the abandoned books of women

hurry, grief, your mice
to a nearby
field.

close, silence, your mouth
in the ****** scar
of mine.

distill, wind, the river
your ****
fiction.

scarecrow
if I am worn, let me help you

undress.

loss of the family dog

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.

annotations for daughter*

the second coming of self harm has entered a town called Both.

having a baby is a mouthful.

–

think of yourself as a journal death keeps.

.....

also:

for those interested, I have 15 signed copies of my full length poetry collection *‘earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from’ (Dec 2015, 98 pages) and 8 signed copies of my full length poetry collection ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015, 316 pages) that I’d love to mail, free of charge, for sharing and/or for burning. send me a message with a physical address along with the collection desired if this is something one hand or two of yours would like.

( Barton)

[inspected musics]

with birth
we’ve bookmarked

the awestruck / god

still hates
his artist
sister / her flytraps

hang
in hell

/

[access musics]

I have a friend whose father called every basement the devil’s treehouse. a friend who’s here today because she hid a knife. whose brother met god too early on the path to god and whose mother would jump from anything to fix a tooth…

there are people who don’t smoke
who want to

when it rains

/

[thorn]

the dream
bread
of insect, horn

of dust

/

[Ohio musics]

a call-in radio show
whose listeners
are asked
to describe
loneliness
in their own words

(******

farness)

to a coal worker
or a clown

/

[corpse musics]

bread leaves home and food / comes for all / in animal / metaphors / favored / by god

/

[remote musics]

I write in this tongue and pray in another.  

we sleep
and are kissed
by an ear
in three
beds:  train, cow, frog.  

if you’ve seen one roach,
you’ve seen them all.  that’s where they come from.

[response musics (i)]

what nostalgia is to angel, eyesore is to animal

most mothers
hate
being filmed

there is the way I hold my son
& there is
the way I hold my son
while running
in place

tornado means
I am touched
in a house
with no
basement

wherever it is your father goes
the postcards
there
are small

oh to see jesus
walk at all

~

[response musics (ii)]

I thought girlhood the boyhood of grief

childcare, handprints, the failed hearts
of octopi

toy / on a stair / left there / by doll

god (memory)
making its way
through the useless
infant

myself
an impressionist

(because all

my mothers
faint

~

[a prayer for the tall mother whose cigarettes void brevity]

piano that disappeared
milk
that didn’t…

feather in the stomach
of my angel’s ghost

~

[cleaning the body small and boy]

the brain a ****
in the remoteness of god

~

[removal musics (ix)]

what a quick study
addiction is

this longing
my father’s

(her childhood a pinning of morose insects)

no horse but maybe
one
that pillows
a tree’s
broken
hip-

this poem, lonely expert
in a town of goats

~

[guest musics]

sand in her ear
she goes
as a seashell
her small
joke
a way
of living
on land
with the ghost
of her unbathed
child
her mother
calling clothesline
the scarecrow’s
scarecrow

~

[how to make a body]

sleep
until you feel
it passing
the slow
mattress
drowsy
and afloat
designed
for god

throw anything
you can find

stick, stone, nest, honeycomb

bird
the weight
of wasp

- name
what lands
with a friend
you can touch

~

[being alone went by so fast]

we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,

inventory, very motherly.

this one-man radio show about a father looking for his mouth. this tornado.

my first owl was a bee-loving tick. my first milk
was jigsaw

milk. being alone went by so fast.

~

[musics, other]

mother’s
farsick
palm, father’s

pack
of disappearing
nails-

our goldfish
insomnia

~

[toying with object permanence in kidnapper’s invisible world]

how
to unfossil
the mourned
boy
kissed
we believe
on the wrist
by
(we don’t)
the last
to experience
déjà vu

~

[lawn musics]

books on arson, grammar, vandalism…

god, multiple owners.

a typewriter
touched by father
at night.

the electric chair my brother imagined
& the hair
my sister...

adam (who’s never known the age of eve

[airways]

I move
tonight
(while he’s
asleep)
my son’s
finger

across
my throat
/ everyone

wants to publish
my sister’s
ghost  

~

[confetti, glitter, sadness.]

to get news
in heaven
from other parts
of heaven
do you know
what it’s like
god’s blood
has fleas

~

[gulf musics]

two bodies of loneliness separated by the same beauty

(sea)

the eardrums of extra mothers

~

[soon musics]

i.

loss is lucky
to hear once
from absence

ii.

pregnant / reading fiction / to god

~

[aster musics]

i.

a god / whose god / has only / just died

that we understand
but cannot
by it
be understood

ii.

a deleted infant’s blank thirst

iii.

