from crow
to anthill
lose
the thing
that’s there

telescope, craft your grief

god is what
if all
believe

being alone never hurt anybody.  I ask online about a coat hanger.  in person about a stork.  symbolism is dead.  it’s not that kind of garden.

stood up
by his thoughts

one of my eyes
is my father’s
alcoholic
eye.

says anonymous

a blood
dipped
balloon
is not
the baby
the angel
had.

says mother

into moral
isolation
the hands
you bring
are dry.  says hers

sleep
orphans
fatigue.

in the tomb of my father’s influence
a single
****** on
juice box.

     assigned seating
in biology class
a giant     a boy
beside the me
most grotesque
and we share
a model
heart     as a found
piece
of gum.

in cafeteria I am untouched
as a tray of food     I fraternize
with my new name     jovial
pisspants.

I *** cigarettes
from the butcher
gave boredom
a fat
lip

/ death has been trying to guess my age

he arrived from work at a normal hour and made a sound.  she called the cops by mistake.  she put the spout of the tea kettle in her mouth.  he watched her cry and went to bed.  the sound he’d made was so weak that when the time came she assumed he’d come home late.  she kept it to herself and stepped on a scale.  he joined the army and watched a soldier toss and turn.  she gained weight in her sleep while he commented sensibly on the loss of his uniform.  apart from the occasional mourner, no one went outside to ***.

when I say church
she says
widow
then admits
it wasn’t
her first
thought

was church
mine

I use god to spy on the gifts he gave me.  youth is a type of wheelchair.  I can see my facebook page and the back of my mother’s head.  I talk so fine my baby talk is for show.  memories are like animals, not made.  my father is happy one of two dogs has learned to shake.  I can look at my hand for hours and not forget its name.  hand.

I can trigger
shame
in my sleep
the beauty
I’m made
to return.

it takes illness
three seasons
and absence
one

to go
nowhere-

explain to my ghost

how my son
has two-

there will be other kids

a weaker
doorbell, a dog

underfoot
as we fry
in church-

I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist.  I am alone.  I am brief stay of bullet.  god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process.  when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside.  I miss mom.  gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.

there is only one creature
doesn’t know
how long it had

to destroy
the world

on doctor’s orders, the girl forgets herself by allowing the water to turn her baby brother into a prune.  mother tells father that god has spoken and that the man in the house is not a cop.  the girl has seventeen sisters to which the man has brought the seventeen boys from town voted most likely to have teeth a year from now.  the mark has begun to fade like parents after ***.

mothers
while jumping
rope
reminisce
on those
crucifixions
not postponed
by thunder

Q: what is a ghost?

A: you have a mom and god finds out

you have to count them quickly

the bite-marks on my son’s arm

-

either you touch a goldfish
or become
a dentist

-

does it matter whose dream
my mouth is

-

make art and make it empty. god has run out of room.

it gave me nightmares, from mating call to church bell, that air conditioner in our third floor window. thematically, the poor are closer to death. my people don’t move. god is where you left him. god where I put.

as you do not struggle to recall the titles of those empty sermons we composed while biking uphill after our sister’s head, I tell you that a baby eats like jesus in a haunted house and that dad was right the lawnmower dies because it knows where in the yard his mom was deep enough to bury doll and I deny that hibernation is real

(is more a ghost started by two wise men dressed as animals

i.

in a letter to my son:

     there is only so much knowledge I can stand.

in his letter back:

     I was finally able to draw a mouth.  I drew first a box, then lied.

ii.

a gutted refrigerator rocks in a junkyard.

either the door has jammed, or she

is pregnant.


iii.

when silent prayer came into fashion
my daughter said her first word
and told me
what it was.

iv.

anecdotally,

they were Mr. and Mrs. Nothing

and eloped.

to heal her father, she asks me to brush her hair.  she promises that when I’m done she’ll not only show me the scab but also remove it so I can see where her batteries go.  the knots in her hair are ungodly.  she says to leave them.  she says she can get any cat to come inside.  ******* is new to me.  I almost announce aloud that I must look often like I am trying to get a pair of scissors to eat snow.

a late swimmer, touching
one side, then the other.  
night window, this wine.  
a walker, beggared
to the wend of a wheel

loosed from the lean of its car.  
a bad man jawing
a gradient slur
of hand puppets

on another's dark drive.
a second swimmer
I hadn't seen, touching
the first.  same stone
on the pool's bottom-

unmoved, unmoved
by the yaw of the moon.

the loneliness
that schoolwork
provides

is god

his body
is your body

has nothing
to leave

it doesn’t take a genius but it does take my brother to see the frog’s been tortured.  he splits my friends into two groups, telling one he has a month to live and the other that I’m dying.  he pulls me aside and asks if I’m up to finishing what he’s currently calling The Mourner’s Guide to Interrogation which began *a month is a long time to the instantly bored.

as an adolescent, he toyed with the idea that he was a vision of god’s and set himself on a path to befriend the less conversational bodies of fractured families but found it was too much like giving candy to the poor.  his disenchantment carried him into my early twenties where I became his father for an amount of time shorter than the left to right the eyes employ to take note of the baby often placed at the beginnings of horror movies.  his mother lost the use of her elbows trying to swing him away from the mouth his sorrow came with.  her plainness landed him on his first victim’s radar.  when we love him at the same time, our love reaches the society of secret special effects.

I wear a blindfold.  I look my age.  I push an empty wheelchair and with it map the way to your room.  I go without.  my children rebel.  my children rescue their behaviors for later use.  I tell my oldest she was my idea of a first thought.  I tell her in a dream.  I have a disorder in which I add to everything an ‘s’.  a second disorder in which I taste chalk when your father eats it.  my mother is a two-man show.  says for example by god I’m next to jesus.  I hold her hat.  she looks into it this time and the next longer than the last.  the rabbit doesn’t make it.  my boys enter a room that’s been moved.  my father keeps me young.

summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine.  say it with me this was not that summer.  as a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.

the ransom note
in suicide’s
dream journal

the ghost of the brainwashed rocking chair

fingers
teeth
who’s keeping
score

the mouth
of the thing
that eats
in fog
a doll’s
head

-

the holy spirit
high
on the bricklayer’s
toothache

-

a cat person
at death’s
door

-

poverty

a belonging
moved
by many
mirrors

the sleepwalker and the hangman jumping rope in the town of the sheepish tornado where the church of two birds admits the child of the expat exile into the afterlife of a stone…

was this bug was biting me into house and home

/ the baby it was my belief
had come out to give me
a knowing
look  

/ I couldn’t
so to silence

eat my way from a wet paper doll

nostalgia’s book of mug shots.

murderers mistaking boredom for regret.

the dwindling league of hesitant fathers
struggling to stay
in formation.

paroled amnesiacs
last seen
by this
photo.

shortly before
the birth
of my eldest
brother
my father

so absorbed
in his most
unfinished
sermon

misplaces
a voodoo
doll

of a mime
my mother’s
mother

loved
and also
lost

the dog moves from sun to shade

its master writes of the beating
a woman
takes

I saw
I can prove it

the size of that tick

does anyone
remind me
to eat

the boy
whose first
computer
was pain

they put something in his food
to make
him drink…

-

one animal
out of how
many

-

marries

-

to avoid
god