brother calls late tomorrow and leaves a cut off message on the machine.  earlier today he left to you his temporary cure for the ailment iteration.  the depth of your sister’s bible remains too much for your dog’s mouth which is something you’d forgotten until now.  now being not the best critic.  the bible itself is wrapped beautifully in your mother whose hands are still broken by recent events.  events that evoke transcription.

it speaks of me

the past

like I’m
not here

he drops a knife in her lap and calls her a butcher.  it is beyond cute

the way his stomach
becomes
a third
fist.  her cigarette

is a portal
takes her
to the baby
can ****

the air
from a room.

as long as others
have food
there is grief
to imagine

a third subtle breast.
a handful of grave dirt.
the palm the coin abandons.

the man
mother irons
from the moon.

the languid hurry
of father’s care.
     his old sweater.

we believe in the coming
of the white fly-

in the demotic ear
of angels-

that we will enter
the lottery
of ****, else rock-

and clutch
at the neck
of god.  

or swat.

from ear to god-bitten ear
you
are poison.

in my youth
I was quiet.

there, I said it.

the food is not a dream
but here it comes.

because I wanted to see something other than my mother blowing out the tip of her finger, I paid two drunk brothers the same amount to turn and stare at each other.  after a couple gay jokes and while I abused myself with body language, one of the men became blacker than seemed possible and the other man sang him a song.  every day of my life is yours to believe my ears.  

I love my mother but her sadness is that of an invisible woman with the power to shrink herself.  suicide doesn’t exist until it happens and by then it doesn’t matter.

father became the man his possession foreshadowed.  mom had a purse full of spoons.  brother bathed any form quiet enough to make the kitchen sink.  I began to believe.  I began to hear in the rock

the thorn
it spoke for.  over the nest of a bird,

the nothing to eat.

we draw god’s attention away from what we’re having by showing a short film shot by your youth in which a godlike figure creates the world’s first womanizer.  we kiss and our kiss goes from being medically fragile to being medically nuanced.  instead of paying our water bill, we fill the tub with sugar and wait open-mouthed for what can dig its own grave.

my brother the mud wrestler wants to know if we’re any closer to finding our father.  I examine the droppings and say someone is feeding you in your sleep.

I am walking up a hill the dark is trying to move.  my mother has a way with words.  my mother has a baby.  reading is a kind of crying.  the baby is crying because the baby has lost track of something that possesses nearness.  there are two babies.  one is always blind and one is blind when it eats.  never lose a tooth you can swallow.

i.

one crow
watches another.

your father
lifts

the patch on his eye.

as a daughter, you believe your mother
when she says

love only
what lands
what thinks
it can land

on its shadow. love only

the second
crow.

ii.

you are weak
but hold
that man

like a ladder.

what they mean  
means
there is one place
to hide.

I come from the woman
who knows
they’ll come
for the baby.

my four children, I need them
to hoard
awareness.

often enough, bad men do nothing.

some err on the side of believing
a woman
is an unfinished
man.

bad night, sitting on a swing, I can look or not look
at a star-

is your mother a one-man fistfight?

my father came out of nowhere.

the crying in me continues.

I was born called
by your first
hearings.

     the moon is a software I don’t understand.

I created god
before you
created god.

the help, the competition, the help,

the competition.

in the time it took
his daughter
to soap
her brother’s
cradle cap

the man
was able
to lose
an entire hand.

every now
and now
he corrects me
with a puppet.

there is no place
where nothing should be.

other than
its ability
to lean
on a wall

and things like that

the ghost of bill murray

is wholly
ghost-like.

wombs itself
in the stuffing
of a pawn shop
theatre chair
carried by
a father
to his daughter’s
and granddaughter’s
wake.

recalls
its fingers
offhand

sympathy pain, crib

of a normalized

hunger

a thought
a ballerina
might have
of smoking.

say poverty
could possess
a doll

a friend and shape
less
doll

whose favorite
and only
outfit

a schoolteacher
mends

while picturing
two pieces
of chalk

     the whereabouts
of her *******

has this look
it’s had
before-

white wall.  snow’s double.

trauma
that it is
to be
in such
a short
time
the same
age
the ghost of rob zombie
invents
futility:

ghost on ghost.

how sad, my cheeks, to fight
for shadow.

awards itself
a **** name
would make
Lazarus

love life.

