I lost you before I lost you. your stickmen were free of anxiety. they left a church to the potbellied ghost of your muscle. their word for tree was branch. what god couldn’t finish they called wind. baby an air that stopped breathing.

I am
when I drink
a birthmark
removal
expert
or an angel
privately sad
who prolongs
with a rabbit
held together
by grief
a whale’s
insomnia…

Boredom is a mirror’s god.

Pianos
in the winter
are cruel.

fish
fishing
for grief
idk
I always
cried
near spiders
so made
to display
their hunger

Light’s
egglike
silence
Rock
paper
infant
Infant
omen
hair

the cause of this grief escapes me and I worry can tunnel breathe. the snake in your love letter sounds real. it takes my belly to things

that are also

When found by my children, I am the most lost of all fathers. *** sounds like crying to someone crying. I want to drink with nothing in my stomach and talk to no one about art. I still have only five words for what my hands can do. In Ohio, either the box is the church or the pup is the church. In Ohio, animals think fire is the last supper of the afterlife. Look, I tire of both angel and ghost but of angel first. Younger I thought the bible had been written by my uncles. The fish is holy and the bread boring and unending. Caress the scales downward. By my uncles against their will.

a mirror keeps leaving me in the same toy. smoking allows grief to imagine thirst. I have a mother; she misses yours. god

sees turtle, thinks mask.

Dear Ethel Cain

Mom cracks an egg and says she is no longer holding onto the fingerprint of god. My brothers look at me as if they know how to erase my eyes. There is a problem in this poem that only a poem can solve. Death is death because it couldn’t sleep in heaven. Stones here are thrown because a stone can’t eat more than one bird. We listen to our fathers argue over whether or not ghosts are angels that are sexually active. Then to the same tooth for nine months. By the time we’re assaulted, we’ve not been uniquely suicidal. Echoes learn the wrong language.

people are leaving my body

it is not alarming

together, how many birds
have your parents
seen
eat

I picture you
as prepared
to imagine, they will judge

her
her hunger

on its form

sacrifice 5

I’ve been trying to leave heaven but my body tastes like a photo I took in Baltimore Ohio of a groundhog’s skull
and my blood is still in the bowl of a dog sleeping on earth.

Before death dies does it see every lived thing

I’m in the accident
but I’m in the car first

It’s hard when your parents know there’s a god.
Babies think other babies are screaming.

Any last silence

to koan
the world
makes perfect
sense, to motto

it makes
none-

two vowels
in the word
poor

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.

Cutting the hair of the crucified.

Stars
and jobs
and stars.

you have to count them quickly

the bite-marks on my son’s arm

-

either you touch a goldfish
or become
a dentist

-

does it matter whose dream
my mouth is

-

make art and make it empty. god has run out of room.

as you do not struggle to recall the titles of those empty sermons we composed while biking uphill after our sister’s head, I tell you that a baby eats like jesus in a haunted house and that dad was right the lawnmower dies because it knows where in the yard his mom was deep enough to bury doll and I deny that hibernation is real

(is more a ghost started by two wise men dressed as animals

My unreachable
mother, new

and unreachable.

All the bodies I’m sent into are in pain.
A caterpillar bellies across an hour that’s been touched

by the last
butterfly’s
moment…

I know that’s easy. I’m not here
for the writing.

I wonder sometimes
born
what was it
we fled

and how it can’t have been
our earliest yearning

to arrive

like when the water
got turned off
I still
got naked
and had
you know
my little
boat…

moms who smoke
that’s how
they dream

I was dead
I thought about death
I died

sleep was the only spotlight my mother could avoid

if you see a wolf, know suicide

has stopped
working

swimming with father, I said jesus is not the best scarecrow
and father said
swim

I still can’t find Ohio in the the bomb-maker’s Ohio

sister
she feels
brilliant
when there is less
of her
to eat, she is often alone

people I’ve never been to

amateur night
in the electric
chair, a bundle
of almost nothing
rocked awake
by a mime

My mouth somewhere open in the unmarked church of naming, I cover my face when I go to sleep. Each night god believes in you a star loses its memory of being seen. We don’t always know how to feel attractive and worried. Angels tell our toothaches to imagine a fly living too long with a small part of the sun’s brain. Your breast dreams of the hole in my lung. Eyes are on the way.

