downloading
the horror movie
that shows
your *****
takes
a long time
in the city.

others
are a grief
I came alive
to miss.

three unicorns
in horse’s
dream
surround
a lame
deer

can dream
be stopped

I enter with my small life to profile the impressions you did of my brother.  these kids, they cough in photos.  as for her, her father’s voice could up and speak at a moment’s notice.  I move the gun daily.  if my head wasn’t glued on, I’d have lost my ears to the hive mind of ghost forgiveness.  my brother liked to play leap frog.  **** art.  we live too long.

an imaginary pet
in the thoughts
of its previous
owner.

the left hand
the afterlife
of the right.

a muscle disorder
in a sponge
sized
infant.

the *****’s paper feet.

lifted from the eyesight of a torn seagull

the beached outhouse of a father’s mermaid

the infant
would get
so angry
siblings
would blow
on its face
it would start
breathing
and a biblical
sigh

would usher
itself
into the nursery
of the infant’s
mind
where

vehicle
to a mother’s
heist
     a child
of present
fathers

would happily
****
on whoever

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation.  in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god.  my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery.  if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.

god
my path
to meaning
nothing

-

she had a sock drawer and a  pair of secret hands

the hardest time
with houses

-

what if the end stops coming

-

what if

from one cannibal to another

it is extra
this bone
from the horse

Moon
ate

the boy kicks on his back, which is good for his memory.  
the house does not clamor for care.
the dryer has a thought, fantastic, like a pony.
the mailman, jesus christ, the mailman has caught
his sleeve
on a branch.  the boy’s mother is laughing.  indeed,
she may die.

the cigarette
the worrier’s
flashlight

the past
a widow…

deserted childhood, electric eel.

if poor
put mouth
where mouth
is

it is odd
at first
but becomes
common
the inclusion

of ghost
on a list

of demands

-

winter means
little
means
ahead

of winter

the mothers
they swallow
snow

worms

-

in no time at all

the bomb-maker’s garden
leaves its mark
on the wrong

snake

-

the infant believes I’ve sent for my body

mother talks him down
the shy
shepherd
whose dove
is deaf

father
remembers
food

the devoured
bury
the bored
stone

the rest
is easy

friendless, born

trespassers
shoot themselves.

your son gets hired
by city

to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.

my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive

turns on.

a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.

my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures

using only
redactions.

god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.

I am far too animated.

your body is the notice
eyes

give.

the question
of where
evil
resides

has not been
knowingly
posed
to the man
locked in a room
with nothing more
than a small rock.

in an open field
of no aberrations
a woman
goes into labor
for god.

most men will throw the rock
before using it
for pleasure.

age is a factor
to age
groups.

to the garden I cannot see-

pain as my witness
I go.

a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.  

your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.  

your mother is a vow of silence
you were born     to second.

I am nobody I speak of.  those alive to nuance, those seeing

a necklace     in a grandmother’s     clotted leg.

     god is not silent.  god is forgiven.

to jump
the dream
of audience
that buried
my father’s
rib

I stand

on an operating table
in a circus
tent
and invite

my mother
to believe
all earthquakes
belong
to satan
and not

to the devil
my sister
was
when high
on the body, its boneless

forgetting

age I’m at
I go
from bath
to funeral
to bath-

puppet
that made
a fist

in the valley
referred to
as the church
of aggressive
amnesiacs

a family
of pickpockets
gathers
for a group
picture

only to find
the single
use
camera

forgotten

and the boy
responsible

missing...

I’ll dream
(when I
die)
of all
the sleep
I didn’t

outside
of mother

get

thunderstorms
reported missing
by some
verbose
orphan

the wounded cursive of the boy who thinks himself chicken

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

the denied
sainthood
of both
imagination
and curiosity

the baby
you can’t explain

and the cuts

how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

a lover of movies sets a chair in a field. sits the pillow here then there upon it.

his daughter her new trick is to bell the head of a spoon to her nose. to move is grotesque.

up close their house looks merely bigger.

her strange shoulder he sees it same as her fall down three steps. sees it without looking.

the spasms, the dormant minutiae of curse that by their accident of suddenness have killed held mice, continue.

mice the minions of mute thunders; the exiled scars of clouds.

the deaf curvature of your knee,
the low nod behind you of a humble balloon; these I address that I have returned the lover of all things made

his chair might the monstrous pass.

I made
for a toy
car
a movie
screen

from a sheet
of aluminum
foil...

/ mother worked herself out of a straitjacket

she wanted
to paint

/ my stone-faced brother
had just been born
to mark
the cessation
of all

thunder

I pick a child to bring with me.  it’s Sunday, and we need bread for the week.  the market’s been gutted since the lot of them were born.  I used to errand with my wife but it made her feel alone.  we starved together for months before receiving notice we were no good at it.  in that same notice was an invitation to attend a symposium on regulating orphanhood.  we decided to go and at that to go arm-in-arm as a grandly private joke.  we came home ready to be serious and went about choosing six, all sent from heaven, as we thought they’d been kicked out.

I am looking for the mark on my body that will tell me how near I was to you when I fell asleep. we can’t know where touch has been. the third animal to which I pray

was it always
deaf