the boys
are not
taking turns
punching a snowman
in the face.

a car
slides by…
someone inside the car
snaps a picture.

     these Ohio winters
glaze hell
blind.

I bring
to city
a pen light
that this time
works.

earlier
in mock
fit
I shook
my head
for the blood
in my ear
and listened
to an ant.

her last words
were oil spill
or so I thought.

she went on to say
very daughter-like
poor bird, so small.

I want god overwhelmed.

my boy’s mouth
couldn’t be
anywhere.

mother is in the zone.  is writing a birth scene for a specific kind of person.  she has this window she’s named god’s narrow.  my only job is to leave my father alone.  I am allowed one imaginary friend as long as it’s a boy when I share it with my brother.  it keeps getting sick from being around other kids my age.  when I catch a snake I tell it satan had to worry about being you first.  I hear almost nothing because I want the voice to be perfect.  it will say I had, quite by accident, become evil or it will say finish your bathwater.

while being whipped
by the woman
who taught him
to mark
only
the people
he could hurt
a person
with, the boy

recreates himself
as one
giving birth
to a unicorn
beside
that horse
oblivion
or family
of horses
eating

from the straw
the stork
became

we recorded, badly, birdsong.

we lit sparingly.

we scissored
cloth
for puppet
rain.

we asked
was having
a boy
the trap
we’d set
for the wonder
he’d come
without?

as always, we ate
from a basket.

name the baby
and then
name
what it has.

an optimistic father
who calls
its insomnia

a god
with a god

complex.

I’d put something
in my mouth
and my nose
would bleed
and mom
would press
my ribs
and know
like that
the name
of the boy
buried
a horseshoe

-

return is a drug

hunger
a choice

-

and the lord said one of these animals is a writing machine
and the lord

he turned
the woman’s
shadow
into a garbage
bag

and the man’s
into water

-

sister dragged onto some dance floor
a scarecrow

-

pregnant / is what you get

if memory
remembers
to eat

can I miss
my body
with yours
our blood
the loneliest
bone

the fragile boy shepherds his pulse
among bigger bodies and into
the bruise and into the bruise’s
unkissable bone, that grey
area where holstered
his invisible gun dispenses
with metaphor and metaphors from
a pep rally
held in theory
in a stranger’s garage
where his brother’s
accidental birth
expired in his brother
who himself
was part bruise
part cream
added to the bruise
by a father whose lightning
stormed
from the hip of god
during a dream
had by a full
gallon of milk
mother held steady
for hours, back to back,
above the form
of it unstirred

a mother, a red permanent marker without a top, and a light Ohio rain.  a patient’s outside Monday allotment.  Tuesday we’ll try to find a vein.  proof of actual motherhood.  we are not far from doing this.  the time it takes to find a sturdy rocking chair in a recently dusted room.  the time it takes to sit there, pull an arm hair from the weak **** of one’s inner ant.  as it is, utter as you were, madness.

my pupils conserve blood for the dotting of your thighs.  the stages of grief omit grief.

he built a church
from the nothing
around it.

-

not all
have a disabled child
to write about.

-

he built a church
from the nothing
around it.

[a spider, worried]

this cloud from a father’s mouth
before it is ruined
by some kid
who’s learned
recently

her shapes
and not

to smoke

~

[levitations]

mom is trying to iron a spacesuit

car horns
they foil
hypnosis

~

[father with his stomach missing]

a fishhook left in a dream

a peeping
tom’s
basilisk

~

[lightning storms]

in a wedding dress
worn once
and haunted
by paper cuts

going
at her dolls
with a fork

the voided twin
created for duplication
trying to eat alone

our food
tastes
the same

its touching
backstory

still intact

be suddenness
my only possession-

heart arrested
and pulse
orphan

the boy tugs your arm in public.  his panic so local his gut could be yours.  verbatim you confront the misquote children from abusive studio apartments inherit warehouse jobs from problem immigrants. a bruise of ***** darkens the front of your jeans.

from the boy

(on the soon to be
exact
date
our poverty
matures)

this ballpark
statement:

I did not ask to be born.

     he wants the names
of those
I’ve told.

the parents
have each
a flyswatter.

they are very worried
about their angel, about their boy
with flu-like symptoms.

in two locations
my son
is unknown
is achieving
a boredom
his disease
can’t reach.

my father is speechless
after
he is left.  I write
about my mother
who is not pain
held
to the candle
of its possibility.  

the timeline is rhetorical, is a deposit
of sleep
disguised as longing
in the heads
of single minded
repeat
abusers.

my son floats for the first time lame,
it is uplifting, a kind of sloganeering
to keep
hate
local.

