I never have enough teeth in my mouth to love my brothers equally. They each have a tick full of blood to throw at a beehive. We form a band to hide our erections but only write one song. Because I’m the oldest, I’ll be dead the longest. Boys don’t call things what they are. Baseball and deer got Ohio lucky. We aim our **** and cry with our stomachs. Think Jesus did all that just to poison god. There are easier ways to get a sister. When shot, we take it in the leg. I don’t go outside anymore but here and there the unshaped crawl into my ear. The re-shaped, not so much. Boys and girls aren’t real. We compare school shooters. Blueballs, leg pain, the holier symptoms of swimmer’s echo.

does nothing
in hell
but draw

poverty has its own alphabet. we speak only to expand our understanding of what came second, be it silence or the ventriloquy of god.  no one here has lost a baby but there are enough of us to go around.  I’ve nowhere to tell you about place.

and stork
is never
home

I don’t see
size-

stormcloud, stone

it’s no
gift

–

it is hard
kiddo
to be a mouth
in the land
of embrace

–

love
two of your fingers

the rabbit they make
they wound

god
as spotlight

unmanned
or not

if I
were me

life is a shapelessness to which form describes its pilgrimage

dream a grave dreaming
of a cactus
for nothing’s
crow

[boy musics]

we’re counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed *** shop in Ohio when I tell you my father is gay. it’s too late for crow and all the deer have been hit. you have just read me three poems by your dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister. a vacuum is running below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.

~

[tube feeding]

the boy who in the middle of performing a handstand finds god just as she’s creating the oceans after being overtaken by a herd of ghosts

~

[in a cornfield a trombone case full of ****]

we buried a god in Ohio today with a ouija board and a map. pain is a different god altogether. smaller mouth. no belongings. I remember becoming a dog with more clarity than being assaulted on a bus during a rash of housefires. sister says that from here on out television is the devil’s paint and bends herself into translating her mother’s poems for grief, the doomed sycophant of language.

if his ears can hear one thing
how does he know it’s god
how does she know
there are two

in the blue church of my father’s thirst

I wear it

(hunger)

like an eye-patch, and emerge

starless

from the uncooked blood
of my shadow

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

what a scarecrow can take to heaven wouldn’t fit in a gas mask.  we learn this the easy way.  so you’ve drawn this circle.  a frail newness that was only just not.  so you’ve diapered this doll.  imagery can keep a secret.  so a beached moth might have something on the baby.  so ice in the stomach of god.

Dear Ethel Cain

I feel my death has passed away. That the golden comprehension of my shirtless youth has become touched out of its mind and into a code for unfinished nakedness. My god a scarecrow stuffed with snakeskin and my scarecrow a fetus trying to curl itself to life. I don’t think any of us are here. The pain of being is the pain of not having been. What a ******* thought. There are children who know the sky is a color made to scream at blue. And they die not because they are little.

was he wanted a dog and was told to go through mom

(it:  torn from nothingness to live in this world)

/ attraction
the voided
bird

father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.  

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.

birth
knows everyone

following a dry spell of imagery

my decoy at the gates of heaven

I try, but can’t make my bed. mom says maybe I’m grief. after coming back to touch me, she wishes herself a bird.

I hope she eats.

–

then

I had a word for marble that wasn’t marble. both were swallowed.

–

thirst is not the same as forgetting to drink. god talks up his handicapped friend.

Letter 082524

Dear Ethan Hawke

The nervous systems of angels. A funeral for a cigarette. There are two Ohios. I am still in my singsong violence when my sister throws her youngest in front of an unmoving farm machine. Sometimes a year yanks a room from death. A wasp eats the shadow of a practice wasp. My wrist thinks I’m brushing its teeth and god is the child who survived my dream. I can’t fake sleep long enough to be healed.

Letter 082624

Dear Ethan Hawke

I live in a body that sleep hasn’t noticed. A ghost is an angel in love with slow motion. No one touch me. I am dreaming of a poetry book written by Chelsea Peretti. I forget its second name, but its first is Lamb Hat and Crow Perfume. It is being reviewed on tiktok by someone whose mother is unable to recently die. I can’t say on brand without crying. I don’t think it’s healthy of course to dream that celebrities want to secretly write poems. But Chelsea’s poems are perfect. In a houndless south, my god gets high. Stay pretty. Goodbye.

the childish
babies
of loss
older
than we’ve ever
been

in a nightmare

(praying over
his father
to highlight
the size
of the first
computer)

he disproves

god

(son) who breathes

for a snake
made of milk

we heard it last night.  the bell on the rabbit’s foot.  it made mom want to cook.  and sleepwalk.  and mice did the wave.

