/ his stomach
attended
like church

I am the photo my visions take.

high
on memorization
the mother
has to believe
in god
for god
to have
a safe
word.

the boy is dirt and noise. is hindsight’s
gospel.

loneliness, meet maker.

when it comes to humoring
me
by name
my memories
draw a blank.

I had a daughter
and three
sons.

my hands
could’ve been
the hands
of an umpire.

in the untouched church
of suicide
was the untouched
church
of *******.

it’s like seeing
a television
on tv.  the comedians

and their failed
sisters.

do your thoughts
still take
the temperature
of god?

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic

mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us.  father is choosing an ice cube to bury.  myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.

via Lulu, 25% off all print books with coupon code of MONDAY25

my newest, MOON tattoo, is there.

some poems from the work, here:

[least]

there I was

lightweight, eyesore

baby satellite
and baby
drum

imagination’s
dull witness

my hair
prematurely
cat-torture
grey

my person
the length
of a sandbox
shovel

teeth
a tooth, a commandment
from the past
lives

of milk


[harrower]

it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person.  if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry.  I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek.  it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come.  the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray.  I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path.  for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises.  also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge.  instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

we heard it last night.  the bell on the rabbit’s foot.  it made mom want to cook.  and sleepwalk.  and mice did the wave.

in one dream, a carousel horse. in another, a stomach.

–

dream is a shortcut

after surviving
a form
of angel
hazing
the boy’s
disability
presented itself
in full
five months
from its
inception
and chose
therapy
locations
owned
fifty-fifty
by the conceptual
folk
known as
bewildered church
and stray
field
and went on
to signal
the boy
with a bruise
here
and a bruise
there
on its way
to a survival
from which
it would not
recover

he walks the straight line as if ghosted by a severity that could at any moment scrape the membrane world.  ahead of him a blood drawing baby floats into a small room where some poor sap must be waiting.  he is here to address the letter writing department for challenging his letter writing capabilities he recently used on behalf of his sister who has been charged with obtaining too low of a tree when in fact the rope she was issued was too long.  his father was supposed to come as well but has acquired a rare form of poet helplessness.  as for mother, she  failed to return some time ago and for all he knows is still softening the language of the animal kingdom.  seeing the baby has made me want to set aside someone to facilitate his reattachment to violence.

you haven’t touched your food.  

the soul has windows
it doesn’t need.  

failure to thrive
has come to mean
the growing
you do
at night.  

when jailed
I thought of nothing
but my cell
and I thought of my cell
as a crib
without a heaven.  

your mother’s dark hair
is hard to swallow.  

I am secretly happy
that you’ve taken
an egg

for each day of your life

to a doll
so doll
can sleep.  

as your mother, I often follow
a black
ball of yarn

into the lake
of how
you remember.

the very sadness.  the very sadness of the intruder who brings his own plate to drop.  the very ecstasy of telling a classmate he or she is ugly along with one finger he or she must choose.  the cutting of the fingers to equal size.  the unintended ecstasy of the sadness I use to *** a cobweb where I wait for something I’ll do nothing with.

the story came to me abridged.  like birth control is a plant.  like one black family.  she came to me from town.  the Amish are being set on fire.  there are no Amish.  tell that to the people on fire.  she was perfect and so perfect to believe it was done by a *** change.  one in particular was prayed for and I don’t know if he ever stopped touching her.  she had a light bulb she’d taken from a hospital lamp.  she produced it like hearsay.  her invisible baby.

magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.

a bird, a high window.  sound of a brain cell.

hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.

as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.

bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.

harm is harm’s audience.

you arrive early to the unpopulated town hoping you might rehearse without interruption the part you plan to audition for.  you spend most of your time in a high school locker room looking for a ball.  your one skill was recently revealed at the forefront of an evacuation spearheaded by your brother after which you were able to convince both the man in the attic and the man in the basement that they were together hallucinations seen by a mirror.  to the lord you don’t seem a day over yesterday.

after sharing her son’s birth story, the woman comments on the oddness of hearing it aloud.  she closes by saying all words are her last.  she is at least as old as the brother I’m told I have.  when told, I believe the one speaking is speaking to the room I’m in that’s been entered by the likes of me as into a place where a manuscript has just been finished.  I continue my brother as a distraction in the form of a man trying to erase a cigarette burn from the arm of a typist.  man makes the sound I have on my person that both my parents made.  instead of taking her medication, the woman imagines herself homeless in a part of town she’s passed while having ***.

infant boy, god gave your body all the bone it can hide.

bite me
when your teeth
are hot.

prayer
as the horn
the car
carries
into
a tornado.  touch

as ventriloquy.

this one sleepwalker
hung
our laundry, this other
left mom
a rattlesnake

some man was mowing drunk
mad about church, a recent batch
of runt
lightning, that baby’s
age

the two skeletons it takes to lift a coat hanger.  the ***** it takes for them to introduce it as an ultrasound.  the excitement you don’t share.  the bone fragment that opens your brother’s eye.  the haunted tourist who never arrives.  who will adopt nothing because nothing is small when compared to the crucified whose toe almost touches the paper shredder we couldn’t move.  mountain storm.  moaning tent of rehab.  eating your hands when a phone call is a phone call away.

he ended by saying surely it is evil to live.