I want to weigh it, what is used
by the typist
to see
loneliness
from above.

I want it to be the star
your sister needs
when her eyes
claim her hearing
and hear

for example
chicken scratches
medications
disown.

boy
in a loose
diaper

standing
on a cement
block

we will have to attend
one of the weaker
dogfights
with

this baby, we will

have to slick
the baby
back

with blood, then maybe

it will slip
into the hidden
state
of those
surviving

on the recognition
you deserve
as a father
a swimmer

wants

I prayed for the wheelchair and then for the person in it.  I prayed for the water above which Jesus raced.  I knew full well that prayer was a starter’s gun.  that drowning was the silent education my grandfather on my mother’s side could afford and that his son frequented the left hemisphere of the brain by aligning himself with the right.  worse than prayer?  its dream of a retroactive birth defect.

it’s a bit early
to be
reincarnated

son, this illness

it takes
our death

her arms
gone thin-

her gait
these two
dark fish
chaperone
recalls me
to the delirium
of a prison

yard

cat-

her stomach
though
bulges
     is an upturned
bowl
of milk-

     it
that would
normally
disappear
before
my eyes

disappears
     after

drops, the man, his book.  it has no end.  but what can be said to men such as he,
not open to the closed terrors of want?  I've doors to lock.  the head librarian
may never return.  presently, sir, I've a candle to light

squired as I am to the dark aisle of sighs.  
the girl, there, on her belly
pretending to read
the intricate press
of your thumb
on her heel-

I don't suppose you'll find her shoes.

want told

you swift
you lovely (you)
were book

    want see
gunwoman
mid-stride
stopped

by man invisible
     man with
tape measure

     want god
flimsy and sudden
to collapse
but first
to press

     illustration
of button

want art
upstaged
by upset

toys

based solely on the original man in room, the man certainly seems to be charting the brain function of the child bride.  you’ll remember, his dementia opened to great controversy but as he predicted has since remained the perception of dementia.  what you might not recall is that the room is the very same room we hid while using.  both men were students then.  heavily armed.  attractive.  I still give the third world a vibrant thought.

I told everyone at school that my parents were together when they died and everyone at work that my children were not.  I chewed my sister’s food because she feared the quiet.  ate in two languages.  I wanted my brother’s singing voice.  his newborn to be shaped in the shadow of a pipe that went from cocoon to cornstalk.  the sound of god hitting on a ghost.

I change daily the size of the bird that will carry me to heaven.  I don’t know why my kids dash out of public restrooms giggling at having pressed every hand dryer.  I don’t know how they recognize you from your tv show.  you wouldn’t believe the business a broken metal detector attracts.  my gift is not lonely but it is mine.  when I dream the tornado I dream what is in it is undisturbed.  man in a chair reading a book.  in a tornado.  it is hard for me to exclaim.  I saw a dictionary drop and miss by a mile a baby’s head because the baby’s head was elsewhere.  it is like I am again addicted to those double A batteries that as a boy I’d **** on while outside uncle was kicking that tiny dune buggy at a cat most likely as perfect as any cat we’d come by.  I say perfect because it was there and gone.  I used to be fat.  it felt true.  and then I had a fat friend and I went and told him no bird would be able to take him anywhere.  you have a wife you have someone to have your child.  the success sorrow has brought me is perhaps underground.

terrified
of baby
chatter

attack dogs
are asked
to understand

english.

a candle burns
for a father’s
restraint.

on tv
the gentle
******’s

sense
of taste.

father bumps around the house.

-

at night, the night is naked.

-

before one can say
decorate
the interior

she powers on
the television.

-

if twice,

pinpoint poverty’s illness

and

aim a pop-gun.

-

mealtimes
I cough
and the pups
congregate.

-

our bloodied hero’s
shoes

burst.

-

if I am not with shovel
I am had
by a vision.

the dream
the body
has
again
in which
the dream’s
body
seizes

with presence, the nerve

end’s
wake

I saw my father
standing on a chair
waiting for god
to take him
for a walk.

