a pendulum maleness
to the clothed eye.

     a half dropped ceiling
under which
a prediction of snowfall
sends puppy
scribbling.

a man well endowed
making like
the empty cross.

a delivery room floored with bubble wrap.

nudes in short supply.

mother’s inhaler is what you called the mirror mother held to size her mouth.  I was in her purse when she was taken.  I don’t know how it is I know things.  bones in the stomach of god.

I am at the beginning of my rope.  my son has run out of nostalgia.  in photos, I look most like one who’s forgotten everything.  my son disagrees and says I look like I’ve seen a ghost.  I think this is our first fight.  we take it outside where none of our punches land.  it isn’t long before we are throwing rocks into a darkness that’s just arrived.  such rocks come back to us in birds, or as.

sister has her tail

brother
his paints…

satan’s baby can clap underwater

a better pill would be a pill that could abuse you before they arrive.  instead, I threaten my mother with my father’s suicide.  it is not easy to avoid the vice versa at the end of this sentence.  it is not hard to be limited by the imagination.  by the verbal assault that dangles you below a dog whistle but above the tooth of a beast.  I impersonate those I love and those I love are impressed.  don’t think me untouched.

when a father
feels as though
he’s not
been here
before

the angel of near death
possesses

any idle
grown man’s
finger

and with it traces
a held
baby’s

outline
into the man’s
chest

for father
to not see

     / angel has no tricks

again, not unlike health

there’s nothing
there

it didn’t take long for the frog to become real to those around me.  some would bring it back and pat me on the head and some would laugh when I told them it’d never tried to hop away before.  some would say it was the frog that was depressed and some would pray for the frog I was lucky to have.  when it began to speak, I told myself that’s just how frogs talk.  god came to me sooner than most.  mom joked that he must’ve known I had a frog to get back to.  my sister maintains to this day she had no intention of eating the frog as she was only trying to impress the snake her eyes were made for.  by the time I woke her up, her hunger had ballooned and she leapt at me the odd leap of grief.

it’s the same in every model.  the cat is first, then the dog, then the baby the cat eats in a dream.  while I can’t speak for his cough, I can say my son doesn’t belong to god.  my fear of water snakes, though vaguely tied to my father’s shaved belly, began with a bike that was given to my brother with no one on it.

I named you once before you were born and once after.  your room was blue for so long.  you’d kick and I’d press my thumb to your father’s wrist.  my hand is still wet from putting jesus as a baby beneath a nervous goldfish.  I know what happens to people like me.

I project my stillness
onto babies.

a still baby creates an environment
that yawns
apart
a dog’s
inability
to reflect.

for each instance
of a father’s quietude
said father
gains a brother.

I think at night my bones are making glue

did my pain
mention me
at all

not to a hymn of madhouse flies

i.

I have for you a bird barely alive.  my son calls it the foot of a large rabbit.  he knows I need a way of thinking that allows thinking to continue

     without me.  

ii.

our daughters don’t live long enough to give America

     ruins.  their legs give out     but before

they collapse     we wish them    

luck…

iii.

…touch your father
see if your mother
comes back

the stone’s wait-listed heart

a god with something to prove

the common telescope of a haunted cyclops

a round of leap frog
played in poverty’s
backyard

homicide

grasshopper

I show
for the fleeing
your cigarette
attends

-

a butterfly
is at first
a butterfly’s
ghost

-

for the face
of god
I admit
I’m torn

-

go dog
catcher

white

you and I, we are kissing.  we are kissing in the bed of a pickup truck.  when we are not kissing, you are telling me about your father.  if he is sitting alone in a house, at a table, you don’t know.  we pass houses and I ask about the driver.  I don’t know why I care so much.  you have lost a button, I can see your breast, and you are closing my ears with your hands.  my head is a rock loosing the tread.  there are two poles without wire in the bed and I’m going to steal one of them.  you are looking for your button, you are praying it shows up.  I can tell you think this is going badly.  you are really looking now, it’s nobody’s business now, and I can see more of your breast.  the kissing is done with but I don’t operate like I know.  the houses are getting farther apart and soon there won’t be any.  I say this out loud and whatever you want to say about it dies with the driver as a car with three small bodies in it moves through him.  we are okay and I tell it.  you pat yourself all over, find your button had the whole time been nestled in the lip of your jeans.  I think of us when we were making out and how that button might’ve been cradled then not cradled by the hole in your belly.  you look at the button.  it’s like I’m not even there.

