book has turned on a light. I am dying. I never got to make a habit

of this. I love more

her adopted
clock.

hit your children. my own, I love the way they look

before I don’t. every shadow

leaves its post

what would she ask
sadness

that old blindfold
from the future

how did you
get old, how

did my father
eat
and eat
at the same

time

perhaps
you’ve seen it
the mask
that took

my face

sister
she bleeds
in the bath
thinking
we’ve finally
run out
of water.

of the cheering
mothers, my mean
***
mother
wants to be alone
with the two
it took
to cut a baby
in half.

myself
I take it on the nose
the baseball
my father
doesn’t
crush.

paint for me / in lost / white

an Ohio / so divorced

from its visionary
plainness / that one

can brush
an erased / hand / at the mere

thought / of spider’s / hair

the insomniac
the conductor
of the sleepwalker’s
train

the centipede
a sort of
wrecked
spider

bunny-eared
watersnakes…

god
took all
my mom’s
ideas

I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister
who said god
is a cigarette
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry ******* forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that
All that having
to separate
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time

a birdwatcher with broken hands, I am the cry of my mother’s body. she climbs the tree she was left in and smokes back the years of breathing underwater. whatever you’ve been through, this poem waited for me to survive.