I started sleepwalking
around the same time
I pretended
to sleepwalk.

there was this bible
one had to step on
to reach the phone.

the fattest baby in the nursing home can’t chew with its eyes open.

it’s a slow day.

looking into the future
a skeleton’s
dog
sees only
sticks.

lightning
marks
the robot’s
church.

the *******
on your left hand

shorter
than the others.

the shoebox
that I swear
moves.  your small feet.

the baby jesus  
I’ve never seen
walk.  the cartoon

flat  
part of your

stomach.  the tip

of the mumbling
needle

I never hear.  book

on a bee’s
heart
you tell me  

you wrote.

sister
breathing
on my food
in the church
of the plastic
bag

if the clothes
don’t fit
you’re under
a microscope

his brother’s
dreams
are made
of wax

the man of the house says the devil sleeps backward.  says they share a barber.  two women walk into a joke and are asked to serve communion.  my father told so few stories that each retained its beginning.  I held my tongue like a meeting.  I conspired with my brothers to dim the lights so we could see the eggs leave the refrigerator and then see the eggs leap into our front yard.  we were saved from what the eggs became by a person who belonged to a group of people.  the lights did not return for so long the whole town feared they would.  my mother hung posters but could not have known this was the start of staying home.  I can’t speak for everyone but we were able to get online and order supplies and make a hobby of waiting for them to be delivered.  to this day, tomorrow is a new object and I’m what’s foreign.

on the day they were born
I murdered my brothers
in reverse order
to teach them
about sticks

more specifically
about my love
for what can break
easily
on the knee

     for what gets smaller
the more
it is shared

- 

premonition?  the delayed seizure of our mother’s countenance.

she could recall the brokenness of a toy car but not the location of the shop it drove itself to.

she needed two people.  one to smooth the map before her.  and one to laugh when she’d blow

playfully    
from her palm
the ants     the car’s tires     had become.

- 

to remain
brothers

     brothers
keep silent
within
earshot.  

distance?

     the hole
god leaves
by not
existing.

     confession?

the seashell comfort of a woman’s hips.  

- 

in baseball
one could ******
the pastor’s
nose

wipe the ball
on a white shirt

and transfer
worry
to the tick
heavy
dog

lazing
in the rabbit blackness
of its ongoing
joy

- 

     as an inner child searching for its twin

     the loneliness
of our sister
is twofold.

no
was my son’s
seventh
word.

I had asked
permission
to record
what I grandly
thought
to be
the rhetoric
of the ****.

my ****** daughter
had grown by then
to say
nearby
that heaven
is the distance
to heaven, and god
uses
too many
birds.

no ear
nor entry
in the diary
of my mouth

ached.

I am in your house
being you

when the boy
enters my house
with a sack of ash

to tell my wife
he has come
to avoid
a whole

personality

-

my wife is one to believe
she was carried
by child

-

listen,

a baby’s cry is the oral future of what touches the brain

madness took my mother’s purse.  I can’t find anything in it that isn’t the information which led the student of history nowhere.  one eye is a double agent and the other

a suicide pill.  availability repeats itself.  angels marry.  I am directed to stand-in for what the future is a shadow of.  

his women are made of sand
but wash prematurely
ashore

carrying broken babies that stomach the glass ocean.  we share a friendship

charm, an *****, and a bleak outlook

for the featureless face.

a friend of mine begs me to have a beginning.  I rub my hands together and lose track of which cleans which.  my mother steps back and forth over a bucket.  my father inspects the chalk outline of my brother’s progress.  my body wants to be my brother’s body and so plagiarizes the latest convulsion.  it happens to be violent.  I love my sister for trying to pinpoint the moment her shadow appeared and for deterring my stillness.  my brother is a riot.  his creation story gives birth only once with dignity.  he mangles a paper clip and pulls a praying child by the hair and is separated from his life.  the paper clip becomes a bit small enough to be used on a snake.  I have a cut that needs some attention.  the void is a man.  the beginning is money.

one less person
for god
to watch
write

even now
I am not
convinced
that I
have formerly
tried

to cultivate
an addiction
to loss

is it real

the woman’s leg
I photographed
using little
else

but my brother’s
nosebleed
and

some straws?