lists* (iii)

with what there is
of my tongue
I think
to reach
the back
of my head

-

televised

offsite, a cat
bathes
its softened
image

lists (iv)

a bruise
on any
visible
child
is

the father’s
jump
on winter


lists (v)

the rare
the black
the eyes
come in threes

the right hand of god squeezes a bar of soap until it becomes a crow.  

there’s nothing wrong
with your son’s
black
heart.  

before I had a ****
I told everyone
I had a tail.

tragedy
to an angel
is

the ghost
of an alien

its mother
has it
born
the day after
it stops
talking

it is the animal
gods
miss

I rarely understand what I read as I read it.  a horror movie with the working title

god’s wound
is being scored

in the mind of my unborn kid.  by the shyness

of my blood, not again.

I trace my stutter to the narrative delay that uprooted my father who broke his foot in his sleep trying to kick his mother’s television.  I limp circles around those who’ve gone quietly.  grandfather, from heaven, I see my body as a surplus of irretrievable peace.

natal homing makes me ***

I am too wrapped up in my own stomach
to visit the mother
who worships

mine

pain passes out. boy is almost

body.

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poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

~



NOTES FROM LIFE UNDER BELL

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church. an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore. my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth. a bomb is dropped on a bomb.

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller. the mosh pit is weak. last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole. onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch. dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood. some god

seeing me
as a person…

how quickly birth gets old.

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma. genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea. this open umbrella. ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby. a door was a door. a ghost was a ghost and a door. the house was possible. its rooms were not. baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub. I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow. said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

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.

–

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key. it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.

–

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

–

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise

–

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.

–

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

–

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.

–

the disappearance surrounding said event. a horse belly-up in water’s blood. see telescope. also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.

–

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.

–

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.





WE BROUGHT HOME THE WRONG DYING BABY



I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some ***** donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.

~~~

father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.

~~~

mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth. I say dog for both dog and puppy. pray for things I know will happen. a rooster through a windshield. a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.

~~~

mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.

~~~

I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.

god will die with his ear on my stomach.

~~~

the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.

~~~

for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son

in scenario’s territory.

~~~

atavism
(god is someone’s calendar

–

valley
(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose

–

pulpit
(rooster ghosted by elevator

–

subculture
(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down

–

alpenglow
(the scalp will baby its grief

~~~

on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost

and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.

~~~

the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.

~~~

because her son can see the future, she is not yet born. god matters to the discovered.

~~~

overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car

of a minor
toymaker.

radar is getting possessive.

~~~

for the gone and for the nearly, brother has the same stick.

I call belly
what he calls
eye
what answers
to limb

~~~

to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.

comes with everything. cries like me.

