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.

Birth never gets its person. The title of this poem was once Babies no one can lift and the churches that hide them. I keep thinking of that flood, and how it had to have killed children blissed out on breathing and how it had to have betrayed those animals drunk on a quieter water. Ah drink, ah brothers, a toast: To the life I spent on my impossible disappearance. A thought everyone will end up having is god watched me die the longest. They don’t’ have a sister. A comb with her hair.

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.

Losing dogs is good practice. In heaven, I look with Ohioans at ruined cars. I love Jesus for those few moments she went unnamed. I don’t see blood. I **** myself when my nose runs. When I say moon, put out on my brother a cigarette. When I write moon, become on earth the first to be invisible. Religion is apology and pain. The afterlife is a place for morning people to talk about death. Dear Ethel Cain, I don’t think letters help. I so try to not love poets, but they read aloud so nervously that books disappear from the bible. I keep in the same place coughing up anthill dirt. We can’t find the sleep god died in.

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

i write **** lyrics sometimes and it's so fun and i really just want to sing into a tape recorder like a detective then drive into a lake where I don't even die all the way

VOICE APPS FOR CRUCIFIXION SURVIVORS

Fasting in the pawn shop
Of my father’s early sleep

My sadness like a dog’s thought
In the pop-gun stage of grief

Three pills left to choose from
But I can’t leave them alone

Dog tells me to lose some
Like the sticks dreamed into bones

Oh the mouths of my longing that sing no hurt
Oh the bells in my body that ring no church

--- giving god a seashell
god can hear an apple cry
--- I guess it’s up to me now
keep the angel’s fossil dry


MY BELLY, HALLELUJAH

in a meadow is the navel
of a god I can defeat
a shadow on a table
set with food it cannot eat
my belly, hallelujah
and its field of empty meat
a killing moving through us
slower meals of absent sheep
I don’t lose any waking
though my hair has slept a lot
alone but pulled to making
dare these cigarettes ask for god
if you think that you could sing this
in the angel time of ghosts
my stomach let it ping bliss
to delay the tattooed crow

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

we know he’s sick. ya body, ya body.

an angel of nonsense, this dying…

god’s
inability
to memorize…

/ I will say to the maker of doors

your mother
gave birth
standing up

[magic pills]

a doll taped to a skateboard. you get the idea.  mirror for doghouse, nest for traffic light.

[mystique]

/ boredom, falling short
in a mom’s
coldest
child / I understood

your movie / is there a meal

choice

prepares, or a less

direct
psalm / a taller me

where ovens
talk

[scrap chapel]**

a black tire, the bed
of the fisherman’s
crow- death and guilt

genetic-

same dream, same bear-

the afterlife of god

– tree of more

the room is no longer
the sick
relative
room.  

our guest is discovered to be a lack of absence.  

here and there,
astronauts prefer
uncalled
to earthbound.  

it wasn’t until I was reincarnated that I began eating animals.

I knock on a baby’s head, a light knock,
the someone home
will need
your voyage.  

lakeside, we forgive
the lone thought
as if the thought
is as alone
as the one
underwater
who

     visible only
to the orphan
form
chain-smoking
beside her clothes

does not
repeatedly
surface.

when I think about you

I don’t

some eyeless thing eating for none

a volunteer
to snipe
the crucified
dentist

appetite’s bedsore

a baby taking up for a chicken

in the only finished scene
of my father’s
documented
seizure

a tin woman
eats a cricket
before a paltry
congregation
of children
hired
in spirit
to distinguish
an aerobic

from a cerebral

doom

how far we are
from soup
when mother
burns her tongue
trying
to convince
god
they had

the mime and the mute
the same
childhood.

we love her so much
we use our brains
as often
as baby
spoons.

first base is a landmine.

there’s nothing to say
we weren’t
here.

bothered
by the parting
and not
by the red
of the sea

my mind goes
to the same place
to be unique.  

it is here
I worship your son
even as he models
disguises
for the father
I’m not.

as for my own
son

I am his memory

of where he put
the earth.

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

I was dreaming of you kissing me just softly between my eyes
and of children chasing a lamb around the silence of a grave.* – Alex Hoshor

I comb one hand with the other. beside me my son moves his jaw front to back, his chin massaging the ridge in the skull of our new puppy. we are snug in a velvet chair. my groomed right hand was last week reset by an accidental flash of fire and to look at it now makes one think of snakes veining then leaving the earth.

I fear I may soon have to field the proffered inquiries of angels lobbying for a pet heaven. I fear that fear is just something we say.

     the dust on my daughter’s dollhouse worries me. disuse worries me. these small shoes on step at the dollhouse door.

it is the simplest thought that it could’ve been my boy, my girl, at flame. but enough that sleep of late seems cat nap to its greater insomnia.

     awake, a mob of naked children some saying excuse me move gently past or leap the car or belly under. I walk from it slowly as if I am pregnant or as if in front of me one is pregnant. I lose my foot on the discarded handle of an axe and lose my way thinking it is the found arm of a puppet. I know I am bare because suddenly there is sand in my toes and the pregnant women are here to sunbathe. it’s the gas can tells me turn back.

how long have we been friends? the length of my belt, bed of copper or garden, removed with my left hand and laid.

in one room
a light is on
in another
off

-

I live with my parents
hymn to mouth
delivering
fluency
by hand
to the language
of vicarious
passage

-

gender peasantry
is about
to become

a thing

-

mom, dad

I don’t think there’s world enough left to be quiet in

-

my bad hearing
I take it
with me

a chicken with its head cut off
takes part in a melodrama
fit for a swan

-

both halves of my daughter
live thinking they are survived
by the other

-

mall nuns.

just nuns
taking a shortcut.

-

my daughter uses a pencil
when pretending
to smoke.  

nesting failure

makes her sad.

-

I spend my days seeing things.

as if
youth is a museum

-

poverty isn’t

i.

horrors of the gentle;
a list.

father

in a son's grocery.

all things tower.

ii.

I am weak but only for you.
I am weak but only for you.

iii.

if your only fear is that you will be eaten
you are not

afraid.

iv.

the mirror's
most fervent
devotee-
has no face
 
and in these last hours
has no face.

v.

perfectly round
the muscle
that slides
from its arm.

vi.

state your grounds

for burial.

vii.

a scroll, flat.  or a tongue.  

viii.

an elephant can be opened
with the tusk
of another.

its belly can accommodate
most families.
 
ix.

the under-shepherds
under

the train

cannot lift
a single crow.

x.

what one takes for god's coat

is probably
just a moth.

xi.  

my house
is your
inherited
house.

          and death its own angel.

employed
was the angry
punk
to recite
the warning
at the end
of a drug
commercial.

the thinking behind this was sound.
the side effect of this thinking

gave the punk
a tenderness
to his voice
none expected
his mothers

to notice.

it wasn’t exactly the voice of god
but from a god-like stupor
came god

to his son
who was his
and the punk

sang

at thirteen years of age she began seeing single.  I report this from my own dream of becoming a priest.  as her father, I can prove her first twelve years were skillfully copied by boys and girls alike.  as her mother, I am so so lonely.

from crow
to anthill
lose
the thing
that’s there

telescope, craft your grief

god is what
if all
believe