i.

amnesia
the perfume
of a dead
ghost

ii.

sleepwalkers
for a more
christ-like

hand signal

iii.

blue hound at a pilot’s grave

the babies
team up
on a sad day
for skins.  I am not  

the same person
we were.

to my most disabled boy-

the girl’s name
we couldn’t
decide on.

to the curled woman
smoking her last
in the photo
she’s brushed from-

baby yours, or baby mine, how important
it is
we focus.

sadness
in something
my brother
ate-

retrace them all

the found
poems

I king my scalp with smoke-damaged eggs. a man is here from the church of predictable witness. each sound is worse than the last.

cousin
she pierces
her own
ears, her mouth

a rubber
toad
maybe won

at the fair

/ uncle
wants
we save
the blackest

marshmallows

might he see
again
his alien
dentist

/ an animal
with no
stomach

home sweet brain
activity.

dog door, bible.  

a brick
from the wall
of crow.

father, thunderbolt, tongues
for totem.

outing.

the light
under which
I fought.

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

as I am not haunted by the tormented shallow,
I am not afraid.  a jump scare
does nothing
for depression’s
heartbeat.  
memories of abuse
are not
abuse.  I recall you turned in
early
and the dream
wasn’t ready.  the blindfold
is patience
that may or may not
arrive.  the stick
a stick.

I pine more for the being god was thinking about when he made you. visually, the moons of pain. where circled by what. the one-eyed lambs.

memory
of god
make
no bones…

I thought
water
slept

/ a pair of handcuffs
from the mermaid’s
dream

this black tooth

my time
as a ghost

a demon with three days to live is given to my father’s body.  in this, father finds luck to be neutral.  mother is a good explosion, brother is a bad.  when the dust settles, sister can see the baby in her stomach.  it is my belief and it is also god’s that our food is the food we forgot to poison.  to pray, I am left with little more than an animal’s halo and two representations of what you were not seriously clawed by.  in your sleep, you move me into mine.  a finger shows itself to the back of my throat.

with a clear
head
I wash
my hands
in the dark
and spread
the fingers
of one
into the absence
of my father’s
glove
where
the fingers
of my other
had died
for the knuckles
mother’d
liken
to a puppet’s
ribs

[soul]

warn a crow
you’ll forget
your past

~

[untitled]     for Kaveh Akbar

all this time, ghost, we’ve been writing about the wrong body. poems talk of me like I’m here. nostalgia adrift on an oyster boat. empty acne on the face of god.

~

[untitled]

heaven wasn’t called heaven until it was full. we are made of water and there’s glass between us. when my son is asked to rate his pain he says his blood feels like a feather. I sleep at the foot of his bed often, a crooked something, a melancholy numeral…
his body- I don’t know. it repeats what most are made to recite. my brother has a ghost can see cats.

~

[untitled]

we are brave
because
one at a time
we are brave
but the mother
hamster
eats her young...

these mouths
age
in a dreamless
noise

~

[dream tells me it is because I miss pianos]

dream tells me
it is because
I miss
pianos
that I follow
a specific
cow
through nondescript
neighborhoods
none
abandon / dream

does not tell me
which half
of hide and seek
you were
when baby

[repairs]

the past
misses
your child
also

~

[beauty]

you look like someone
who’s not
famous

god

before he died

~

[campestralia]

i.

hailstorm a midwestern cairn for cracked eggs

hiccup
the small
afterlife

ii.

figures, maternal
step naked from a.m. houses
scream
to be
collected, we’ve all seen

the rooster
reenter
the clock

iii.

birth, go to heaven-

god
is time’s
way
of showing
history

that death
has no
experience

iv.

and the pestersome
bats
are asleep

in the cross
of Ohio
crows

~

[tongue]

a prop
fingerprint
from the object’s
dream
of being
touched
or a pig
that gets
fire
to keep
a diary

~

[empty]

grief
has a swimmer’s
stomach

ageism

mob mentality
of the boys
you were



faith

in these
the footprints
of a left-handed
boy



doubt

unicorn sickness

as so

rumored



gentility

duster
of my father’s
bookmark

identified

by her picture
day
invite



final resting place**

god already underway

the shape

consumed by another man’s pain
I stayed close to home
but worried

that if even my mind
wandered

none would find him

or discover the shape
he was in



this that informs

I scratch the cheeks
of my sleeping
son.