We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain.

where is bird

bird
hospital

do zombie
young

ever
crawl

carrying bread
to thirst
in the small home
of my drugged
companion, swearing

on the length
of ah

that scarecrow
not skeleton
be anatomy’s

mistress

the elderly
our unpraised
orphans
with healed
and self-taught
toys

~~~~

cancer is a pop gun and when I say missing I mean her body was seen by the lonely / her body / was having children but only those / we’d seen / in photos / I mean bus

of a christian
swim team

~~~~

when cooking, mama says she is burning the uniform of the country I was dragged through.  she knows better than to come from rib.  cheek, maybe.  or fishhook.  

~~~~

scar to my wound, this man believes in god. the last thing I learn is what I know. Franz Wright’s final book is called The Toy Throne. I understand this man when he says he was born with a disabled child. what is lightning

to a fish

~~~~

faith a shoelace in an unbroken egg

I stare at the letter x

~~~~

the plate

in god’s head
is a writer’s
dream.  she crows

her three
words
for stoplight
as a doll

bites down
on a stick…

math is maybe not the best look for grief

and hunger

too academic

~~~~

after suicide, everything that happens is the past

~~~~

I am not a ghost,

hand
I use
the least

~~~~

the mothers they were rehearsing in the drive-thru
the *** talk for boys they thought
were still
alive

-

crush a white tick / you’ll become / a projectionist

-

sleep is a bleeding stopped by the eye

~~~~

with god
prepared
to remove
its white
stomach, the dream

sees brain
as the print
of its thumbless
hand

~~~~

/ to a breathing machine in a swimming pool

the angel says whale

/ my nightmare

has a whale. it takes grief

from a mule

/ my brothers are ****

and star. claustrophobes

haunting
the hard
to forgive

~~~

alone in that no-name church of dream

scales of grief
and thrown back
fish

I come to in the middle of eating. I am making a sound that drags an ear through the stomach of an angel. My sons catch fish with silence. My daughter sings them to a cricket left in a human mirror. By the time our loneliness reaches god, we’ve been created.

as violence
might recall

nothing’s
gospel, I wear

a mask
and poke
your baby’s
eye-

forget beauty, ah

/ the description of a monk in the notebook of a nun

how many fingers, fork

will hunger
lose

-

I am the trap
god sets
for my kids

eating lamb
for his lovely
misheard
boy

death writes to me from an unfinished foster home.  other things are also untrue.  how subtle.  light’s

list
of demands.  focus

on crying
in a messy
car
absent
the animal
you’ll worship

last.

before the feast
there is one
erasing
the doll’s
eyebrows

(i)

no one in heaven is named after god.

place is an animal. animal a cure

for déjà vu

(ii)

my hands
are the hands
my hands
could rescue

(iii)

I was wrong. now is not

the afterlife
of the present.

not
yet

(iv)

our towels are asleep in the oven. our surroundings

lonesome.

/ mom severs mother from the **** vocab of our nakedness

there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish

coming to
in a beheaded
angel

a brother sleepwalks and beats his sister. daylight, brother looks for her abuser but can’t stay awake long enough to catch the person he doesn’t know he is. sister fears what he may become. I have two children, Object and Permanence. they examine my spotless body

like aliens

who cannot hurt their own but want to.

–

boy has no name
so town
has no name

–

when my younger brother was born, his program made him human. because of this, my mother was thrown in jail. my own program gives me the power to look like anyone I’ve seen. I need you to write down what you look like because it’s me to the rescue.

–

her hand is a ray gun that can only stun babies not yet born. her grief is a time machine that wants to grow old.

–

as they had no memories of being children, mom pretended she had been their mother and told them stories of the funny ways they’d been in trouble.

clown fog, road head, gas mask

–

I can work
with anyone

–

two boats
per animal, horror

–

is dead
but had

a farm

the person
who reports
photos
missing, my sockless

brother, the tooth fairy’s

bones

the suicide of a mother’s
swimming

instructor. the browsing

history

of little
ghost.

~

[accident]

because
when mine
stopped

your sadness
was still
moving

~

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

~

[dear you]

I am at a word
for loss

~

[nostalgia]

my father
he was in
this poem
yesterday
so deeply
that I-

****.

they repo
even
dark.

~

[goodbye]

my penchant for last things does not end

before touch has a body, we can see only

the hands of god
how they fumble

loneliness
and imagine

birth
for a family

of small
permissions

I say
into beer cans
code names
for ear

oh earth
to dog
miss

whole phantoms

pregnancy
while on
the list
wasn’t
his first
choice

but memory
ain’t
human

our lost
way
of thinking

forgave
different
films

to him, these meals
are small
fictions.  there is

however
some truth
to his mother

the weigher  
of light.

God died doing math in a nightmare. Not everyone was able to hide the body. Men without mothers bit themselves thinking it would lead to nakedness. Angels did the same but thought nothing. Fire chased an empty bus past the cemetery of the three things I couldn’t name. Into a small life of startled handguns, people in photos were born. Gameshows, I said plainly, above a hole the ground touches for being hungry.

the fact that no one is watching the movie is good for the baby.  my wrist hurts and so far not a single pill has cleared the mouth-hole of your mask.  you’ve seen your mother but not since she got that haircut for which her eyes are still too big.  god exaggerates.  the choices were, and are, eat or learn a language.

Q: what is a ghost?

A: you have a mom and god finds out

bring little, for I am a small room.

my clothes are yours and have always been lonely.

from nowhere
came beauty
to avoid
god.

bruise, ye
from nightgown
to blanket.

be kind, history

to those
in my dream.