I thought it lost, a meal

our language
finished

iv.

or

v.

a ghosted

grasshopper’s
thumb / the sole / possession

of the brainless
calf

~

[a scene based on the need for such]

boy

(whose blood
is a fairy tale
kept
in his brain)

(who sees himself
reciting
for threesomes
the denial
of peter)

has his mother
cut the gum
from his hair

~

[vacancy musics]

how priest-like
my father is, the biter
of his own
breast, in the church
of my sister’s

bluer
moon

~

[on peacelessness]

no jump
scare
this losing
of child
to sheepish
math

~

[drift musics]

you won’t
drink it
but ask
anyway
for a glass
of milk.

vigil.

that bone you broke
while swimming.

[removal musics (ii)]

how naked
the alien
as it paints
pictures

(nest
after nest)
for the ghost

of a bird
birds
want

~

[altar musics]

you were not wrong

(child)

to come out
scared

(thought you’d be)

my haunted
proof

of lisp

(and home)
yourself

~

[having a disabled child]

means
it is enough
this morn
that the weak
kneed
angel
of small
hands
dreams
from the disposal
the rabbit’s
foot

~

[son musics]

i.

the ambulance
the fog’s
chapel

ii.

the angel
obsessed
with a human

ear, the overbite

iii.

common
in creatures
of departure

~

[fact musics]

my dad’s
second book

how to look
for teeth
in the rain

forgotten
like every
spaceship

sister
            saw

[removal musics (x)]

this father
handing bibles
to prison scene
extras, his sadness

sorrow’s
nondescript
editor…

the drive-in’s
elegiac
dog
/ nose
to the scarcity
of theatrical
emptiness…

the fish a cigarette burn on the body of god
gets bigger
over time....

how unfair
to insomnia
the monster
with child

~

[give god my space in the unleft church]

as you count on your teeth the losses
I’ve turned
to stone

~

[no musics]

I am to bed without supper for hiding my face from the lord. in the city, my brother is handcuffed for biting his wrists. still unborn is the calf that invented sadness. do I look like what you feel when you look at me? I think there is only hell.

[I still bring snow]

I think mom’s new dog must have the bones of a kite. I have a lover, now. a he, a beekeeper. a she if she saddens in the nearness. a nothing, a dowry. ghost china. spacesuits for stillborns. under this blanket, a puppet reads to a doll about light. under that, the shape of what goes blind in a poem. I miss you. plural. I don’t wash my forehead. I still bring snow.

~

[house musics]

no star foreign, brother kisses a spiderless ceiling.

the diver
dead
our father
loved

~

[untitled]

a sick child can be in two stories at once. anthill. calvary. tell neither. I feel like maybe I am talking my way up the dollmaker’s ladder. eat? I won’t the black duckling. god

won’t the owl. angels

just birds
that faint.

~

[response musics (iii)]

...weigh god in photos. free a crow from the gospel of the negative. (we) revisit the medicines. call you dead and call you hawk gone to curl in the lap of a cyclops. ask (we ask) for what landbound thing did your body carry time? your past, every year, the same spot. thing never shows.

~

[response musics (iv)]

a run on mirrors. lowkey exorcisms.

wheelchair, lamb’s minus
one.

mom and the angel
of last
names. dad

and the snowplow.

dad and the ballet slipper.

yea the shadow
of his yawn.

~

[removal musics (xi)]

it’s always your story to which the afterlife gets added. did you even want children? do crows

hear thunder? no butcher believes in time.

