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.

Dear Ethel Cain

They are moving the body from star to star when a landmine made in a dot of blood yawns arisen somewhere in the white acre of my poet friend’s eye. Needing a past, my sister lets a snake eat her entire stomach. Father invents in the grey cinema a remote for loneliness. My friend becomes an angel obsessed with redhaired dolls. My father leaves the cinema wearing nothing but a seashell and spends the rest of his life dreaming of a doorbell that tracks decay. Three mothers we can’t place leave together for a nightmare where a fetus bounces into the back of an out of control pick-up truck. I keep changing what my mouth holds, but it all fits.

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.

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.

angel of the old well
speaks to god
in rabbit, I wish

jack-in-the-box
your films
were longer

Teach the baby to **** in its stomach. Go bitemark bald to the burning of tire swings. Pretend you can be nostalgic in America. Do this by having at all times handfuls of woozy spiders that prevent you from making guns of your hands. Do this by drinking. I wasn’t worried but then my phone started working in a dream. In heaven, every mirror is an exit wound.

absence and removal, the parents
of nowhere

pity
they don’t
smoke

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

that was
the is
my father’d
been

keep the baby

eats
during thunderstorms

from ghost-written diaries
a constant identity

late
for its own
resurrection

this machine
it counts
for your mother
your father’s
sheep

that’s all it does
but is very
large

(everything
from the year it broke
is remembered
by the dog
that looked
with me
at the mouse

I ate for

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

ache’s password
is ghost
I mean
what I hear

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

oh
voice, my immediate
orphan

inspecting my son
after a fall

the blind
and photogenic

Dear Ethel Cain

I sleep in the sleep I’ll die in. My heartbeat says too soon, too soon. A hand on god’s eyelid. Nothing.

at a time
unlike this

the father
is all
appetite

the chicken, gone
he points

to its ghost…

–

my mouth
is a church, my clock
a Sunday spider

in a dry
toilet

–

(I’m passionate about my grief)

your shadow

dolled up
in the yard

–

cyborg, minotaur

not once
did I watch
them sleep

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.

daughter has a language keeps her quiet.

penny
is a pillow
for my father’s
blood.

lamb- every other

in a home
for animals
that have tried
to undress

she weighs
the child
and the child
the doll

God forgets things before they happen. In third or fourth grade, I was pulled out of a bathroom stall by a boy who’d been nice to my mother and I was told what should or should not be in my stomach. There was another boy with him. A city named Empty and a city named Goldfish took turns burning. I missed the future. The past, more.

shape is a future fashioned from god’s inability to reflect

–

(she thinks her hair came from an egg. she is not alone.)

–

there’s nothing in the food

Dear Ethel Cain by now abuse is nostalgia’s first job

I did not mean to pay attention to my life. For that, I am touchable and sorry. Not dying earlier is always the most cruel month. In school, in second grade, I wet myself two days in a row. I’ve never been able to scare the right people. During the assault, I spotted on the bathroom floor a pencil nearly sharpened out of existence. I thought of a star, a cigarette, and of a newborn being ****** back into its mother. I burned my face on a mask as something god could use when asked about my teeth.

a man turns a brick into a bird, yeah

call beautiful
what you can.

bird has no idea

and my home
is there.

I reach into a dream and pull out no small puberty. Every sister is terrifying. Hundreds of frogs jump differently away from a pond with two shadows. I can’t afford a ghost but can a demon. It looks at my ghost. Then at my food. Days from now, an entire train is used to transport the bones of a single mouse. I think I’m asleep. A sound thinks I’m asleep. Writing isn’t that important. You could die here and everyone would know.

its gaze
a eulogy
for distance
the animal
is mostly
pity

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma. genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea. this open umbrella. ghost at the keyboard.

(for JP)

running with my brother
those three miles

seconds
kept
by a watch
of salt

the bland
sons
of distance

the names

of the born
between

Everyone is writing. There’s no sound in heaven and ghosts are the teeth of god. I can’t even read I’m so sick. I have been a boy not wanting to know about *** and I have also been a boy wanting to kiss a crow put to sleep by god’s footprint. I looked it up twice on my phone how to set oneself on fire. The body is a boring dream. I can’t enter a building without hearing a baby stop breathing in the uncrushed stomach of my inner child. Someone says oh look and it’s just something outside that should be there.

this dream where an owl as big as a mouse lives with a mouse in the mouse's hole and they share a scratched up plate that looks like something a microscope would eat off of and for once I don't really know who I am in the dream beyond maybe just in the theater making sure I don't drink too much because when I drink too much I miss scenes but inevitably I miss a few scenes and I come back to the mouse and the owl fighting over the plate and the mouse kicks the owl out and says this wasn't normal anyway and of course the mouse says all this without speaking and it's only when the owl doesn't leave that the mouse realizes the owl isn't real and the problem with this realization is that the mouse then thinks all owls aren't real and I can see where this is going and so can you and I told a friend about this dream and he said dreams don't usually have a moral or end that way and the real end of the dream is that I don't have friends and now we're both sad

two ears
at once
her wounded
boy

–

sleep has one god

absence, none

–

the cough
he had
the week
he was missing

I had a doll
kept me
from believing
in sunburn, ideas

for the same
church

after
the talking
animals
of body
horror

and before
acolytes
anonymous-

the wrong
dying
baby

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide

forgetting
to signal

the future?

of the world ours is based on

/

my teddy bear
doesn’t
sleep

/

birth
means the baby
on your back
can swim

the bridge
the broken arm
of god.

the ventriloquist, her immortal canary…

birth the jackpot
hit
by grief. a wiseman

mourning
his third
son.

eat
as often
as a squirrel
mad
for the ghost
of a nesting
doll

some medicines / don’t work / how lonely

–

change diapers

else
you invent
evangelism

–

suicide, all those dates I didn’t

–

formless herself, she makes an image. animals

were the end
of god

The heavy heaven horse
headaches

The infant cinemas

The invisibly tragic
frostbitten
palmist…

Go on, son

Toy blood teething in the church of my ear

would die
of ceaseless
immediacy

to adopt
god
the paperwork
alone

sound’s shy historian, digger

of a hole
for the mouth