you recall
yourself
inventing

my disabled son won’t have a disabled child.

for comfort, I have
this baby
being carried
prematurely
in the hand
of one
hoping to enter
an underway
snowball fight.

my hangover
imagines
again

a future for those I want dead.

[dying brother with microscope]

last night
a horse
left Ohio
and waited
seven seconds
before
clopping back

(all cats had my sister’s tongue)

angels
had fingernails

and fish food
taste

~

[palimpsest]

illness
as diary
we

are underwater
where eating
was discovered

(this is our
joke
that on land
god is waiting
to cut
a birthday cake
for the non
born
the non
below...

our grief comes in pairs
to the animal
it looks
most like

~

[easy]

a ghost and an angel compare childhoods

(we’ve all
let our food
get cold

umbrae

for Genevieve

your prayers include a terrible notebook, an invalid friend, and a man believing separately that we are here to place turtles upright. when you walk into the ocean you walk into the ocean on your hands. you do this to protect your knees. many think you are magnificent and these many you are on the verge of telling about the Saturdays that bore you and about the spider you repeatedly squash. the resurrected spider that is not a gift. if you could you’d give your youngest son a woman he could either swim through or swoon inside. a woman who could put him to sleep and rock in a chair the boat of her belly so untroubled to be thinking twice about twins. you’d be sad, or sleepy, and get to choose.

before I go to war

     the dark readies in the oven.
my father washes with a wet sock a knee exposed.
my mother

wears one dry sock which she removes
and makes into a puppet. or an oven mitt.

both
silence the hand.

idolatry**

a red wheelbarrow, maybe-

but not
so much
depends

on a poem
about it

[boy musics]

we’re counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed *** shop in Ohio when I tell you my father is gay. it’s too late for crow and all the deer have been hit. you have just read me three poems by your dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister. a vacuum is running below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.

~

[tube feeding]

the boy who in the middle of performing a handstand finds god just as she’s creating the oceans after being overtaken by a herd of ghosts

~

[in a cornfield a trombone case full of ****]

we buried a god in Ohio today with a ouija board and a map. pain is a different god altogether. smaller mouth. no belongings. I remember becoming a dog with more clarity than being assaulted on a bus during a rash of housefires. sister says that from here on out television is the devil’s paint and bends herself into translating her mother’s poems for grief, the doomed sycophant of language.

[fealties]

mowing the lawn
dad swallows
a bug.

sister is folding her eyelids back
and brother

his diaper
stays on.

mom on a small map
is making
noise.

the animals are what god sees
in animals. soon

a birthmark
on a tooth.

~

[would you say, mouth]

that god
made a deal
with nothing

~

[god is silent in every language]

mom is driving. mom is washing the spider that closed her mouth. sister has a stick of gum but says she doesn’t. dad is half-asleep and cutting the fingernails of the babies he dropped. there’s a scab on my arm that looks like my brother’s nose. we pass church after church. sound horn for buried bees.

the narrative that haunts my flood story never has two words for the sticks I rub together.

the mother treats her mouth like a net she’s failed to eat through.

no one is talking to the pregnant angel who can’t ****.

The present is the language god uses to tell the future there’s no present.

To swim is to let John the Baptist draw on your body.

Touch is the hand’s trapdoor.

an orange cat
touches
the earth, this

my dad’s
dream…

and this, the nail’s:

a palm print
on the hoarder’s
window

but for the death grip
she has
on a popcorn
necklace

the underdeveloped
character
from god’s
desert
memoir

would otherwise
stuff
her face

as if eating
above
a crow’s
grave

had ever
brought back
food

things are desperate because they are beautiful.  

my transparent sister
wants to be a surgeon.

as for the infant
he ain’t
gonna hurt
himself /  

to quote
god
is that

how I sound

thought clouds exist.
as does the advice
god
took.

I love your stick figures.
I love what you’ve done
with your hair.