~

[how I want you to remember my sister]

in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down

the ice cream truck
with her bible, or

as farewell

to nothing’s
church
of neither

~

[pseudo]

between the house of the first suicide
and the house of the second
there’s one
with a dog door.

the moms all work at the same ghost jail.

the dads say things like

/ finally a parrot I can hear / & / in hell
nobody steps
on their reading
glasses.

the dream is there we put our mouths on. our hands.
the dream
that was nest.

brothers dressed like jesus
brush their teeth
and sisters
keep a tender
thumb.

~

[takeaways from his speech to the poor about what happens overnight]

horror movies are all the same.

babies can’t get amnesia.

I once pointed a starting gun at the head of a thing that wasn’t looking.

sleep is the christ of the mind.

~

[dream saw and dream tooth]

to be
as asleep
as a father’s
left leg

as a birthday
for a window

~

[removal musics (xii)]

if childless, we call it mother.  

-

how long
did you fake
being young?

-

this part / of her poem / is empty

-

three men remove my shoes

-

translates

to yesterbed

-
  
self-portrait in milk

[confession musics]

I planted
a gun
on myself
in a dream, also

dad
I was faking
sleep

sometimes death

~

[blank elegy]

after death
nothing
(oh citizen)
of god

~

[phase musics]

not all of us have a sister and not all of us have a sister whose first job was to run security for a petting zoo.

not even in dream does she have her own room.

her lifetime of sickness
god’s
hidden fondness
for

/ the tattoo.

when she gives birth she gives birth in a field
to a thing that records
her lost
nothingness

& we visit

where ****
we cricket.

~

[diagnosis musics]

what moon
were you on
when you lit
that match

when they could still be made

the sounds
that choke
your son

~

[prognosis musics]

get a rabbit.

put a penny in the microwave.

run.

ask
for a third
breast

any
size.  burn

on a kiss

your son’s
foot.

pretend every day

it’s just
for one.

~

[known musics]

as a birthmark
on a fingernail
the boy
is young
and scratches
into mother
the unauthored
south
of illness

-

photo is a color
is a scar
raised
on or by
(**** it)
the moon

-

I have my health / can hide

from god

[tunnel musics]

metaphor to grief: one hand grows faster than the other. blood is just milk that can’t see. the way you hold a gun makes me think of a baby’s ear. I do not want a long life.

~

[***]

in how many dreams have you appeared

that were not
at first
yours

-

hey

-

in movies

-

when streetlights go out one by one

I don’t feel
Interrupted

~

[treaty, grief, moon]

no clock
fast
we live
in the house
beside the house
we bought

treaty, grief, moon

some far
tornado

some nakedness

~

[returning]

he takes baths instead of showers

the boy
who believes
in ghosts

~

[returning]

to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain.  no cricket you hear is alone.  in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong.  his first sad poem is about an oven.  his second calls dust the blood of a seashell.  his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon.  my friends they are made of grief and brilliance.  they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft.  I sleep and my sister paints my nails.  kisses my head.  she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.  

~

[having a disabled child]

means
or maybe
it means
in Ohio
we are shown
how to die
of symbolism

~

[I have avoided hugging those who miss your phantom limb]

no windows, ghost bird.  

lo a mirror that picks a side.  lo in rock the bones of bee.    

~

[lapses]

we are playing
rock, paper, scissors
and arguing
about the birth
of leap frog

it is good, you say, absence
with faces

and what / from the fire / would you

breathing machine
or canary

who has
a canary

~

[removal musics (xiii)]

has hunger
an ear

do barbers
when lonely
jog

is there glass
in your belly button, is this

why you feed
the unfinished
babe

what has no home
and cannot grieve, oh

question-

by know we’d know
god lost
a father

~

[a delicacy, here, this harm]

mother my eyes
my longest
miracle

mother my bones

I owl
your voice
above my son
how much hair

can christ
swallow, is it human

to want
for the uni
cyclist

a more
cinematic

church

BURNINGS

~

church

entering the body after a stroke

~

milk

my shadow made of grass

~

cow

dumbly regarding another’s art

-

radio

grandpa cursing outside
then inside
the barn

~

crow

we don’t use the crow

~

owl

pillow for which the night has long been looking

~

yawn

moaning
into mother
my father’s

swimmer’s
ear

~

high-dive

or a very private room

~

***

two
as if they fear
a third

~

suicide

might I record
this moment?