both of my secrets
are hands.

my son has only one secret.

it curls his body
into a claw.

it caresses

the sibling world.



years I was not kind

playing flashlight tag in a darkened church
I kicked whatever form
hid under

the pew I’d chosen
for mine.

though I’d not hear the squeal of an actual pig
for some time

I’d seen Dorothy fall
in black and white

and had cast her most anxious
uncle

as Lennie
in Of Mice and Men

and so knew to broaden
god’s periphery

playing dumb.



the draw of evening

if I manage to hear myself
in my children
I can close
my eyes



museum with one exhibit**

everything his daughter makes is ugly

hide it all
he says

until her soft fat hands
remain only

to lead him
to the others

become kind
from waiting

I was made
to believe
in the making
of the thing
you were made
to see

-

Q:  what is a hand?

A:  my own blood squirting out of a fish

-

it is hard to choose a coffin
when your mother
is clutching
a purse

dying of young age, your brother nurses at the breast of the stage hand’s version of a mother.  the stage hand is off arguing with a lamp on the impossibility of attracting moths.  beside a tall cake, a groom with lockjaw and a stiff neck has to take life’s high point on faith.  if you remember, brother made for the groom a bible so light it could be held by a cobweb.  and then it was.

how many last words are there?

I don’t mean to suggest
my weapon
is heavy.  

before every meal
a voice tells me
in its best
voice
impression

that some bombs
don’t
go off.  this means eat.  

bait is a bird from a brother’s birdwatching dream.

it is sad like seeing a fetus
in the dark
is sad.

have we failed to water god?

as our rescuer, god could not go with us into hiding.  how many times must I accept my heart let alone stop my brother’s?  your father is ****** through a straw into a spaceship summoned by your inability to dream.  your mother, on paper, lives under a tooth.  I can hear my guts scrape against the baby whose melancholy is brought on by the loneliness of my health.  the world is mostly weather.  we associate in shifts our sister’s body with the inside of a furniture store where nothing screams

you.

i.

a brother
on the roof
with his raft

and the white mouse
his baby
takes
like a bottle

ii.

the coming
of radar’s
crow, the lights

of illegible
ambulance

blank yard signs

radios

of the independently
poor

their babies
slow
in getting

up

doll, prayer mat, microwave

/ more time

i.

a river.  a sister born without eyes.  a sponge that is not your mother’s mouth.  

commonplace is a toddler’s map.  memory an unremarkable trauma.

I sign to sister how there’s no hot water in the house & count father’s burn money
where you can see it.      

ii.

the son most likely to catch a program on flamingos
thinks of himself on one leg  
and of a land
covered
in chairs.

iii.

a man is standing on a kitchen table gripping a broom.

his inbox will fill for three days
before the dogs
are his.

iv.

memory does not serve the woman
all out
of labor.

any mention of slave trade conjures
within the brood
retroactive     existential     endeavors.

it is confusing for the crow
to land on the arm     of a man
manmade
by straw.

secretly, perhaps secretly
jesus is not sad
but envious     that our sins permit
exhaustion.

mother never follows the word disabled.

without warning
I am the same age as a breathing pattern.

     god is an only father.

you don’t want to buy a bunny but you’ve already told your ex-wife you’re doing fine and now she’s requested a photo of something you love.  pet stores make you claustrophobic and you wonder if this is the same everywhere.  you decide to borrow your neighbor’s good camera but when you get to his door you hear him mowing your lawn.  a car going too fast makes to turn around in his driveway but blows a tire on the curb, backs up, and continues on its much sadder way.  you’ve seen your neighbor’s adult daughter without a shirt but at the time your dad was in the hospital and it was the beginning of not being turned on.  you don’t remember who but some odd duck sent him a snowglobe instead of flowers.