I wouldn’t worry.  I myself didn’t walk until I’d put everything on the floor in my mouth.  even then, my right leg would sometimes fill with my left.  dad would warn me about bumping my head and mom would remind me to make him hungry.  anyway, I told your kid I don’t know how to read but the truth is reading makes me want to see two women fight.  I blame my brother.  some people have the attention span of satan.

baby I'm sorry
my penchant
for last things

does not end.

I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight.
I make the bully too evil.

I shy from death
to be made
its lure.

I have a wife
board
what else
a train
to transport
the sadness
a *****
can’t.  

     my son
wonders
aloud
if all females  
are mothers.

if animals, talk.

this poem
is for
my daughter.

for the longest time
it was called
the hand & the dark.

I want her to think
it was written
quickly.

some had sports. some terror. all were poor. to all I said I was the best child available. my mother’s diary was mailed and mailed again. declined by thieves. no one will think I wrote this. my father. father standstill. vocal coach. my sister’s mouth a spittoon. her loneliness that of a short distance walker. her tattoo a blanket for a frightened birthmark. teachers were clever. could gain only the ground lowered into the pit by sports and terror. teachers were the future. were right not to waste my fingernails on a chalkboard. this one thought a nail my body stayed skinny for.

i.

one ground to another runs itself rock and rock in the unclosed pebbles of dirt open to aching at the wire your father fixes for free in the canceled warning of crow made gauze for blacktops poured not wholly over a woman-

she a belt buckle drunk pocked full the called back joy of a pop gun.

ii.

over glass I go with my milk bottle feet to church after church past mirrors sick and doctored.

iii.

needs hisself a dog he does the speechless boy drawn mother to his own mute breast -

so he clicks the roach of his tongue

makes a hole with the hole in his sock

makes tunnel sounds.

iv.

my aunt’s ear like a deformed thumb.
my aunt dreaming she says for two.
my aunt changing her mind, her mind
a mid-bread knife.

v.

soldiers able to turn in the throat a chicken bone straight.

vi.

for muscles: jaw down nightly the door of a stove,

jaw it up,

and salute.

vii.

tiny cups cured with sugar cubes and stilled with steam taken

from a skinned
train-born
pig, a train

of blackest
fur.

viii.

about ladders and war, about the devil-

a man stands on his hands in three feet of water. about god-

marco. marco.

ix.

the blue dolls and the gray dolls and the care with which the chosen choose cloth and after
all of it

some meat colored cloth.

x.

water knows your lips, and mine; takes our mouths

on faith.

xi.

*top teeth on the skin of an apple. top teeth mine. a test of joy, joy’s age. mama stepping on a scale holding my brother. mama putting him down, cocking her head, picking him up. asking for a towel. asking nicely be a good brother. the towel, hot from bread, sick with ants. heavy my mouth with sorry sorry. my slapped mouth, my loved love. mama’s hands back from hell. dish soap mama hands

uncut by the hair long had by my head.

when it was said
cannonball
I heard cannibal
and wondered where
was my helmet

my dad as a boy was bullied
by evocation, as a man
by the flawlessly
deaf

puppet to puppet, I only have two hands

the future
is all
you see

or, the pickpocket

voted
most likely
to be chosen
from a nudist
foster care

by christian
couples

–

some ****** eared stranger at the door is listening as if to a radio where being announced by name are the blow-up dolls gone missing from the home life of victims.

–

in the two accepted versions of the story you have a son your husband beats. in the third and final version your three equally tall sons lift you privately from a parade honoring your **** scene. this is theirs.