~

divination

found alone in a ******* *******

~

angels

mystique
that surrounds
a small town
search party

~

blood

******* from the reader of my palm

~

drone

I don’t believe
in being
attacked

~

chthonic

a prayer asking god to brush your teeth

it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn.  it drew with daylight.  when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth.  we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise.  its pain went everywhere.  it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes.  its mothers had fight.

it is like trying to pinpoint the body’s first secret.  dear depressed woman.  unpopulated cities abound.  a screenwriter has a ******* and one is supposed to say what exactly train sounds trigger.  the human head passed around at a party.  partially, but also.  the human head my life parades with confidence.  past children sitting on their hands to make them sleepy.  into something even the third act would understand.

nose to nose, my hands under his armpits and his hands soft and missing.
his legs holding onto his feet and the river or the rug pulling away.
I haven’t looked at anyone like this.

if somewhere a knife slips in and out of consciousness, I don’t care.
it will not be news.

not at the same time will I break every bone in your body. god can brush his know-nothing tree. satan run a bath for a hole.

your mother, she’ll eat you in shifts.

a sort of
human
grief

in the dog’s
mouth-

a stick man’s arm, or leg, or crutch.
something

from the world of sticks.

the person
who reports
photos
missing, my sockless

brother, the tooth fairy’s

bones

clap for your mother; she eats.

slightly, move that bible.

half your father's eye; allow.

put, in the paper, that you will sell:  dinner bell.

put that it is real, real as
weighing less
when you die.

for christmas, write a letter
to your sister

in jail
for ****-  ridiculous.

the language
I use
to warn
my voice

a letter does not reach you.
maybe
you hear
sobbing.  the lady with the dogs

she hung herself.  her bare feet

you cannot
stop seeing.  when she was told

she had a son
his death

mattered less.  you wait in the garage

most days
for your husband
to get out of the car.  it turns over, it dies.  he looks up

much like them dogs
looked up
you think

for the one at the end of the rope.

the accidental possessions
of a disillusioned
proofreader
include:

/ the asemic
pawprints
of something
swallowed
by an invisible
hypochondriac

/ paper plate
the shadow’s
last
brainstorm

/ puberty
the broth
of wound / & this

the hair that pulled me through

I slash myself to recreate the map of shortcuts your mind blanks on.  under sky, some doctor induces the angel our mother became.  two boys, while still in our underwear, are witnessed putting their heads together without knowing it is okay to be so by any father whose madness works from home.  hell, the baby with its ears could be saying look at this ******* flower.

i.

no more can you see
into another
than at your age
have a stroke
to mirror
my father’s.

ii.

     deep into the assignment of my youth
I was said to be bowing
when in fact
I was dipping
into the thigh
of Jesus

     repeatedly
with a brush.

iii.

we haven’t always been godless.

     how this persists as comfort
is a vision a fox
has

of illness.

iv.

     to fox I apply a certain wakefulness.  

v.

my father admits in his bed that some mice are alive when he bends to the earth a cornstalk and lets fly.
he confides of everything he is the most guilty of hate getting him places.

     I have to find the mouse that means

other mice.  

vi.

     (above this plain a woman’s privates thunder  / below it
      there are those
      whose tears
      are a newborn’s
      thumbs)    

vii.

a mare kneeling  in a bed of maroon straw

intuits doom     as a color     as optic

     Apocrypha  

viii.

subconsciously, I am holy and by holy
I can offer not being seen in the grocery
as my father squints into a handheld
calculator.  

ix.

to fox paw
this thorn

     from my mother’s
apnea

as my sister
inspects
her *******
in the white
piece of paper
we both
refer to
as the one
and only
ghost
mirror

