the words
I disappear
to say, the circle

I can’t
finish (that devoured

is the mouth
of nothing’s
babe) the knowhow

to inherit
immediacy

a man
whose face
seems
newly
paroled

switching
a pebble
one hand
to another

beside
a telephone pole
beneath

a pair
of sneakers
strung
on a wire-

     parked cars
they have him

surrounded

waiting for nostalgia
to download
these portals
to the same
world
are lovers
born
feet-first

first

two boys at a rest stop

one cowboy, one indian-

also there

a mother’s
burning
car

and the mother herself

flipping open
a pocket knife

oh place, you are not
my first
language
but

it was men
created
machines
that they could tell
those machines
the little
they knew, and it was god

found god, and it was your father

that with his father

while in
their astronaut
poverties

took shyness
from a gun

I tell it what I tell my stomach. if I die, you die. but there are limits to what the past can do. I had a kid once. insects were invisible. my mom was a face turning two from god. never worm do I know where to start. nightfall, and the number of hands I’ve collected hasn’t changed. brother still kicks himself for the nine months he couldn’t film. the best thing he wrote down had in it a father, who’d never seen a wheelchair, setting a trap for a wheelchair. it is like me to wait.

it is beyond me how a neighbor’s dog breaks all four of its legs. once, in looking at the smallness of my life, I dismantled my son’s dollhouse and told my daughters of the storm that didn’t wake them. I still learn in the church of the death I was taught by. I have my health and the healed their amnesia. do you see this ******* dog? and now for my previous trick.

‘sister played outside with a broken arm
and the wind turned her into a constellation.’ – Allie Gilles

a piece of ice
in my mouth
I’m kissing
a screen door
in Ohio

eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate

and doll
the first

eating disorder
in space

I was wrong
about the crow
and crow
forgave, still

no s
in psalm

I take every other footprint
to mom’s bedroom
she is there
pointing
a pack of cigarettes
at the television
I am still the age
of our year
together
I’ve yet
save
for the one
son
he sent
to see
god
mom says
there are others
for example
my dad’s
lonely
assailant
there is not a painting
mom
likes more
than beware
of dog
and the healthy
they were cured
to believe
in nothing

no luck
at the inn
the couple
entered
the garden

god
he mourned
the lizard’s
tail

they, the death

their distracted
baby

reading
in the extra
room
that which
you wrote
to stay

I could be
a scarecrow
with a pack
of condoms, a nose

breather
with a broken
jaw, a poor

even
for poverty

****

mixed-up
in a case
of correct
identity, all three

perhaps
praying
in a cave
over a can
of paint

I, you, born

inside
a baby

knowing
obsession
would starve

I was dead
I thought about death
I died

sleep was the only spotlight my mother could avoid

if you see a wolf, know suicide

has stopped
working

swimming with father, I said jesus is not the best scarecrow
and father said
swim

I still can’t find Ohio in the the bomb-maker’s Ohio

sister
she feels
brilliant
when there is less
of her
to eat, she is often alone

people I’ve never been to

it’s the day after jesus dies and father is a nightmare. I am the right size to change out his cigarette and I’m good at it. people in handcuffs pray over his legs.

father is a dream. a tree you notice in the dark- mom said that. mom says also that an ant’s heart is everywhere. everywhere in the ant.

jesus wants to be human. my brothers lift his body because my brothers do not yet know that neither will want to put it down. I mean to see them off but am rooted in what the future for a moment believes.

mother is not two people but she does go up and down the stairs as if she’s visiting two museums showing the same coffin. for every other step there’s a step that’s not. if my mouth at night is open, she sleeps outside in the ribs of a tree.

your sister is made of money and silence. has nocturia. death on other planets, oh. we're just poor.

one cannot love the ocean
without asking an orphan
to be
specific.

I tell my words
to use
my poems.

father he quotes
echo. his shadow

a short story
by ghost.

(for JP)

running with my brother
those three miles

seconds
kept
by a watch
of salt

the bland
sons
of distance

the names

of the born
between

we bid
in Ohio
on a pack
of condoms
dropped
by the invisible
man.

birth approaches its black stoplight.

in clothes
that fit
I feel
remembered.

the handcuffed man is not two birds.  he says as much on body cam.  his family is one woman howling offsite at those clamoring for an open forum on the etiquette of howling.  his sister desperately wants to ask a question.  her god pauses before speaking.  her god begins with god as my witness.  her hands are done being raised.

people are leaving my body

it is not alarming

together, how many birds
have your parents
seen
eat

I picture you
as prepared
to imagine, they will judge

her
her hunger

on its form

odd that the abuser lives for flashbacks. that movies ask god for more time. that I smoke might an angel picture thirst. that I say not here, mouth. in the church of the empty bowl.

why are you here?  no one left me.  do you know god?  boy skipping recess to play dead.  is your mother sick?  she packed a lunch I’m still eating.  have you ever given blood?  to a parrot in a time machine.  have you ever been arrested?  no, but my father is alone.  how alone?  a fishing pole and a pair of handcuffs.  name three gifts.  invisibility to bread crumbs.

when your son finally speaks, he’ll say the kids in his very first dream were all sick

/ kiss only those
who blame
god

a man enters the dark to say blind is beautiful but he doesn’t die there. the sick child

a dream unable to sleep

easy on the eyes, her parents
invisible

in the white-haired dream of stroke’s snowfall

–

her other, the apple-diver gone AWOL from the priesthood

her twin, tapped out
of being
born

–

the grey bullfrog
god of her brother’s
swollen
neck

–

what else

a fat kid
hearing
how he won’t
hang himself,

a sleeping bag
puking
on the topmost
stair

I am a boy because of the boy who killed my family. she wears a swimsuit designed by a hole.  we eat together these fireworks in the mouth of a frog.  our gargoyles worship food coloring.  our father for a living disguises his mother’s roof.  his mother speaks to the animal animals don’t.

