sorrow the mudwrestler of my drought

whose tooth fairy
does
impressions

can we erase
what silence
films

a dog
a smaller
prison

I bring with me
to put
on the moon
my webbed
foot /

father for soap has been known to use a magnifying glass

brother he bend a tooth
in the temple
of the spoon

sister she is fixing a screen door
when her child’s fish
moves
its bruise

let surgery leave something in your mouth.

weigh them as a whole, the clothes of the smallest person who died on your watch. the blindfolds. the dreams of your stick population. down the pill

yet inside
the black
sheep.

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

we had a baby together to solve our bug problem. god said all we had to do was read to it. the books made us look poor. some of them took batteries and, if struck, played music.

the memory
before I have it
of this terrible
thing
I’ve done

/ and the fish
the flaggers
of blue
runways
are swimming
two by two

/ and god has no one

your hair looks like a missing wig. dream is comb in a glacier. sleep an ape’s thumbnail.

a rake
the scarecrow’s
broom.

ugly makes you easy to find.

as a word, plot seems artificially unaware of its absence from a book of baby names.

online, abandonment needs a vacation.

/ GOD

comes home to a punching bag in a treehouse. to a breathing machine being fixed by a marsupial. to a son talking himself down from cooking-show fatigue. to a clockmaker’s lab rat

putting a spell
on a boat.

[entries for the unmarked]

i.

swimmer was a cornfield baby

ii.

fox clock, always

noon

in the egg thrower’s
aquarium

iii.

playing tag

no blood
allowed

iv.

her bones
disappear
when pups
nurse

[entries for travelogue]

on his belly to **** on his tail, man dreams of getting laid in the birthplace of tunnel vision

/ my son he keeps showing me how to find the same animal

died of different
things

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

I tell the mechanic my car sounds like it’s drinking blood / I am not trying to be funny / end.

–

abuse, 1980: because a tornado won’t touch a house on fire

–

in the nursery, the babies with elderly features…

I can’t speak
to how
the form
my father’s
form
mimics

is able
to take
from lightning

a licking
while whaling
on the snout
of what
was born
muzzled
then sewn
for safekeeping
into the belly
of a punching

bag…

(I am not
the one
my meditation

needs)  violence

is my brother’s
music

I had
all year
one
idea

-

the infant is forever in the infancy of immediate hearsay

-

I was online / had a nosebleed  

-

I was with your mother when she safely evacuated
many

from nothing’s
installation

-

you may

in event
of god

instill in my sons

the all
clear

a fist camouflaged as a bird, a very baby, bird
is born in a pile of bricks.

I open a door for a woman
because online a photo
has taught me
I stand
as all stand
for ******.

     home for good
with papers
she’s convinced
tell her what she’s like
in the workplace
my mother, my mother
like an artifact
of her own
paranoia

     survives.  

(I am a response to a world I’ve yet to receive)

from the many scattershot piles of junk, my father is able to make a two-headed shovel.  his laugh wants my mother to worry for no reason.  in the space between us, things die in pairs.  in motion, my father is adamant.  of the one camera hanging from his neck, he gives me the one that works.  he has me shoot him standing on a chair with his arms desperate to keep his hands.  he has me cut them off so our memory will later deceive our outside trappings and believe he changed a light bulb.  now it’s me laughing, the boy god, the hope.  hurry, america.  hurry, chuckles.  if the **** looks the same for three days, it becomes a ruin.

he’s got this look like he doesn’t know how much he’s into them for and the kicker is he’s alone. I’d subtitle him as nervous but it wouldn’t be ample. we’re brothers, 4 years between our bleaker anxieties. he talks with his arms and I see my father at age 32 and my father sees me and winks. brother he knocks the table wood that separates us with both knuckles and tells me he’s gonna need luck in both of these and he shows his open palms. he begins to gag and I **** but he shows me again his palms. I lean back in my chair and pretend I am in a very small space and pretend I am cigarette smoke. I see the oval in his throat and then an egg and then the egg broken on the table. my brother he loses his cool and bites his palms and futilely tries to set the table afire with matches, some light some don’t, no matter. he tells me he usually catches the egg and telling me calms him. still, it’s some trick and I say it. not a trick, he says, but magic. he drowses right there in front of me and my subtitle is ‘****’ because I am scared. we go inside to the dog we’re sitting for and I retire to the guestroom where I check the eggs in my bag to make sure they’ve not broken. I go into the bathroom with one of them and say down the hatch. I spend the night on a hard bed and care for my stomach. my stomach and not the egg.

