~ the director
one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her. a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.
his peers double crossed each other in small houses. he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled. his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.
he was in love with his sister, always had been. after she was mauled by the dogs meant for his father, he made walking his home until it called itself a hotel
of running. last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication
he did not miss
the death row scene, the saw his brother took from the cake, the plain basket
as it moved
with his mother
from bike
to bike…
~ transmissible
the stomach remains dumb
the way she finds this out on a school bus
the way her mother
after losing
a child
~ ephemeron
cornfield visionaries, they sat around the ball as if it were fire. I myself was tired of magic
so we played four short and the ball was a fact. a hard period planted in mud
or a long quote
buzzing the ears
together.
~ alleviant
of all places a park bench will do for the man not yet reading but planning to the children’s book with its cover of mother and child and kitchen and some kind of batter on the child’s face. presently the man is alone much as his mother is alone in one of his fingers. two men nearby are drinking from a water fountain and in turn are each palming the low **** for the other. they are friends but only by length of service and the man can tell one is aggressive and the other allows it. the book itself is disappointing. the child is just ***** and the mother is just angry and they learn only to be themselves. the men at the fountain become two men on a bench and the reader scoots over to hear about the voice of god as ****** children take the park.
~ amends
your house in foreclosure and you leave it and you are holding two bags of cat food.
sometimes a tricycle is a particular tricycle
trying to clear
with its back wheel
the low cinema
of your bare
foot.
I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.
I hope we can meet without talking money. this story my mother gave me
about the world’s first invisible man
is a keeper. he was born
that way.
your mother I saw her setting the patio table for two and I looked away but could hear
no one
beating her.
we can talk about your cat.
~ homology
the empty raccoons by their emptiness have kept the priest awake. the church dumpsters wheel themselves into the world and he watches. he tells his mother it is the silence of god. she shrinks from him more and more and eventually fits through a door he cannot see. his house fills with garbage and he becomes convinced he is wearing gloves. we do not argue. he raises them with his hands to take them off with his teeth.
~ fiction
my age, father paints an abstract jesus. mother has the kitchen to herself and sits. mother watches my brother lift a chair and leave. my sister lets a train pass and bites at the shoulder strap of her bra. not my age, I draw a violinist. draw a dog at the neck of its owner. at my age of apple and rope, I prefer god’s early work.
~ monodist
online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary. in house, I dreamt not of my wife but of a grape being rolled by a palm gently toward a grape the dream could not see. as it is in heaven, I was not all there.
~ signage
I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs. my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened. soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I startled that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad. I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of the man who’d fathered the boy whose fist had found so recently fistfight heaven. the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise. everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now see as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance. I told myself I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly. the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine. the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but went quickly back to its original. I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button. I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and that boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.
~ discipline
somehow sweet in his want of no trouble, the unwashed man goes hand in hand with your father to the backyard where they wrestle as if hurt were people keeping them apart. your father’s jaw comes loose, the man’s ear seems held by too small a magnet. at window you a sickly child with overbite and a scarecrow’s pipe stroke the puppet-corn hair of a sister’s doll and walk it cloud to defrosted cloud. amidst this bartering of vanished weight your mother is being made to balance on her bare stomach a glass of lemonade. in three days the man will come back, your father a bit healed, your mother less angry about straws.
~ the rabbits
the head of a shovel enters the earth of this southern field. there is no more give here than in the northern. the burying boy has been long facing the wind and will be longer. in walking toward the boy, the old man’s knees have locked. the old man is seen by the boy and the old man waves upright in the wind’s gnaw. the tops of the boy’s legs reach his stomach.
~ archaism
a man carrying his dog stops to kneel. for my distance from him, I am disallowed any inquiry that would flower. he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god at the simple chore of placing those first shadows. I am holding my son nostalgically, almost forgetting how my tooth would ache and his tooth would ache and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.
~ sincerely
the males had in them a sloth and a jolly fog of sportsmanship
and in the females a mistake was made.
against frogs, and against the dim leaping
of frogsong
I had this friend
broke his arm
while *******
at the wheel.
I put my arm in the grief of my arm.