I live in a hotel.  it has
one room
and maybe
the room it was.

two things you can do at once
are a brief
pause.

it is so
never suddenly
late.

in plainclothes my uncle claims he’s a disappearing clown.  says he’d take me to the park but boy god borrowed my pigeons.  we’re eating in a stalled car the grapes he’s pulled from behind the ear I didn’t get from my mom.  when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.  grief is the herd my sadness trails.

father takes a shower because he feels half full.  in order to revere him in a detached way I have to run a hot bath and sit on the floor while holding a bar of soap with a plastic fork stuck in it and I have to be blind not to see it’s a sailboat.   mother has to be blind not to see it’s an iron.  I lift it to her unnoticed and there is only so long my hand can burn before it feels like a hand again.  father makes his hands into bunny hands at his bare chest and hops into my mother who squeals and covers her mouth and allows her face to look as one who’s given up the ex-con.  father removes his towel and she whips him with it and he goes naked laughing and swatting at hanging model planes the guns of which he reports to memory.  she fixes  him a plate of food knowing he’ll throw it from the roof and say he’d rather eat a bullet.  when she is outside for the plate my father controls her with a remote he claims doubles as a detonator.  she sees me kissing the ex-con and mouths goodbye like a paratrooper.

brother was fury ****** around by a pair of eyes.

god
the unsuccessfully
tortured
contortionist / was road.

bedroom was the trunk of a repossessed car.  mother
was not a single
speed bump.

hotels
were dry
land.  hotels

protested

abandonment.

silence was the liquid diet
of an orphan
whose insides

glowed
with traces
of paint
found only

in river.

father was the light that as a boy he was left in.
that as a boy
I predicted
in small amounts

by blinking.

lifted the forepaws of dog asleep

one in my hand, one in dad’s hand

an open bible slid beneath them

pushed by my mother  

-

beside the broom, I see a toad-

though some suggest it is dust

-

to see her water break one might say

she swallowed a sponge

in fact

one does

give childhood
some time

let vengeance

travel

/ say it wrong

my name

while whale

watching

Drinking in the First World, The

she scrubs at a dinner plate with a clump of hair and tells her boy she is not balding.  the most harmful part of her satisfactory conclusion is the offhand detail of how her brain no longer needs a straw.  the boy squeezes himself shut.  his father is a phrase he can recount.  in my coffin I am a withered leg.  he envisions a christmas tree no bigger than a toddler’s crutch and a cow nudging a deer awake with its nose.  sleeping deer, I would eat the babies but fear I’ll have nothing to eat.  either god is distant or has an increasing phobia of the next moment.  three people

are one
hearing two

sob.

to the shadow of my bed I call sleep

a woman with bare feet put her breast in my mouth.  her man lit a cigarette and opened the schoolroom window.  I pictured a microscope slide pressed into a ladder of blood by some pink thumb.  miles off my mother came to on a raft and was afraid.  witchcraft, she said, to the dry land below.  to the kites on hiatus, tied to trees.      


to the man who will say to my daughter a lurid thing

the whole of your mother was lifted by one with a similar weakness to mine, lifted over the head of the so named, was the whole of your mother, and she was witnessed safely, snugly, to be fitted by the circle window of a kitchen door, seen by your father’s father, whose care led to the phrase hungry as a hornet, because he was a ****-up with horses, had been kicked, left by anger and like a small nest.


to those who think me wild**

so I can see my mother sleeping on the roof on an indian gift shop, I pull by a string the toy rhino on wheels up a nearby hill.  I hear my brother crying into the sleeve of the shop’s owner for what seems a lifetime.  the lifetime I’m referring to is my father’s.  at the top of the hill father mugs me for the rhino’s horn not because he is a coward but because he fears the red ball my brother could not leave.

though younger
than a father’s
nostalgia
you are
my boy
of 10 years
this day
which has
always been
a reflection
of how I miss you
on the others

there is a god
but you’ve more
than one
birthplace

the singlemost mother has heard of a skin cream can turn one into darkness.  

a bar of soap that reads palms…

-

on display for the poker face of birth, you are the vision footage dies for.