God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.

a father remembers making dinner and whistles at the sober. his death nudges a turtle in the direction of some absent creature chewing gently on its tongue beneath a poster of a missing dog. lightning prays wheelchair and preaches lawnmower. there is a woman here said to live on hair. on whose mouth we survive. birth thinks only of itself. not a day goes by in the grocery of touch.

some entries from poem sequence [returning]:

~~~~

my angel is a scarecrow in a sleeping bag. heaven a movie theater in spain. she walks that way because she is trying to step on her blood. the boy at the gate is lost and must choose either frankenstein’s childhood or a more diverse nostalgia. orphans on earth smell like bread.

~~~~

there are pictures of me sleeping that are responsible for my brother cheating on his diet.  apples the shape of going home.  *** addicts fighting to direct a musical about the number of people disappearing

to let death
mourn.  there is a chair in an open field.  a throbbing in the palm of sound’s publisher.  a kid under a blanket asking god

when did she know
what perfection
was.  a mouth that was a bomb

/ before I had teeth

~~~~

with sound
the second language
of absence, with

mother, bible, bee

(I am trying to memorize missing you

~~~~

church
of the removed
stitch. what I would bite

to have your mouth.

~~~~

in the history of newborns
not one is named

shelter, and we’ve called

only two
attraction…

my dream priest
dies
in the desert
after making
with death
a movie, no...

the blood’s
search
for brain

~~~~

they took
the body

lamb
stayed with star

~~~~

you can train
a bird
but not
a fish
to care

for a thumb...

fire is the skin of god

~~~~

a father
at peace
with how many times
his hair
has died
is standing
in a museum
before the shell
of a giant
turtle

his infant’s mouth
has gone home
to lose
its shape

he is alone
like any
grocery cart

some
cribs

~~~~

that I be baptized by a vandal whose frostbitten hands…

that I could touch you with what I’m seeing and that a thing be worth

no words.

her dream the one where my father pretends to research the wrist of a deer

–

given another chance, I’d check my memoir to see if it’s happened yet

–

god is the least efficient way to feel nothing

A crushed moth in my mother’s throat is dreaming of a red lightbulb. The silence of our hair is too much. I say to brother break the same finger seven times you’ll hear a churchbell. Eyesight changes what seeing owns.

I threw
a couple sticks
and waited
to be kissed
on the arm
while my brother
licked
from his leg
the first insect
to have
amnesia
pretty soon
after that
our sister
bought a car
that had hit
a puppy
the puppy
lived
and god
was hooked

I lose in the dream

each child
in a way
I’ve imagined

Dear Ethel Cain

Hell doesn’t have a language but everyone goes there to talk. Your ears are ears to my ears. I continue to want to die less than my children want to be killed. Yesterday was yesterday. I could afford a room in the aforedoom. The future is a rumor started twice by a violence we remember being able to stop. The poor play shape, touch, reentry. Find four hands.

[hunger anomalies]

your son
he has
two brains
that’s great
but we’re looking
for water’s
stomach

~

[starvation names its food]

ask the sickest boy what a pig says to the pink phone of god

leave fingerprints for his hand to find

have words
with echo-

he will die
he will not die
laughing

~

[death has too many mothers]

in me like a sympathy pain

is Christ, her language

a fasting
echo

sacrifice 4

If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.

TRY, RUIN

I put all my knowing in the hands of the known
thinking things wiser would **** me in peace
the roots of my going expanding alone
where drinking sings finer to pill popping beasts

you placed all the growing in a garden so burned
a leaving built into your still lover’s teeth
the pace of your smoking so slowly relearned
our drinking spilled into the pillcrusher’s feast

oh bombs made in heaven too perfect to drop
  I still think the angels are ******* with god
the mirror a creature that image resists
  unmoved by the seeing of its own basilisk