I have not been stunned by fiction since having hands.  


he started by asking silence to observe the audience.  
he crushed a cocoon under foot because it had no god.  


I have not been beautiful since needing nourishment.  
I have not sinned since taking an active role in my dreams.


he arrived in a white limo.
he applied to his body a lotion of black milk.
he penned in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels.


he cried like a baby he’d seen.
I have not cried like that since being cut in half.


I was not ***** in a field of vision
nor have I been
since refusing the kit.

wear a cheap mask
to bed.

kid, your mama

she can’t
touch a baby
without touching
a baby

that’s hers.  

small brain,
I have less
to wash.

oh
voice, my immediate
orphan

to stuff our faces or to knit the same hat for the unseen gargoyle of our still life or better yet to give legs to the rugburn it takes to find a newborn’s nose

[in the past I am describing god to my attacker]

I don’t take good care of things.

I can’t even give you
examples.

~

[dead child]

the future
the past
both are ready

to talk

~

[late poem]

one can only write so long
about loss
in pencil

find my house,
dog-on-fire

~

[reading and writing]

which one of us did loneliness hear coming?

the woman she is holding an umbrella over the man she is yelling at.  the man he is blowing into the bowl he’s made of his hands.  a boy sits at their feet with his back to us and is bringing what we can guess is a toy to his mouth.  you joke he is laboring to light a cigarette.  in the rain.

daughter has a language keeps her quiet.

penny
is a pillow
for my father’s
blood.

lamb- every other

instead of goodnight, my father says he is putting away his feet.  instead of cutting my fingernails, mother has me wear her favorite gloves.  I am a child

but know we are getting by on the shelf-life of secret hands.  I don’t pray but if I loved god

I would put us here to impress him.

I don’t see
size-

stormcloud, stone

it’s no
gift

–

it is hard
kiddo
to be a mouth
in the land
of embrace

–

love
two of your fingers

the rabbit they make
they wound

this foster boy
known for changing
his name
back

and forth
who lit a cigarette
without removing
the paper bag
from his face

has the only
photograph
of my mother
my mother
took

0503-2017

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.      

0504-2017

his weight a cricket on a piano key

0508-2017

disability as competition, jesus.  and then these over here are arguing about the use of the word, disabled.  here we will coin transformative indifference.  a body is not a teachable moment.  as a parent, I think I’ll take the shortcut.  meanwhile, I have a glossary of terms you’ll never need that you can read beneath a dog-eared, thumbless god.

0513-2017

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

0515-2017

there is sickness by repetition and sickness by living once.  echo hasn’t the chance to go deaf.  you breathe and say god gives out  no more than that which I can handle.  the next breath is mine.  god gave us god.    

0602-2017

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

0613-2017

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

0620-2017

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.  because I want to.  

0627-2017

magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

0627-2017

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

0706-2017

the disappearance surrounding said event.

a horse belly-up in water’s blood.

see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost

0719-2017

today was more your hand than the photograph it was cut from.  a family of five in the bed of the unremembered present.

if the poor could keep to themselves, they’d have superheroes.  hey man, hey beast, them aliens already know what it means to be human.  abduction is the fingerprint of loneliness.  

-

what I teach my blood is grow up.  I put everything I had into ruin.  watch as my mother becomes your mother trying to be two people god can use to carry tug-of-war from a fossil.

-

my dream house is language.  you say it to my face how there are beheadings that have made a wish.  before my son was a giant, he’d somersault.  cigarette in mouth he would.

in it
brother
levels
his eyes
at the fog
with two
red rubber
*****

the *******
registry
posted
at home
highlights
the name
of a local

     thing our father
calls demon
our mother

confused

I bury the carnival fish.  my neighbor pretends he is casting while my son ***** on the opening of a plastic bag.  I take the bag and blow into it then pop it on my palm.  my neighbor’s heart is safe but he tries to grab it anyway.  the vietnam war is a pop-up book of the vietnam war.

pressing
a cigarette
into the double
absence
of what
has become
the snowman’s
mouth
the woman  
begs
for a light…

it is a thing done softly
in a larger movement
of searching
belly-up
the nowhere

that sober
looks funny
alone

I saw his mouth.
I thought he’d ripped.

in madness, explain a chair to the ocean.

unborn, be buoyed by pregnancy.

scrape
mother images
on a cave’s wall
by the glow
the unborn
have.  

I sense I still flicker in two lost minds.

she would say god planted in her a notion of anorexia.
she would sanely say her morbid obesity made her largely abstract.

to sleep
on your son’s
insomnia

my son
has enough
light
for god’s

cheek.  in pain

I am over
the moon.

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.

/ does the demon
know
I’m the same
clue

kiss me like I’m not here

like my belly
is

think of blood
as the author
of bruise, of the baby

you’ll not
see
blue

newly
with the knowledge
of being
god

a man stood
woozily
in an Ohio
field

feeling passed over
like a horse’s
one
thought

and was hit
in the head
by a pebble
masquerading
as a stray
bullet

now, no matter
if he rubbed
the pebble     or his head

he was not given
three wishes
but three
separate
people     to forgive

and chose
himself