-

you have this father
leaves
no stone
unseen

this brother

haunted
by surplus
aftermath…

-

before it was an ear, it was where

she scrubbed

Before you were born you listened to your own unrecorded grief

Diagnosed gods
test weapons

Today a tenderness and so on

a spider can take its home to heaven

-

it is my goal
to be sicker

than my son  

-

have the baby
trying
to be had

I picture my father
lighting a cigarette
in the baby dark
of his ******
awareness
while sitting
on a motorcycle
not yet surrounded
by snow

I listen for my mother
telling tales
of white owls
struggling
in outhouse
webs
and of the hole
with a bottom

I admire
the dollhouse
ghost
brushing its hair
in the lopsided
mirror
of my brother’s
loose
tooth

and I plan
to make a stick
figure
family
from no more
than eye-
lashes

to be somewhere without a book on my person.  hard word this, hard word that, for the never arriving marble of grief.  to rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel.  to let the water from my mother’s body but not before telling her god lives in me as long as my son is outside.  to have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to.  to die well.  die punctuated.  by imagery the drowning cull from years on land spent openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.

if you put the future
in your mouth
you will eat it.

if it’s missing
from your life

know
I’ve eaten

if you can hear
hear these:

the mid week a.m. church bell
accidentally knocked
by a man
naught better to do
than shoulder.

the street sweeping machine
lowering its brush
to send
pills, teeth
onward
to reservoir.

by noon
the brother
of an only child
splashing
nearby and in

the future.

i.

leaves that would've been books.

and there a fire trying.

fells an owl
my son
     the upper bill
of its beak.

to night, I say me.

ii.

a paucity of stones
and brothers.

with ink
what once
we made.

houses to bell the wind; my work.

or widow and skinny tree.

as I hope to one day hear
the heartbeat of hell
I’ve sent my son
to save a land
of giants

cavity
a clock
dreamt
by a scar.

the scalpel
the ear’s
idea.

birthplace, hide your own.

no animal
harmed
in the making
of god.

bodies don’t last long
in heaven
a study
was done
the circumcised
smoke
too fast
I don’t
love data
these babies
letting god
take shape

wrapped head-to-toe in toilet paper, he’d still ask for a cigarette. does this kid scream suicide to you? it’s not ******. the name of my animal

is shape. remember the face we saw in the bruise?

games like tea and fake
blood test

/ doll with a pill in a painted-on shoe

we went to soften the dog in the way we’d seen our sister softened.    

when her heart  
was still
a hiccup’s
echo.

her eyesight the sound of a drill.
her eyes
two holes
in a turtle’s
shell

     her eyes for seeing

the food in her mouth.

that I might long
to pine
as your mother does
for my father’s grief
I lament the loss
of my quiet desperation
by randomly marking
the pages
of a special
thesaurus.

they, as in they, say

     this is done so we might identify
     the defragmented run-on sentence
     that will keep your son
     from becoming a scientist.

perhaps a paper flower hides in the envelope it could’ve been.

invented for god, the topmost angel
definitely
proves

the angels below it.

the order of things
illustrates itself well
in the following:

     private / female / detective.

special to me.

his new right hand
has an extra
thumb

to date, it’s been found
twice
in the dryer

he is loved by father
but cannot
stay over

father is a reasonable man
full of possible
fishing trips, stories

of pregnancy, napkins

written on
by god

father met the boy
in a common way, through suicide’s

mistress

a woman
said to have forgotten
what it was like
to die
doing

what it was
my mother

loved

god’s dream
of dying
first

they are spam and were yesterday and will be tomorrow and god will keep loving you because she is dumb anyway you're dumber than god is what I'm saying

take my children

who at their most vivid
recount for me
my childhood

who disappear
from trampolines

I shot, one summer, both my hands at my brother.
the tree he climbed was the most realistic tree
he could find
in that city

and I
missed him.

seek poverty for the instant nostalgia it provides