Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

Dear Ethel Cain

Maybe I will come up with a song about my dying body that everyone except my brothers will sing to the same American bomb. Maybe then my mother will maybe then my father into the image designed by the non-working eye of god. And I won’t be touched in a bathroom and my cousins will outlive heaven in a patiently violent world of surrendering angels who surrender to themselves because their mirrors saw a sheep under an icicle and joined the suicide cult of sameness that went on to become the alcoholic white space that created heaven from nothing more than a nothing that added itself to a hell built on any toddler’s belief in offing oneself to get a nap. Gaze is a sec away from Gaza.

I count the same money and think of my body. I send to a stranger a TikTok of a man crushing dried insects with a red rolling pin. I don’t watch anything anymore that requires sound. The last scream I heard was god’s and I named it god. The stranger messages me twice that they recognize the man. A lonely world, but for kids.

swimmer’s nostalgia. grain of salt.

the infant
is clumsy
but no one
knows

Two birds with one deer.

Touch is touch
teaching touch
the backstroke.

The ****
think snow
can die.

I pine more for the being god was thinking about when he made you. visually, the moons of pain. where circled by what. the one-eyed lambs.

a year older than his violence

the over-feeder
of goldfish, the quietest lover
of his voice

would bruise
when his ghost
would blush

night is the sound of my father’s adding machine. of mother narrating the life of a stone. lake is my brother’s action figure learning to swim on a full stomach. lake is a bird going from dream to dream as a mouse. hole is anything I bring home that isn’t my body. home from the city where sisters drink in silence to footnotes of future fictions.

I would look in the mirror to see if people knew I was ugly and maybe now my son does the same. in mine, god had no soul. in his, god’s soul has nowhere to go. I love you. I don’t matter. I love you and I don’t matter.

–

if I could go back in time, I’d help her take care of me

even
longing
loses
me

I am from the future (I miss

you) there is a way

to contort
the body
and deepen

scarecrows (my son

has an illness)
I’ve seen

in pictures

I am not going to tell you the name of the movie but 1983 I thought my mom was asleep and she thought I and our closeness got near enough to be seen watching the wrong ****** put a lookalike in the right life anyway the past like your body is always new and before the eclipse I pressed a bottlecap into your thigh

you will never
know
what this
is about
but sing
**** all
to your double

What if I am close to knowing
why
I have brothers

Life is the line drawn between death and death

Once I’ve seen your body I look at your body

to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.

comes with everything. cries like me.

I cured my son
in another
language

that of a perfect child
born
to draw
a circle-

doorbell, house of nothing

a woman
with a handsaw
whose rabbits
dream dove

I don't need any of you.
I don't have details.

bible and the missing
book
of aspirin.

fast food chains.

mourners.

The body’s been to the body and back. Catching fish presses the eyelids of god. I look at my brothers to see if our *** dreams have overlapped. I look at my brothers with the unmilked violence of nostalgia. A church painter works backward through the bible. The painter says if the mother’s nose is bleeding, find a baby to put under it. Does not say that touch returns in an image cooked up by the face of pain. Meanwhile a book as quiet as a book turns blue in the space between belonging to the strangled unhoused and beheading the hand that starts a fire with a nail. Meanwhile, the past. You’re never far from the unborn.

for you I would covet the broken arm of a snake

in grief’s
heaven

ache’s password
is ghost
I mean
what I hear

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

from crow
to anthill
lose
the thing
that’s there

telescope, craft your grief

god is what
if all
believe

I don’t have very long
says the stone / all sadness

recent

books to step on, scarecrows

to kiss.

animal
a thing left speechless.

night
a lost
suitcase.

the apple, the quiet. brother’s

double
nodding off
on library’s
secret
horse.

door songs.

mother, mother, father-

what creature
itches
at night
knowing
I have learned
to crawl

God’s stomach is a cigarette trying to eat on the moon. I am asleep in my homage to sleep. In hell you have to give birth to everyone you’ve killed. You can’t have your kids.

“Probably I’ll die like this,
a long time ago.” – Franz Wright

I will never forget hearing god pronounce your name
to a ghost obsessed with wolves

out there in the dogness

the poor
in Ohio
say
Ohio

[tunnel musics]

metaphor to grief: one hand grows faster than the other. blood is just milk that can’t see. the way you hold a gun makes me think of a baby’s ear. I do not want a long life.