I fry
god’s egg
in the plastic
shovel
I took
from a sandbox
shaped
like a coffin

and shiver
like the psychic
who with
the controllable
sobbing
of her hands
gave our seizures

to animals

they met after years of sleeping in the same bed

like two peeping toms
in a haunted
time machine

we stole eggs

more
than we needed

if caught
our mom
was a widow
and brother

would name
our church

if no animal
is there
describe
to me
the one
furthest
from a mind
harmed
in the making

he is to have
his inner monologue
removed.

his surgeon
so publicly
sad
is not
captured.

sometimes pillow
sometimes x-ray
his boy’s
seashell
ear
foretells
the housing
crisis
in a place

of worship.

a ghost on the sincerity of fear

a sleepwalker
on hibernation

god on faith, acolyte
to wheelchair

a listener to a mime
of the yawn
that tricks
grief

I am the boy Abraham and I have been brought to this room to be examined because I **** my pants.  the man Abraham is my father and there is also a young adult Abraham who hands out bowling shoes on Saturdays.  the place I am from is easy to write about.  in that place the girl I love dresses like a witch and stands for hours on a high-dive above a drained pool which is closed to the public.  she never jumps, my mascot, and pretends to smoke the same cigarette which can be seen if one zooms in.  there is no food, no water, nothing responsible for hunger or thirst.  no one goes to the bathroom except to look at the toilet so the urge fades more quickly.  I am some sort of god.  if you want to hear yourself think, each house has one phone.  if you want to hear what is now me, there are phone booths everywhere.

to those of yours
who’ve died
I give
my prayer
of being better
in one-on-one
situations.  if god is god,

let me become
the woman
I got
the idea
from.

a spider on the ceiling
in the bathroom
means father
fill
the tub.

your mother stood on water
before she learned
to walk.

something about a fly
speaks to her, the way it

enters a thought
to leave
a message…

saw satan
spit bread

I was with
my son
we were      

differently / enthralled

this sunburnt
man / unable

to eat
or put his hands
together

who then
hissed us
to take

a picture / though

I think
     hissed / only appears

in retrospect

her hair
at night
is going
places

(a fish licks through the ocean)

this is my camera
the salter of dust

two of three
children
go with father
to the movies

-

his sentences
have to them
a smoker’s
brevity

-

understand, you, that the saying
of the word
angel

is limiting
to the length
of my son’s
life

(which must not be
directly related
to god’s attention span)

two of three
children
go with father
to the movies

-

his sentences
have to them
a smoker’s
brevity

-

understand, you, that the saying
of the word
angel

is limiting
to the length
of my son’s
life

(which must not be
directly related
to god’s attention span)

I lose
at times
the names
of the boys
I hid from…

not an angel, I am allowed
to love
the baby

it grows overnight too big for its bed.  in dream it hammers at the nail’s head still hidden in the infant’s palm.  when mistaken it is mistaken for the hand it stings with a fastball.  it is all man to the boy with a frisbee.  on land it has a dog that growls in gentle code at the untouched bowls of dogs underwater.  traces of it can be found in the model glue scraped from the space shuttle that depresses your ghost.

I am not one to criticize your method of self-abuse.  examples of god set examples for.  all babies are early.  all babies are the death of blanket statements.  sending a body to hell weighs the same but is not equal to holding the bloodless ***** of the poor man’s number one squeeze.  from what you tossed off, I took this:  twins are gay.  and how your father’s suicide was facilitated by your grandfather correcting his aiming of the garden hose at a hornet’s nest.  what I left were the sounds of war presented as souvenir eggings of the same fog swallowed house.  and my mother, the missing headline of my emergence.

on the off chance
one of the buried
has a shovel
we dig
with our hands
while telling
these stories
of men
with headaches
whose women
would gain weight
to absorb
the souvenir warmth
of wanted
pregnancies
which made
some of the women
smoke
so as to be
in a constant state
of unveiling
bruises
seemingly given
by demon
toddlers
yet to be
crossed
by hunger
hobbled
creatures
being that the bruises
recall to us
the botched
renderings
of paw prints
and then we’re on
to the women
who don’t smoke
who are puppets
with frostbite
and believe
the lord’s stomach
is sometimes
bowl
sometimes
plate