[untitled]

today I was outside
holding my son
and hummed
into his neck
a man
resurrected
to faint

-

childhood
animals
deeply
unhurt

-

this machine can detect silence

this stick
if stones
are gay

~

[tenderness]

it is there
in the way
my father
refolds
a single
grocery bag
for a cyclops
that never
arrives

~

[having a disabled child]

means:

there is a tent
being studied
by dream.  

missing
more than snow
the ashes
of snow.

footwear.  and checking
our food
for holes.

means keeping
dry
a diver’s
eyelash.  and leaving

to finish
absence.

~

[jesus]

an unhurried ****** whose character development was orphaned by ghosts

~

[high-dive. dusk.]

as if any father
could heal
a cigarette
or remove
for a grey-eyed
newborn
the stitches
from a dream
    
~

[mother praying for two]

tooth fairy gone to salt

shell of a bee in an empty lamb

~

[/ yyyy]

doll burns its tongue on a teacup breast

at your abuser’s
costume party

~

[later meaning]

my eyes meet in a tunnel beneath the museum of things that belong. sister moons the moon. mother she buries the ironing board of a crucified dentist. childhood starts at the top. the painter of stomachs eats from a footprint. egghead shreds a pillow in the madhouse of snake.

~

[eremite]

the frog in the hood of my coat
has I’m sure
a later meaning.

my brother is on his back in a field he calls helicopter.

I know my father’s mouth
by its embrace
of doom’s
unconnected
dot. there are sounds

I can’t make. like that of a boy

squealing
as he rubs
a toy tank
under a blanket
for a god
whose mother
a face

could love.

~

[highs]

eardrum the airbag stomach of a lonely doll

brain
a blue
parachute

~

[handheld]

somewhere between satellites and baptisms

grief
the daydreaming
thumb

~

[days of bread]

the image
crucified
for its lack
of focus.

the loud music
over which
you hear
make
your blood.

the weakest
electric chair
this side
of moth.

father’s grip on a rolled-up magazine.

crow laundry.

an out-of-shape
coat hanger. & (and)

the news
that my nakedness
has died.

~

[possessions]

i.

chew toy
abandoned
at the throne
of old man
scissorlegs

ii.

a claw
from the lottery
of hands

~

[promising]

the girl wearing a scuba mask is not on a skateboard. this, after all, is church. I see what you see- the writing suffer. I’ll wash, later, a pair of black socks from the minefields of the one we call birdbeak and you can be the puppet with a needle in its arm.

~

[last names]

he cracks the motel room door from inside and ****** from wasp to spider to spared cricket.  he can smell the baby’s back as it begins to burn a hole in the pocket of a bag-headed hitchhiker.  the earth is 42 years old.  a car in the lot below moves over a body and stops.  the woman in the car is ******* a tooth through a cigarette.  whatever god put in her cake is almost gone.  

~

[for Eric]

I’ve held dogs as they die. vet’s office, 1993. a bad dream is a nightmare and a good dream is nothing. is a dog’s rib. I get an idea, here and there. design the same bathtub.

~

[lost grass]

eat loudly, mouse, for still I have my baby blood. loudly else you become a fish. else I jaw ear

from the character actor’s god.

~

[clarion]

heaven is art and hell the artist. regret matters only to the creator of regret. brother hops around like a drugged rabbit. headcount is the nickname given by sisters to the outhouse built on a sandbox. an ambulance from dogcatcher’s dream puts the hurt on a flickering cornfield. our cellar is a mirror where thunder goes deaf.

~

[for daughter]

in a wordless dream I’m nowhere near anyone I can’t be.  my dad’s mirror passes out.

~

[untitled]

snake
is the best thing
for snake.

I know you’re sad.
like a yard, a vandal, a roof.

seeing the future
takes time.

~

[laity]

the unmarried wind will comb its hair in heaven
but for now
in the Ohio
of the weightlifter, that odd
follower
of stillness
who built
on roadkill
tornado’s
church

You can't drink in the bathtub if your son is disabled. The eyes are more violent than what they see. People standing on a haybale pretending to be high shouldn't be killed by a truck. There is one year of *** and two of snow. I unmirror in the dream I was left in for the bot that I was.

in the story, a newborn is placed in a mailbox.  we know of no harm and the story itself is very casual.  an angel tells us the job of an angel is to fly in front of the master when the master is ****.  we try to hang on every word.  the mailbox is the only mailbox in heaven.  our questions turn our stomachs.  some of us become hormonal and some of us identify pedophiles by future rote.  we head home in a pack.  a siren behind us wails a moment before being joined.

don’t talk to babies.  write.  write to be the first one there.  the frostbitten woman ******* her thumb has all her teeth.  walk once a week into the wrong bathroom.  worry.  bump around the house at night, noisemaker.  a depressed elephant in a walrus graveyard.  pull.  pull from your habit forming past.  be the bomb god’s yet to wear.  surround with others the baseball bat signed by the last woman to mourn sleeping beauty.  open your mouth then look at your son.  call it photography.  if spotted, be a monster.

