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.

to the goodbye
that created
distance

designed the afterlife designed the afterlife of missing children

designed the dream designed its biological dream

In this church there is a toy phone on top of a toilet seat. I miss trapping god with nostalgia. I miss amnesia. A boy is a bell is punching into that fatherless space created by any shape born into a world of swimsuits. Oh fury, moon of hopelessness, the astronauts need nudes.

sacrifice 4

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

Be the false thing that god worships. Lead hyposexuals to the sleepwalker tired of finding your body. I am desperately dumb. America is ruined because the destroyed parts of America angel no creature to a stop. Imagery is a measure of detail's molasses loss. I can't go back, or I'd take that out.

[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

Dear Ethel Cain

I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.

Dear Ethel Cain

Knowing I have skin makes my skin stay put. I am perhaps in my last translated body and am maybe hearing creatures compare voice apps for crucifixion survivors. In the dream that cannot undream the dream of my assault, two men who share a neck find part of my stomach in my son’s brain. I was wrong. Everything I touch forgets being my hand.

is my son
alone

ask

God thought I was a dream.
I’ll love you in heaven.
I didn’t read
All of your poems.
They didn’t change my life.
God told me in a dream
That angels
Throw eyeballs
At scarecrows.
I get weird
Born
And ******.
I am afraid of my children
And my children are afraid
Of their friends.
I wrote in my head a song
I wanted to hear.
Owl, whale, crow
Is the only
Order.
Writing about god doesn’t mean you’re smart.
Barton you can’t
Use
Like that
The animals.
Word choice
Is a hoax.
As far as last lines,

Roll that tiny spider
Into a cigarette
For years.

A minotaur, a unicorn, and an angel walk into a bar. Stay terrified. Your feet will bare themselves to abandoned rabbits.

You can't drink in the bathtub if your son is disabled. The eyes are more violent than what they see. People standing on a haybale pretending to be high shouldn't be killed by a truck. There is one year of *** and two of snow. I unmirror in the dream I was left in for the bot that I was.

They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.

sacrifice 8

Gaze
Is a lost
Film
Filmed
In the seen
Abyss
As memorized
By a mother’s
Basilisk
Star
I don’t
Say after
Life
Around rabbits
Cigarettes
Give the dead
Roots
Made of smoke
Gaze is the unnamed
Limb of sight
Time a pause
God takes
In the post
Angel
Tantrum
Of a carpenter
Ghosting the ghost
Garden yield
Of his father’s
Pawprint moon
Loss
Has bones
All of them
Found
Fact
After sobbing
Fact

The killing, the movies, the drinking. A spotlight stolen by a man in a deer costume. My son saying he wants to live at home until his brother dies. God’s dream, too small.

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.

A squirrel in the guest
blood
of god apes
history’s unthinkable fetus.

A brother and a sister
forget
at a funeral
who they look like.

My son’s
hot ear
smells
like the cigarette
gave Jesus
away.

I love you.
Terrible
that we’ve met

The poem is as old as I write it. For example, this poem is too young. Come back.

sympathy pain, crib

of a normalized

hunger

the eyes
in a sad
race
a game
of godless
tag

Are you willing to leave them alone on the earth for their last twenty years?

I doubt with presence my absolute hereness.

Amensia.

I believed inquiry would mean I had a
Question.

No one likes your gesture sequence of
Poems.

We left the water
To leave the water
Guessing.

Don’t get mad at babies.
Be nice to god.
Tender soldier, there are birds

That bury teethmarks.

The ground is too soft.
Your hand will die.

Climate change killed a ghost and every angel slept.

Animals hid their dreaming.

Microwaves
confessed

to hummingbirds.

Our longest death
remained a boy
his brain
god’s
now

Churchbell, fetus, ceiling fan. A frog hops out of my brother’s dream and lives instantly. Seven men pull a child in all different directions out of a car perfectly owned by their wrecked father. If you don’t sleep, your body will remain too crooked to crucify. Many of my poems are not called 'cleaning my son’s back'. Here we are.

I cut myself near a doll that wasn’t meant to look like me.

Nakedness,
find your nudes.

No newborn can reach existence.
Sleep knows memory
cannot fix
an eggshell.

( into a field
  fled water
  from the spine
  of the lord )

Erections turn the stomach to salt.

The comb
born
too early

How long the hair cries

No god called me into this poem.
No god
calls me out.