you’re not beautiful.  night

makes a mean
eyeball
soup.  

hell is a chicken-scratch.

ask not, spit not

the low
milk
of absence.

see red for crow.

to overcorrect
the subtitle
of touch

give him
a moment-

then
just as he
whether he’s
a him
or a her

lifts
the temporary
tattoo
of light

say

you’d stay
but your pain
needs you.

if you can, for me.

you’ve so much
to miss
doing.

it is hard
for my father
to be seen
in public-

of my invisible
birthmark
he says
you know
there’s a tattoo
for that-

on any hill without a cross, they pause, and the father points.

when they are tired, father and son, they plunk into
then off
the sides of valley homes.

one home in particular remembers thinking
kids these days
roll anything
looks like a tire.

your own father smacks whichever finger lifts without the rest.
says you sleeping don’t mean your epilepsy knows.

in your dreams the father does not point, and there isn’t a son.
just a man on one hill after the other, sunlight purling
into the seeable
dark yarn sea.  his eyes leaving his head,

somersaulting,
somersaulting,
godbraving.

the cyclops dies having never heard you recite the last two letters of the alphabet.  it’s 1983 and you’re all of seven.  hearing beautifully gets you slapped for hearing things.  you kick your frog legs on a swing going nowhere and try to touch your mind with your forehead.  from a stolen bicycle you quote future passages written by a lover half your age.  your pity has the lifespan of a voodoo doll.  sound is the word of man god disobeys.

to the goodbye
that created
distance

the last robot to name its baby.

two smokers
back-to-back
in the high
corn.

the spoonfeeder’s ferris wheel.

litterbug’s
shadow.

above
a ramshackle
transmitter

is my father’s
bright
mind.  

the angel’s mouth is a mouth to feed.

a man
packs a baby
in snow.

I’ve had children for years.  I’m only now going public.  my advice to them is no secret.  speak when not spoken to.  throw a rock at least once in the general direction of a future sibling.  climb a tree.  in the absence of tree, pray.  if my advice disappears, stop eating.  not too rapidly.

to punish my brother
for no reason
I told him
I could see
his stomach’s
shadow
but because
my visions
never
work
I vomited
what my sister
ate

the man lost his voice threatening to smack my mouth off.  the woman unplugged the tv.  in its own way, the game was on.  it was the night jesus went from being indifferent to being abstract.  the night someone’s dog let the ear of another from its mouth .  as for the baby on our doorstep, the same someone brought it food.

it’s okay to follow your dreams, son, but christ
you ain’t gotta
hound’em.

the would be
landmarks

     (the fish)     she eats     in a dream.

formerly, a palmist.
sweet on my mom.

mine are still
her favorite

hands.  

on its own     all hunger     is young.

to see a stone
as ruin’s
pursuit
of aftermath

one must share
this dream
  
of arriving
on earth

to pray

pregnant, she was killed during a game of hide and seek.  a man passing through popped the trunk of his car going over a pothole.  disparate images of war took root in the photographic amnesia of crows.  brother smuggled a pillow into the meeting of the minds.  never much to look at, mother made a skirt from the executioner’s mask.

it is not uncommon, when placed on its stomach for the first time, for the infant to break a rib.  

man creates the world as something to sleep on.  

some water is trapped underwater.

were it not a mouthful, she’d have been disfigured by the mirage touched by god to oversee the transformative reading of the trapdoor’s bible of knock-knock jokes

the story of her brother’s drowning
her father’s
haunted
toolbelt

told
separately

to the arsonist
who

while pulling
her by
the leg
from the house
of her sister
the fasting
mudwrestler

said

dig, you

tunnels
torch
the dark

what is the baby doing on the floor

this tv show
about shyness
wow

she makes weight, auditions
naked
for the face
of god

is death
still known
for its one
mistake

the stranger and the magician
walk the dog
their baby
girl
looks like

/ what the orphanage
knows
the nursing home
doesn’t

(ix)

obscurity’s footnote

mom’s
prescription
blood

a lamb
nosing
a bar of soap
into the path
of those

women

burned
by blackboards

(x)

around the time god stopped writing men

I took
a ghost-like
custody

of a property

a ruin
of melancholy
trespass, my father’s

dream-ending
stomach

(xi)

return is the first stage of a life’s work

god
loses
eden

every so often
I use my breast
to open
the photographer’s
mouth, her hair

alarms
the dead

(v)

she prays to food

food
be gentle

birth
still leaves
me out

(vi)

she recognized

the poster
from the boy
she’d been seen
by dogs
with, her mother

was gone
her father

grey as water’s
last
meal

dyed
the wigs

(vii)

one woman’s sorrow
is another’s
intermission

bread don’t break
not in blood’s
backyard

acne

illiteracy

(viii)**

she is holding the bird up to the phone
she is crushing
the bird
can your voice
and mine
caught swimming
swim…

I think of my mother in her block of ice summoning a curling iron and of my father sending a robot to prison. of a leafblower named mercy hugged by my brother for outing my sister’s electric chair. of nakedness, poor nakedness, always playing itself in the story of had I not been invented I would’ve had to exist. the black eye how it quoted swan.