I don't sleep anymore.
I can almost see
god seeing
a child.
My stomach remembers every olive.
I have two phones
but no favorite.

footage
of evil
things

whose people
are sometimes

asleep

-

father, footrace, fistfight

-

uphill
you’re such

a yo-yo

-

the bike
no bones
is beauty

I reach into a dream and pull out no small puberty. Every sister is terrifying. Hundreds of frogs jump differently away from a pond with two shadows. I can’t afford a ghost but can a demon. It looks at my ghost. Then at my food. Days from now, an entire train is used to transport the bones of a single mouse. I think I’m asleep. A sound thinks I’m asleep. Writing isn’t that important. You could die here and everyone would know.

There is always a mosquito on my wrist

I learned
so early
that belief
became a cat
checking
my pulse

I thought of something
the other day
mom

I don’t know if it happened
A little girl
got sick

swallowing
band-aids

That’s a weird way
for the body
to get out

of communion

I made that joke where
ever
one with
the nostalgia
of goldfish
was everyone
left

That girl was on tv
getting tickled
by a man who wanted
to still
be in Eden

Mom I saw the car
No person
it said
plainly
is here

Some boy
next
if not
for time

under the boy’s pillow
she slipped
an empty pack
of cigarettes-

the kind
her teddy bear
smoked

Carried
by a parent
one becomes
a ghost.

I can fall asleep anywhere.

Crucifix, cop car, etc.

Mirror,
the photo’s chapel.

Days my son
forgets to walk.

her father
of tame abandon
given to sayings

any such
that would
when uttered
refute the admittance
wrongfully present
in so many
confessions.

all boxes contain the same amount of silence.

he surrounded himself with boxes.
when she moved
he said nothing.

there was a night
my crow dark mouth
held a small priest
who gave his head
to be smothered…

I go as a mute to the oral history of praying hands.

that my father can sleep, god has me put a pea under the resting body of my disabled son.  my three older children are sober enough to call my mother.  my wife puts a gun to a head that’s not in the freezer.  I jump rope thinking I might move into the land of plague my acre of miracle and find for snowfall the farm machine that once cleared lambs from the formlessness of habit.  night, you.

as touch explores its past

and what would you have me imagine?  a change of tense in a tale of abuse.  a baby licking the palm of a doll.  a spoon.  a robot’s broken arm.  a chalk outline of a worm.  hunger’s tacklebox.  our allergic sister’s suicide note.  a calf eating its first canary.

father smokes to make something disappear.  he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected.  when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil.  mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears.  terrify no one your childhood knows.

the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world.  hell was always the preparing of hell.

I am trying to lure my brother from the woods with a semi-flat basketball and a fallen wasp nest.  at home, the neighbor girl he has a crush on is using our water.  the first time he disappeared like this, she wore my mother’s bathrobe and called his name all the way to junior until her voice went.  her note is the oddest thing I’ve not reread.  

there is smoke coming out of your father.

with some distance
god
gave suicide
to a crisis
actor

a dog, plainly.  noses water bowl to mid-yard.  to the spot.  exact it will rain.  rain soonly.  a word the town uses.  (sit) one yells from a slowly passing go-cart.  someone's mother.  I often think for.

give death a sign. pumpkin seeds to the weatherman holding his throat.  nostalgia a reason to *******.  a gas mask to goliath.

i.

you can’t stop the man who’s tucked himself away.  like mine, your mother doesn’t lose her voice but disappears when quoted.  give the babies to jesus.  god wants us old.

ii.

I lasted in childhood as long as any who believed a scarecrow got its name for being scared.  though I’d go out like a light, my father never fell asleep on his feet.

in late years, the incarcerated man becomes a vessel of facts not widely recorded.  he puts them to paper for the daughter he’s imagined by.  on the outside, the daughter settles into a calming routine with a perfectly good father.  her mother abuses animals with such regularity the family name becomes synonymous with the fight to end recidivism.  on the whole, the man’s youth is something he said once and forgot.  a real wife was humanly possible.

I was reading beyond my years to childlike fathers in a house named for the woman whose hair was brought to her by boys her sons had wronged.  I was eating what I could of the horse said to have eaten hospital flowers.  I tried to make it last.  the fathers were hungry and oblivious.  they had left their voices outside before telling me they’d need them.  I worried they could sense I was pretending not to know.  I loved equally the horse and the horse we ran out of.