“you are the secret watching the private act”
– from Citi, by RA Washington

ruins are for playing tricks on the past and god is the mugshot newborns love. hand is smaller than the hand it knows of. I am here for the nudes of the amateur basilisk. look at me when I exist.

to it that hawks the mirror’s television, eating is the oldest trick in the book.

the ghost of my clone

/ does death
get the message

I am not sure which of us has no one

the dog
or the me

–

violence
my crippled
editor

hides
her hair
in grey
spiders

–

grief takes a picture of something I drew

we come for death, stay for mother.

I cut myself
might a memory
make room
for sound.

god studies his own cure.

holes
for breathing

some get
to heaven.

most days it would try not to look at its clothes. there was the night it spent at a friend’s house where it puked in the bathroom and spoke to the glass door of a dryer. where it saw it swore a mousetrap catch only the pregnant mice. where it heard from a wall the names of those against making a ******* from a smashed spider.

year baby was the year the strippers fled tanks and were later shot safely from cannons. the year it suspected déjà vu of bringing food to the same stomach.

pregnancy
while on
the list
wasn’t
his first
choice

but memory
ain’t
human

afraid of my sons I was born scared / I say sometimes to my friend of few words a few words on how a newborn looks like an undiscovered fish fresh from ghosting the underfunded aquariums of rapes that occur / at some point I’ll tell my daughter we’ve met / my father when he comes comes from another dimension to bear hug our dinner guest who’s arrived in a mirror / mother puts a gun to her foot

upright, I display the dead
battery
of my dreams.

daylight
is the bald spot
of my father’s
god.

of late, rumors
have surfaced
in regards
to my mother’s
infamously
pastoral    

aerobics.

how to jack
a scarecrow

off.  how to go

unheard
by the occupant
of an outhouse.

most people are not women, and think
only
in birth

scenes.

and god, feeling

left out,
cornered
the present
and waited
for back-up.

Adam was Eve’s great lie.

I eat
on purpose.

the son of my enemy
has an overdeveloped
sense
of absence
and hates
all cows.

[untitled]

a movie
to father
an extra
room  
where the more
are less
to feed

~

[thinning]

under the monster’s bed
a child
haunted
by normalcy
gags
on a goldfish
from the painter’s
darkroom

~

[bowl and psalm]

his inner monologue made of water.  

a pill
in a drop
of rain.  

a rabbit on a leash.  a dead bird
in a woman’s hat.    

wind.

my eye for my other
oh town
of Ark.

I do worry that this love for all things will keep from you the name of the creature dreaming

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree.  a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar.  mom slips in and out of pregnancy.  it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself.  you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

the interiors
of helicopters
in the air

and men
who pace

within the beating
there were smaller
beatings  

-

delirium, the haunted sandbox

-

in his, my brother could taste the rib of a mosquito

in mine, I could taste
my voice

-

them kids had time to fetch

other kids
there was

no hell

woman not womanly.

living's dry gesture
at the open gown of the sick.

scraped by leaves a body.

a second son
in a blanket grandmother makes.

of god we've been speaking.

hospitals when we were younger.

the tree where snakeskin.

hope not for.  but for

statues of them.

live in a dent.  the electric

left in a crater.

we release, outside, a balloon.

bury in the land an arm made of earth.

     to curtains as fingertips

of babies
to scars.

click in the hall of yesterday with.

heels of irretrievable mercy.  

hope not for.  but for

statues of them.

     an agreeable ****** in stirrups.  a cradle

taken by birds.

the only vandal
the town
has

has just
welcomed
into the world

a baby’s
broken
ankle.

the people of the town
though not diverse

rejoice.

the wind
tortures
with a trash bag
its shadow.

the vandal’s dog
allows
a darker animal
to nose its way
between the knees
of nothing
clipped
to a clothesline.

god is the sighting
such tantrums
begin.

god gets ******-up about which hair to harm on your head.  in some, this goes on for years.  I have a lucky razor, a father who’s blind in one hand, and a suicidal thought that scares me to death in front of cops.  my last meal came to me on a toothbrush.

a rolling
baseball
is stopped
by a shoeless
father.

clap
if you hate
your handwriting.

the players
are on their knees.

it’s not your nose
it’s not mine
that is broken.

eat ice cream
like an orphan.

the condition of false
remembrance
in regards to
experiencing
another’s

déjà vu-

     once mine,

had I planned
for the past

when I was a child, the children I was with did not turn on me.  like our parents after us, we took on faith that our present loneliness would go elsewhere.  if at any point I felt strong enough to lift a boulder onto my back, I became bored.  I was drawn to books having in them unreal prose dedicated to thunderstorms and I filled these books with joy.  I don’t mean it salaciously when I paint for you the few women cramming into an outside bath.  they had me surrounded.

firstborn
I came
to soften
my brother.

before my mother knew how to sleep,
I slept.  father

was a thing
forgotten
by something
real.

lighten up, dream, we’re light
on crow.

the animal
your favorite
you won’t
become.