last day, 30% off all print books on Lulu with coupon code of OCTSAVE30

/

some poems:

/

[her impressions of the experiment]

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean. the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple. I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

~

[estimations]

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

~

[upheaval]

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree. a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar. mom slips in and out of pregnancy. it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself. you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

~

[no after]

and what would you have me imagine? a change of tense in a tale of abuse. a baby licking the palm of a doll. a spoon. a robot’s broken arm. a chalk outline of a worm. hunger’s tacklebox. our allergic sister’s suicide note. a calf eating its first canary.

the bunk
above mine
I call
deathbed

is

my brother’s-

he has
his own
way
of thinking

     showerhead
is spotlight

     he argues often
with sister
about
the staircase

two times
of three
she pushes
him

but today
she is tired
and agrees
by saying

silly
backward
staircase

     and I, as ever
unable
to break
the heart
of either

sleep
for both
as they watch
me

eat

errors in care

how many hells does a death need?

the lost mind
the nurse
of the mouth.

I mean to be impossible, oh

/

and dreamt
from sleep.

~

horror movies

because they have no master
and don’t
overstay
their goodbye.

because in talking
we hid
sound. death

happens more
on land.

~

devotions for pilot**

historically, it has gone this way

birth
flashing
the present, my lap

breathing

a plastic spider
in the cereal box
glows.

my foster parents
think
I’m asleep.

as asleep
as my legs.

my wife was pregnant with a silhouette.  it lost itself to her.  it left me out.  I began saying sensitive things around women about their bodies so one might trace me.  I said lord I thought my life would be sadder.  I bought an AK47 because it was the only gun I recognized.  I hung it on my neck.  my wife used her memory to pluck things from my hands.  food, mostly.  it helped me realize I was rarely using both hands for the same purpose.  my wife began going out at night.  said she did so to hate America.  when once I tried to join her on the front step I was informed how she missed me but not as much as I believed.  she threw bread crumbs into a shuddering bush and I had the feeling it wasn’t new for her.  yesterday, I sold the gun to an interested neighbor with a child to protect.  he told me my wife’s nightgown is rather sheer but that he’s more concerned with how she carries herself.  after hearing that, I don’t think anyone could’ve dragged me to him.

a statue of my father drilling for scarecrow. immediacy as elsewhere’s double. my mother’s dream to play pool on an empty stomach. blow-up dolls for the drowned christ.

at the local library
books
separate
the victims
of home invasion
from those
researching
the doll’s
propensity
for drunkenness.

I stumble in, stumble out.

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

to adopt
god
the paperwork
alone

close by, a man is relearning how to cradle his corrected son.

my luck
the alien
I saw
was disabled

Letter 082524

Dear Ethan Hawke

The nervous systems of angels. A funeral for a cigarette. There are two Ohios. I am still in my singsong violence when my sister throws her youngest in front of an unmoving farm machine. Sometimes a year yanks a room from death. A wasp eats the shadow of a practice wasp. My wrist thinks I’m brushing its teeth and god is the child who survived my dream. I can’t fake sleep long enough to be healed.

Letter 082624

Dear Ethan Hawke

I live in a body that sleep hasn’t noticed. A ghost is an angel in love with slow motion. No one touch me. I am dreaming of a poetry book written by Chelsea Peretti. I forget its second name, but its first is Lamb Hat and Crow Perfume. It is being reviewed on tiktok by someone whose mother is unable to recently die. I can’t say on brand without crying. I don’t think it’s healthy of course to dream that celebrities want to secretly write poems. But Chelsea’s poems are perfect. In a houndless south, my god gets high. Stay pretty. Goodbye.

Letter 061624 climate sameness

Dear Ethan Hawke

Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I **** a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I **** a rabbit. I’d never **** a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.

Letter 081124

Dear Ethan Hawke

I don’t write to anyone. I am hated. In photos I am the photographer’s ghost. In the dream I wear a girl’s bathing suit and someone shoots me in the foot. This is how I learn to swim. Thigh is a perfect word. The way it dies in the mouth. Mouth is dead. Who can tell. Only god. In Ohio at every fair the young say eat me until I’m young. We make jokes about crowhio and about the baby’s stomach born without an inside voice. The spider in my ear comes out a wasp. I don’t want my kids to see me do anything. Spiders get toothaches and angels, erections. Wasp is on its own.