~

[***]

in how many dreams have you appeared

that were not
at first
yours

-

hey

-

in movies

-

when streetlights go out one by one

I don’t feel
Interrupted

~

[treaty, grief, moon]

no clock
fast
we live
in the house
beside the house
we bought

treaty, grief, moon

some far
tornado

some nakedness

~

[returning]

he takes baths instead of showers

the boy
who believes
in ghosts

~

[returning]

to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain.  no cricket you hear is alone.  in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong.  his first sad poem is about an oven.  his second calls dust the blood of a seashell.  his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon.  my friends they are made of grief and brilliance.  they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft.  I sleep and my sister paints my nails.  kisses my head.  she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.  

~

[having a disabled child]

means
or maybe
it means
in Ohio
we are shown
how to die
of symbolism

~

[I have avoided hugging those who miss your phantom limb]

no windows, ghost bird.  

lo a mirror that picks a side.  lo in rock the bones of bee.    

~

[lapses]

we are playing
rock, paper, scissors
and arguing
about the birth
of leap frog

it is good, you say, absence
with faces

and what / from the fire / would you

breathing machine
or canary

who has
a canary

~

[removal musics (xiii)]

has hunger
an ear

do barbers
when lonely
jog

is there glass
in your belly button, is this

why you feed
the unfinished
babe

what has no home
and cannot grieve, oh

question-

by know we’d know
god lost
a father

~

[a delicacy, here, this harm]

mother my eyes
my longest
miracle

mother my bones

I owl
your voice
above my son
how much hair

can christ
swallow, is it human

to want
for the uni
cyclist

a more
cinematic

church

I do worry that this love for all things will keep from you the name of the creature dreaming

[mercy musics (i)]

this is where
her name
is changed

to dog, not
puppy

where her father believes
he can stab
a bird
and talk
to ladders

dear
ladder, longing

eats only
the hungry

these are my
stick, and haunted,

persons

and what’s
more, it’s mostly
female
this lost

baby

~

[mercy musics (ii)]

angel, with urn, sleepy

as a hoofprint
is not
a dreamer

of unmarked
edens, but is

of the child
eve

who buried
a mouth
to imagine
a pig

–

some ****** eared stranger at the door is listening as if to a radio where being announced by name are the blow-up dolls gone missing from the home life of victims.

–

in the two accepted versions of the story you have a son your husband beats. in the third and final version your three equally tall sons lift you privately from a parade honoring your **** scene. this is theirs.

–

similar persons of colder weather gather elsewhere and disrobe.

all await
the dog of evening.

its blindfolded boy.

–

he spends a few good hours trying to pin the small shadows of overhead birds beneath his feet. his wakefulness is a gift handed down by a sister he had to stop making up.

–

I squeeze my infant son until he is young enough to remember impressionism’s grocery.

–

I skin my knee a total of three times. I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake. he demands nothing. he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference. he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long. my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become. I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother who smokes on the roof in her Sunday beast.

–

for an elusive
smallness
not seed, nor raincloud
grievance
of ghost

that was
the is
my father’d
been

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

A neighbor points me in the direction of himself as an amputee. Information isn’t my strong suit. Excess of angels, tyranny of nostalgia. I dug into a tree a grave for a rabbit’s foot. Talked year after year in an echo that had my children tapping out of televised fight events. Violence is a language that rewards godlike pronunciation. Everyone knows where they were when nothing encrypted the pathway to racism in the shell of finding its mother. My drinking keeps changing the age I started drinking. Jesus gets crucified so many times that a one-of-one pop-up book of god using for a pillow a doll based on death doesn’t arrive in time for the book burning. I am late to my life and the television longs to be frostbitten. The toys have no memory. Even less when they explode.

[soul]

warn a crow
you’ll forget
your past

~

[untitled]     for Kaveh Akbar

all this time, ghost, we’ve been writing about the wrong body. poems talk of me like I’m here. nostalgia adrift on an oyster boat. empty acne on the face of god.

~

[untitled]

heaven wasn’t called heaven until it was full. we are made of water and there’s glass between us. when my son is asked to rate his pain he says his blood feels like a feather. I sleep at the foot of his bed often, a crooked something, a melancholy numeral…
his body- I don’t know. it repeats what most are made to recite. my brother has a ghost can see cats.

~

[untitled]

we are brave
because
one at a time
we are brave
but the mother
hamster
eats her young...

these mouths
age
in a dreamless
noise

~

[dream tells me it is because I miss pianos]

dream tells me
it is because
I miss
pianos
that I follow
a specific
cow
through nondescript
neighborhoods
none
abandon / dream

does not tell me
which half
of hide and seek
you were
when baby

the first person to use these steps went down these steps. violence is the new past. I see a dove and think god will never know who it was ate his crushed light bulb. I betray my ear. the seashell of the stomach.

A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll.
Stop drinking.

I don’t know the name of the animal that slept with god. that ate the pea and left a rib. that moved the angel’s grave. with help.

wind’s childhood, nothing’s

gift exchange