(xii)

lost on crow

why star
won’t move, why woman

would make
hand signals

for satan’s
toybox

(xiii)

the double life of the man who’s not seen her baby devoured

/ the bread crumb
becoming
milk’s
nightmare / the way

to resurrection’s
hospice

it put mine on backward
the creature
that switched
my mother’s
feet

if the ear said anything
her ear
said

that’s the kick
of a twin

she highlights
an entry
on hair loss
in the cannibal’s
diary

–

dearest echo, language
has a country
it can leave

–

one holds the owl and one pours the paint

/ knowing
how to dream
they choose
this

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 the 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.

there are those who would forgive our debt.
there are those who would not.

I prefer god’s early work.
at my age, apple. apple and rope.

to the readers of fiction

you can
with a hacksaw
save most
of your leg
and its double.



writers of fiction**

was a man
bit a dog
and lost a tooth.

was another man
bit a dog.

same dog.

wasn’t a day
went by
the two
didn’t wake
to the howling
other.

poor, yes.
poor in that
what he does
more than once
is considered
routine.

there is no one to do the abandoning.

the last of a kind
had all these
thoughts
and first
choice.

she turns her back on beauty
and is abandoned.

I put god under my wing.
he makes it real.

my dogma for his koan
for my koan
for her.

it is not struck
after all
this tree
where the lightning
bolt
starts.

higher birds
strike a chord
in god’s hand
on god’s fork.

occurs most commonly in humble homes

afflicts men and the men they are tortured by

symptoms include a jesus complex that stiffens the limbs
and a weakness that presents itself only in sleep

has been known to create animals from nothing
and to make one believe
that like god

god is not a woman

when out
of ideas
she cuts
my hair

-

a man who’s been forgiven
has no past

-

my healer
is the main squeeze
of her god’s
pastoral
depravity

-

the plane is coming back

-

at my mother’s cough

the bombings
continue

-

father
retains
his orphan
clout, I lose

-

sight

-

of my hands
that they’ll know

-

what to do

the evacuated court of my son’s illness.

the blind man’s
missing
eyelid.

the grief, the broth, the reacquired thrift.

the dispersed body.  the hotbeds

of skeletal
trauma.

the dance music as mother’s
chthonian  
darling.

the sorrow method.  the rhythm.

i.

a lifejacket that small

my answer
is no

ii.

no
has one

eye

iii.

god is coming to touch your foot

film 2

I am everyday older than my brother. Those years I did not have him, he did not have me. Gods die in the star they sleep in. There are eyes in my sadness when I look at my sons.

film 6

The face of god trapped in a scratch on a whale’s eye. A mother’s mouth shaped to shrink the cigarette’s brain. Ice that heals the *** lives of record collectors dying in Ohio. My unfollowed life of absolute distraction. A star above it that is a ghost branded by a moth. The spotlight that moves the abuse at last the spotlight

film 7

Angels cut themselves in invisible changing rooms. Ohio covers god’s tattoos with ice. I am watching on my phone a television lose blood in front of my son’s old breathing machine. Fire isn’t everywhere.

film 5

Each creature in heaven thinks it's the only creature in heaven looking for god. I itch at night with the short life of my skin. In a world without touch, I am sleeping you with my hand. Anyway, I want to say I'm sorry to my mother and my father for keeping them awake. For making them read this right now.

~Notes for film 8, the last~

I notice the bathroom floor isn’t healing. There’s a roach in the house of the miracle-worker. Just one, just one. Age isn’t here, but it’s not a thing of the past. What I thought was guilt, was guilt. God’s god is touch. Worldview, worldvoid. The alarmist nostalgias of my faith. Seeing double is a sickness that disappears my children. My password made me look like this. Nonsense, angel. I am lifting with my arms

red weights on a white lawn while the leash of a blue dog tells my wrist a secret about my neck.

Mirror invents the ghost.

film 1

An angel eats a mouth and sees for shape a horseshoe deep in the story of satan’s toothache. My sister’s hair listens while I grow nothing. I leave the poem briefly to raise an addict and the addict says pain is god reincarnated while alive. You don’t come back.

film 3

Tell them this was handwritten. Tell them Ohio locked itself in the bathroom to imagine deer. Tell them god’s eyesight was too still. Tell them I couldn’t sleep. Tell them I couldn’t die, but that I bled to sleep in a field I was eating. Tell them the field is gone. The field is gone, they believe.

A tooth looking for your mother is not the same as a tooth searching. Lived experience is our jawless god’s highest fraud. Dear squirrel, we don’t eat creatures made of ghost worry. Future is the aftermath of the future. I’m ugly in heaven.

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.