Dear Ethel Cain

The lie of my childhood became a lie. Let's compare suicide notes. Turtle, ashtray, ghost. Time is an angel knocked unconscious by a star. I had an idea for a resurrection story but the 3D glasses failed lol. I remember your fake mother on the set of a zombie movie telling *** jokes for the dead. Confession number one: I was born without a missing finger. Our bathroom door falls asleep before we do.

Dear Ethel Cain

I’m in the afterhood of childlessness. No one is dancing. I say things above my dying body that sound final. A cigarette is a flashlight with a toothache. Look for whiskey’s underwater church.

Dear Ethel Cain

I try to sing. I am not cold. Where deep designs of making hold.

Dear Ethel Cain

somehow for both Aria Aber and Franz Wright it’s hard to have good brothers I can’t go a week without drinking because the week is from 1983 touch resurrects itself how lonely sleep is named after sleep my eyes fight over two memories a line of ants carry a lightbulb to god I pray in a bullet to a melancholy bee don’t be afraid there in no nowlife

Dear Ethel Cain

Despair is a food group. I had to read the line again that said my brother’s hand was eating out an angel. Cannibals surprise their mothers in Eden. Is skin still the longest dream? My fake sleep is not your fake sleep. I thumb my own eyes in the shepherd machine.

Dear Ethel Cain

I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a ****** we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish.

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.

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.

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.

Dear Ethel Cain

They pronounced my name correctly then killed my children. A shredded angel brought to god the blue arms of Ohio lightning. For too long, an infant heard itself think. God outlasted imagery. And gender, god.

The mouth is the only wound denied entry into paradise. Each eye beats birthmark to the body. The angels find us, forget. A tooth like a ghost growing in a fog bathes itself in a window. Bombs, miss. Meat into dust, that ****** hoax. All but a pair of creatures know the truth. God taken by two kids who can’t move.

Dear Ethel Cain

An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this anymore than I’m.

Dear Ethel Cain

A spacecraft carrying blood for the animals god didn’t name loses power near the star of Bethlehem. Those on board have nothing to write with. It’s not the saddest thing, but has happened prior to there being sadness. Later, sound takes a chainsaw to the sound of a chainsaw. The world makes me afraid of movies.

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.

Dear Ethel Cain

I might be dying. It is rude to care for oneself when your kids make from children bombs that bomb. It’s not hard to be drunk. My blue mother lives on motherhood while worshiping in miniature the sleep of the lonely bear bought by our most eccentric celebrity. I’m not okay. I have to drive to work when at home my son is sick and my other sons aren’t. If I die, people will stop looking at me right away. My brothers aren’t on their knees with this. Dear star my abusers used puppies to touch my blood in black and white. You can’t deport a witch. A miracle. My nakedness shrinks death with a folk song about angels protesting permanence. The lie reached heaven and that dude set himself on fire to burn god with Palestine. Jesus rose but the rest kept their graves on earth. The minotaur fell out of love with a horse. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder.

Dear Ethel Cain

I heard a song just now and my stomach wept weeping still. I started a band but we all had pianos. Frogs showed their throats to owls stuck looking away. You told me your opposite loved god for making jesus attracted to nothing. After is a place in the wristcutter’s belly.

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.

Dear Ethel Cain

I feel my death has passed away. That the golden comprehension of my shirtless youth has become touched out of its mind and into a code for unfinished nakedness. My god a scarecrow stuffed with snakeskin and my scarecrow a fetus trying to curl itself to life. I don’t think any of us are here. The pain of being is the pain of not having been. What a ******* thought. There are children who know the sky is a color made to scream at blue. And they die not because they are little.

Dear Ethel Cain

My belly drew circles around me. A scarecrow with cancer made peace with paradise in a cornfield of melancholy. My parents fell asleep but neither one before the other. Some bad kids formed a church then left it so they could pour glue down a rabbit hole. A short period of drunkenness found a mistake in a star. I didn't know how many rabbits to pray for, so I just prayed for one.

Dear Ethel Cain

Ants don’t cry or think about teeth. I got this star tattoo that cost a lot.

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.

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.