I worry
not
that your car
will slip
off the road

with you
in it

but that you
will think
it has

and arrive
on holidays
and at funerals
looking

more touched
than you are

thinking for shadow

(all my homes were entered at night)

and then for the crow
hit by the crow
our baseball

bear with me, a man was going house to house.  a big handed hunch of a man.  he was wanting to know if anyone in the immediate area had seen the bird he was talking about.  his enthusiasm was off-putting and in the back of my mind downright scary.  the look on a face when a door is opened is often the look of one to whom the lord has reappeared.  I don’t think the man knew he was ruining the rareness of the day’s clarity.  the bird itself was not his fault and the bird sighting could’ve happened to another.  on a normal day a suspended woman sings above us.  there is a before and an after and a bit of mystery to the meal obsessed.

how to bathe
a red chameleon
from the childhood
of Moses

the boy on my shoulders says my hair is on fire. it is our longest running joke. he laughs so hard my ribs fall asleep in his childless stomach. he takes the cigarette from behind my ear...

his cough is a paintbrush. no father can **** god. the resurrected miss death.

books to step on, scarecrows

to kiss.

animal
a thing left speechless.

night
a lost
suitcase.

the apple, the quiet. brother’s

double
nodding off
on library’s
secret
horse.

door songs.

mother, mother, father-

it changed me none to see my father rubbing a lamp in a time machine. mother, too, ain’t been different

since.

–

mirror miss your clock.

I’m sorry you have to see this. if I could starve invisibly, I would. my son’s surgeon worships ventriloquy. do you dream of the sleep you’ve already gotten? or of a thing so sad it gives birth? my abuser talks as if one can lose track of a mouth. in god’s favorite book, my ghost gets a hobby.

I lost three days of my life. four

less
than my father.

I am sad when two people kiss.

I appear to animal
sounds
that my brother
makes. sister

tells me
with a look
that giving
birth
is the same
as naming
your source.

mom likes the way I say
hypochondriac

after every
meal.

a fish looking for its graveyard

I was in the dream
I was writing
down

the audition calls for a woman to pretend she’s missing her right ear.  a day before I’m scheduled, I wear heels and have my boyfriend mangle my left.  a day after, I’m holding the baby of those who’ve never underestimated their power to look away.  I don’t get the part.  and mom turns it down.

I can’t write and write at the same time. there are drugs in my father’s shoe and bread crumbs in my sock. sister can sing but says church gives her two left knees. mother squeezes the hand I feel sorry for. ah, sorrow- no bird walks on water and your babies

are all
neck.

my stories go nowhere.

god
and his tree
of hunger

the evil was mine, the face wasn’t. some were delivered by one who wore a monster mask.

the smallest mouth guard. viruses

transmitted
by dream

keep the baby

eats
during thunderstorms

a newborn wants to be a hand.  

there’s the dream I have of heaven
and the dream
god lets me
bring.  

my boy
has a crow
for a backpack.

-for Jacob-

when I say there are four of me, I want you to imagine you can board a paper airplane to resume your life elsewhere as a supplier of matches to the triangle of vague nations.

-for Noah-

when I say there are four of me, I want you to fill equally exile and absence with a color you’ve seen twice.

-for JP-*

when I say there are four of me, I want you to put my face to a face and imagine two hands shaking beneath a god with six.

as this poem

was being written

     written

     a word that stops

     long of being

     sufficient

another poem

was being read

and by its end

was about

my brother


-

if you need to contact me

I would be moderately happy
to know

-

the poem being read
predicted a lake
surrounded by death-

in fact
it is something
it still
predicts

-

result:  one in three brothers betrays the fourth

-

my son may never  walk
but when he kicks on his back
these are what we call

his bicycle legs

hand-powered     for John Paul

we are without shirts.  our ribs, unshared.  

     you lift a mud flap to recall small stones
from a frog’s belly.  


light     for Noah

you write quickly in the dark.

we know better
than to love
the room.


advice for a kind of passage*     *for Jacob

invent only
what you
remember

in anything, uncoupled, there is death.
carneys, clowns.  canaries, in them, that sing.
soul: one of many karaoke bars
from which the devil was primarily
thrown.  this work

of taking, from the body, its death.  work
for men whose eyes if shattered would release
nothing.  men at your window.  men watching
you watch
horror films.  the cant of each head
polling, in its mask, a sameness.

soul's arbiter:  toothless.
because it is a tooth.  the poor, they take
the head of an ant
from the die
of god

     they take it to mean
decay.

there’s rain
and then
there is
outdoor
beauty pageant
rain.

permanence is upon us.

one who paces.

predator
that I never took
for god.

-

on the inside
the predator
I attacked
personally

became the world
where the window
into the world
of hazing
opened.

-

in infancy
I possessed
a belonging.

the ****’s failure to stay awake in a laundromat.  the suicide of the copycat toddler.  nine types of catfish.  a worm’s tongue.  god’s last name.  the orphan’s timekiller.