~~~

she says
three times
the word
brain
to her stomach’s
blue
mirror
and scores
sight’s wardrobe
of rags
in earworm’s
dream

~~~

there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish

coming to
in a beheaded
angel

would not recommend the usual quiet
or the quiet we project,

the necessary
the led to believe
quiet,

not even the quiet
of accurate prayer-

instead, the stillborn baby
into a room of loud colors

into a surrogate room
that is now
smeared

wall to wall
inanely
with moaning-

this is where we are, speak up, we come
with given
thump and wail-

better yet, make it some beast’s
unmoving
tail end
of litter, make the little
one

speak english- yip, mew –

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~

below are some poems from ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015):


[tautologies]

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

[first appeared]

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

[notes to abuser]

I have had to tell time using only repetition.  there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t.  I can see what you see in me.  none of my sounds echo.  I have a son.  I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own.  he has three rooms upstairs and three down.  when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

[immersion]

your attacker has a history of being baptized. identifies as male. was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father. we shot him not knowing he’d already been. his mother says his stutter is an act. she is what we call empty inside. you look like your father.

[onlookers]

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen.  in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream.  in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.                  

[maker]

when I think about you

I don’t

[incarnate]

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

[exposure]

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

[a photographic memory that applies only to acts of eating]

in the oar I broke on my brother’s knee
I found
a human
tooth.

here is a lamb
floating
in the reflection
of a star.

the father tells his children how he is not surprised by how much they’ve grown.  they are healthy, after all, and he is not death. the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  perhaps her pain is political.  her pain is god’s.

and she was nice to her kids not because she loved them but because not a single one of them was predicted to reach an age high enough to become an only child.  and she held on to coat hangers and to memories of pressing outlet covers into place.  and she lynched dolls claiming they’d be lanterns for god when god got brave enough to move again.  and what went on without her went on to cheat death or her brother out of his massacre.

the only
animal
recognized
by the magician’s
one-trick
pony

/ touch
giving itself
a childhood

/ an alien’s
crucifix

for Gen*

it was not art but is was my son agreeing to draw a picture of a man with an itch.  it was not exceptionally large but it was enough to clothe a scribble in my mother’s diary.  it was not lost but it was lost on me how the very baby I used as the window of my window seat was able to stiffen at the sight of unrolled dough.  it was not for nothing but it is

now.

(to see her crippled from pointing
to the sadness in her hand)

to slow the scarring of god, the man spits into a can plucked from the river that washed his hair.

to hasten

the woman
shaves
her mirror’s
head.

being born
puts the end
in sight.

within reason, I offer shelter
to bowls
of my father’s
cereal.

mother
she is pained
to the point
of philosophical
pain.

we are
to god
scare

tactics.  and to angels

we are post
war
angels.

we are not sad, yet
there is sadness
in how
we thrice
touch
a rebuked
abstraction.

she puts down the book once it begins to read like it remembers being written. it’s my book. do you know this man? his sight returned while he ate. boys play freeze tag to sadden birds.

when brushing them, she asks god
for help
her teeth
are puking.

later, when caught
smoking,
she says
she can’t
keep
from wanting
the cigarettes
to be
shy.

because of who she isn’t
I’ve had to baptize
many
dolls.

the past disappears to haze the same childhood animal. touch carries non-fiction to belief. earth lands on earth and is somehow loved. there are dolls to skin and there are dolls contagious. any mirror is a fishbowl from hell. she was a good swimmer but was not eaten fast enough. lazily, I remain born.

be alone.  enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress window shopping for a red.  

know

     that in between heaven and hell, there is war.  hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell.  hell sleeps more than your sister in love.  heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.  

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.    

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

the better part
of isolation

fact checking
his father’s
loneliness

appetite went from our dog to our cat. from our cat to an animal that had no fight. a tornado took our shoe-store. our sisters were assaulted for no more than ringing dollhouse doorbells. our mothers blindfolded for putting lipstick on the crow. we ****** ourselves and corn set its blood on fire. our weeping our weeping swept.

his girl sleeps.  the drive-in has been closed a year.  they thought, last night, they could pretend.  if there are seven days in a week, if it can be proven, then she is happy for three.  it’s his job to space them out.  you would probably believe me if I mentioned a car accident, a third friend, a former lover.  but I arrived only to meet you.  minutes from now a white dog will drink from a bucket of red paint.  the girl will shift in the passenger seat and tug the skirt of minnie mouse past my idea.  the driver will start the pick-up with a fork I mistakenly told you, in a letter, was a crucifix.  in many places, for that, I remain sorry.

girl speaking.  my father is no drunk.  not so long ago he chased his head away from hell.  he was on a binge.  he took to his tongue with a pair of pliers and wrote with a ****** finger and when it stopped working he wrote with another ****** finger and finished the sentence I don’t want to be a snake.  the pain meds put him on his belly and I brought him water he thought was drink.  he beat my ankles.  when I throw my head back my mouth is on a stretcher.

the hands
they look
unswallowed

but (dear hate)

I’m the same
person
I always

wasn’t (tree

with frozen
stomach) (the wrong

grave) (movie)

that ended
god

I cowered early.  my mother received one leaf per nakedness.  in my youth, I was touched into being a mold of the unborn.  I was said to be overheard and I was said to be with mother.  I was spotted by a spoonful of milk being fought over by those I slipped from to watch tv in the smallest museum of childcare.  when I am most alone I count backward for my newest boy and for god’s limited son.  soon is a heaven of affordable pills.  comfort is knowing all my boys have eaten late.  yesterday gives birth to a pecking order.

my sadness is broken.  my mother sits beside me on the top step as I **** with the laces of shoes I’ve had on for hours.  I am trying to place myself in front of the woman who while holding a bowling ball asked me to **** my cigarette.  mom has been falling asleep in front of a tv turned on by a mind of its own.  I don’t want to be touched.  god for now belongs to the hand that went crooked and circled every date on this month’s calendar.  after eleven guesses I say jesus mom is he gay.  I don’t see how this will become me knowing all along.  my father is a man of many words he can’t pronounce without some stranger getting knocked up on the radio.  there’s nothing in the water, nothing in the air.  I get my people from the store and bring them to a carnival that exists because of food poisoning.  I think my belly button is a cigarette burn that makes me want kids.  I have a brother who will wet the bed well into his ninth year.  I include him here as the brother around for this.

cannot go.  I am covered in ghost.  it is not lamb dust but it does not keep me from being a thought beside the poor lamb.  yesterday will have a party I won’t miss.  your mother your mother.  echolocate.  a book of poems will open to a flat match like what attracts you on its belly.  melancholy heads will roll from the ocean.  my thumbs have each a valley.  I believe this instead of believing I can be identified as lesbian because they are shovels.  I thought my head would ruin the cruel.  ruin then yawn.  ah, I was not long for my mind.  though I say to them unbury my feet my thumbs have each a valley.

the camera is blind.  the blind

my dog
is going.  

in my mother’s sleep
I am kind
to think
she lost it.

a foreign adoption, a procured act
of landfall.

I bomb my lifelong
dollish
sense

of the photogenic…

the dogs were fat, the ticks were full.

20 times
I kiss
like this
my father.

her age not so much mattering she talked on the twins she was about to have.  I held the hands of my mothers and each fronted their stomachs with full baskets.  my own stomach was in its prime and not yet the space beneath my *******.  I wondered at that point had I heard, ever, a man speak.  a song came to me but it was tucked as in a church.  my mothers on either side of me were not meant for this genre of grocery.  the low singing, the bulk rice.  we would the three of us go home that night to our videocassette of Witness.  it falls today under thriller and or drama but we knew it as horror.  mr. ford bends the boy’s finger in the police station but not backward, instead forward, instead very maternal.

poor death, sleep
the shoe
that never
drops

and poorer
dream

mine of a foot being nailed to a seesaw made of light

yours
what the rabbit
did
to its knee

the composers of rain
fight gently
but fight
nonetheless
over the brush
that first touched
my mother’s
teeth.  mother

is asleep.  I’d leave

a thumbprint
but am not sure
which lid
covers
the eye
she drinks with.  I want to say

dying
is the bath
we draw
for death
but know
father
can’t hear
a thing
since losing
his voice.  

/

though I am rarely old enough to have seen a boat

the boat is weeping

brother Abel
the original
dogsitter.

metal plate
the mirror’s
pearl.

the treehouse and the crucifixion.

sister.

sister she’d overeat

and draw
all night
the adventures
of the subway
driving
egg.

a *****
cradled
like a baby’s
broken
arm
and expertly
wrapped
in crime scene
tape…

hell why not
give privacy
to a salt
lick