–

similar persons of colder weather gather elsewhere and disrobe.

all await
the dog of evening.

its blindfolded boy.

–

he spends a few good hours trying to pin the small shadows of overhead birds beneath his feet. his wakefulness is a gift handed down by a sister he had to stop making up.

–

I squeeze my infant son until he is young enough to remember impressionism’s grocery.

–

I skin my knee a total of three times. I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake. he demands nothing. he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference. he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long. my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become. I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother who smokes on the roof in her Sunday beast.

–

you have let
again
small birds
land

on your collarbone
to gag you
their empty
gullets

or

you've again
swallowed
a red
insect
and it

walks.  the ink

of your looking
seems
a hammock
but you say

far off
a raccoon
is watching.  a stick
 
out there
separates
on its own

like taffy.  your hair

has mostly
fallen.  three shadows

I will never see:

under leaf, coffin, or strand

of your hair.  when I hold a glass

the faucet
tries
so hard
for milk.  I can't kiss your neck

and that's okay.  I don't think our boy

would've been
silly.

I am framed by a quiet that exonerates silence

god is the story
is not
the teller

don’t unpack, she says
we will be
eyes

tomorrow puts it out there
it wants
kids

animals have two souls

go
like light
to undress

swimmer’s nostalgia. grain of salt.

the infant
is clumsy
but no one
knows

‘ghost’     ‘angst’

     ‘wade’     where one might

‘weep’

he began to kick the place apart in his mind but didn’t finish.
some of the chairs were already down and the tables nailed.

she cut her knees and we said why

‘underwater’     the knife was there and my wrists

were also     ‘courtship’     ‘breadbasket’

     her face to which the years had not been kind but he could tell
they’d been polite.

I know my mother     ‘merestead’

‘mammogram’     I know my mother to be haunted

by a fetus     father took his hell

*to basement
where his food
came up

my son helps me open my fist.
he rolls up my sleeves.

Christ is still dead.
my mom doesn’t smoke.

the path of least woman.

not even
my kind

of violence.

father’s faith needs some time alone.

she’s had work done.  

the headaches
are real.

clown fog, road head, gas mask

–

I can work
with anyone

–

two boats
per animal, horror

–

is dead
but had

a farm

mother of the hour-
I have
no clue
which.

-

dodgeball, no one sad.

-

praying mantis
eating blood
from a bowl
of dreams.

-

toy phone
imprisoned

why, toy phone, has wheels
ask

your father.  

-

here somewhere
my nose.

sleep
an absent-minded
saint
in the pallbearer’s
dream
of outhouse

moons

it is for my ears that god gave me a stomach full of cotton.  my mother’s fingers are made of bread.  her blood she says is dieting for the blank book of beauty sleep.  I have an inside animal unable to move on from the rained out magic show.  its only joy is to bring me shoelaces.  after building houses, my father shakes himself barefoot in the railroad car of a train his angel plans to swallow.  I have nothing for my throat.

she has put her middle name up for adoption.  her middle name is syllogist.  you will be reading for the role of first applicant.  you will die of natural causes each of which have been previously cast.  in the two accepted versions of the story you have a son your husband beats.  in the third and final version your son seeks out his real father and doesn’t need you as much.  in real life your three equally tall sons lift you privately from a parade honoring your **** scene.  this is theirs.

to encourage
the unionization
of stereotypes
in YA
fiction,

join my father.

for money, add punctuation
to a vandal’s
prose.

women are not soft, but
I think
anyway
it’s true.

on paper,
proofread god.

whispering
about baseball
in an outskirts
bar

two men
and a woman
the two men
call roughneck

their six hands
curled
for what
won’t arrive
in the snout
of a terminally
ill
dog

all promising
to name boats
gently
after boys
as it’s not
about her, no

**** is not a ship.

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread.  her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on.  her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours.  her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door.  when the door opens, any dog will do.