mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.

on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost

and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.

I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.

god will die with his ear on my stomach.

the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.

for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son

in scenario’s territory.

atavism

(god is someone’s calendar

-

valley

(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose

-

pulpit

(rooster ghosted by elevator  

-

subculture

(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down  

-

alpenglow

(the scalp will baby its grief

the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.

because her son can see the future, she is not yet born. god matters to the discovered.

overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car

of a minor
toymaker.

radar is getting possessive.

for the gone and for the nearly, brother has the same stick.

I call belly
what he calls
eye
what answers

to limb

to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.

comes with everything. cries like me.

she says
three times
the word
brain
to her stomach’s
blue
mirror
and scores
sight’s wardrobe
of rags
in earworm’s
dream

there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish

coming to
in a beheaded
angel

death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.  upstairs, your mother puts a hole in her hair hoping the lord of the attic will take her for a tea kettle.  outside, a boy paces on his father’s land to mock the dark with what it cannot do.  trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud.  in your recollection they are the horns of an empty beast.

I am three pages into the most honest letter I’ve ever composed to a brother when I realize I’ve been writing with my finger.  I tell my daughter it isn’t crying if you’re drinking.  she’s asleep.  it’s there she hears a piano.  sees a typewriter.

we proceed
as in recess
of mourning

outward
of the brief
city-

longing is a pup, a kit, a word
the stupid have
for infant
ape-

we constellate
in godless silence
only to form

our tragic
figure’s
jawbone-

it may be
there’s no future
immune

to the draw
of evacuation-

but sway

beneath the high
empty

crib

in the bed
of a soundman
who has privately

gone to bury
his own

simply trying to remember a certain coat that took me like a mouth.
a coat my soul left me for.

I have been to the tub I would sit waterless in-
typewriter like a ******* my lap; the vaporous acorns of bliss winter squirrels, ash,
in the desperate curls of *****.  I have been

to the gym, its court of passed and passed back fire, its auditorium unfilled
as a church in spain.  I have been to my knees.  

to the egg of bird, the grief of cow, and to the lengthy absence
of train’s tunnel.  I have been

with boy, with baseball, with book-  smoking late on this fence

with these my trinities
soon to strike
for the house of my anna

cheerless and bare, not russian, not there.

i.

the mule’s belly
travels with the mule
makes in sand
what my son claims
as a whale’s
bed    

to ward off
the otherness
of any creature    
appearing to him
that is not
or that is my

whale

ii.

a son

I always say

a son
for every
sadness

iii.

one dreamless mule

hand-like, unfixable, the hugger of its neck

a flood rescue
helicopter
tracks above
a submerged
limo.

a shepherd leaves his field
while quoting
his dead wife-

one anxiety
under storm…

you
keep secretive
as a soup kitchen
the third act
apparitions
that are
your children.

a horse has nerves of horse.

grief is a manger.
I set it down.

the animals
out of earshot
come back
as phones.

you have a son
who like your father
holds a mirror
up

to some
nobody’s

paranoia, a daughter

who steps on crickets
as part
of god’s plan.

the wax baby
isn’t my thing
but appetite
is.

wheels

the night before his surgery, my boy’s body is a dark suggestion I inspect with a cell phone’s light.  his brain is tucked away.  his brain a self-assessing god that, created, has ceased to exist.  I hate that I have as all do a floating rib.  it would put me in a better place

referring to it as satan’s disabled life raft.  I have no advice for those on the operating table.  for those above-

say thumbprints.  start missing.

as a boy, I envied the vague.  a man at my father’s table told this tale of a rabbit struggling beneath the belly of a dead dog.  not wanting to see the rabbit, I covered my eyes.  that night, my sister put me to bed and let her boyfriend sing me to sleep on the phone.  I never ran away from home because my dream of doing so seemed more like a memory.  when mother tells us she is looking at a picture of our father

we know it is any picture has him in it.

when pain
experienced
a woman
so strong
that my mother
became dislodged
from the two
schools
of thought
founded
by my father’s
hunger, I was told

that before
he could be adopted
I had eaten
god

i.

love is not blind.

ii.



iii.

love is braille.

a bunny my brother hadn’t fed began elsewhere in the opening line of a friend’s memoir.  I ran with a lollipop in my mouth toward my father who could sell a shovel to a mermaid.  my mother ****** her thumb and so taught by example how to become invisible to god.  your son slept while you were spotted looking through a widow’s viewfinder at each of the three places he’d wished into being.  a child-torn child made room in a body bag.  drugged my elbows.

be the still
working
camera
god
dropped

if one can be taught
to stand on one leg
correctly

and to hop tenderly
one footed
past a stone

let the student
be my son

     be at the stone

of my father’s grave

not a place we can go to have my grandmother tell you again how my uncle was born with a tooth.

where slavery just a star watched and watching and **** just a rainbow bent to its work.

where babies are shaken like hollow gifts and we want people and the emptiness of people put to death.

where grey flutes billow.

where milk is in our blood and ghost letting.

where hope is ugly but don’t tell it.

where fathers disappear into the dashboards of looted trucks taking with them their once employed hands and taking with them the heat of those hands.

where disappear is not a word we lightly loft.

where envy is the work of nearby grass.

where a man moves over a woman so that she is equal and equally ransacked
of travel.

where in a field this far away one can do finders keepers to a body scraped at by others and poked.

where a pill is like a mouth but smaller. but wants a bottle. and roots at the tip of your tongue.

not a place we can go to have my grandmother tell you again how my uncle is born with a tooth.  where slavery just a star watched and watching and **** just a rainbow bent to its work.  where young we are shaken like gifts and we want people and the emptiness of people put to death.  where grey flutes.  where milk is in our blood and ghost letting.  where hope is ugly but don’t tell it.  where a man moves over a woman so that she is equal and equally ransacked of travel.  where in a field this far away one can go out of body and claim finders keepers.  where a bottle as we are speaking makes it to a baby full of pills.

it is on the path of the simpleton
one takes the scarecrow
as Jesus Christ.

it is just a scarecrow.
I drive to it in a minivan
and face it
and fall asleep.

in the dream I am trying to *****.
awake I am still trying.
a man is knocking my window
with a woman’s heel.

touching the earth is madness.

what a scarecrow can take to heaven wouldn’t fit in a gas mask.  we learn this the easy way.  so you’ve drawn this circle.  a frail newness that was only just not.  so you’ve diapered this doll.  imagery can keep a secret.  so a beached moth might have something on the baby.  so ice in the stomach of god.

I want to tell you, but can’t, how obsessed god is with me

-

hears the whole
of the devil’s apology
does the man
with one ear

-

when nothing
was on fire

nothing was proudly
orchestrating
itself

based on the church fire
famously started
by two pieces     of convenience store     bread

-

I am going to zip
the tent
now

-

a chalkboard eraser
still strikes me
as useless-

a boat
in the hand
of god

-

poor speech

imperceptible narrator
of the wound
my mouth
endured

in the factory
where one’s job
is to wrestle
the storied
fish

the lunch pails
of the
     existentially
kind of
scared

hold their own
against

the stunningly
migrant
bellies     of the daughters

our boss
denies

and some of us
know our thirst
here

as a baseball
not breaking
a window    

while all of us
stick to knowing

that the world
over

     it’s impossible
for the devil     to sin

I want
in the cookie-cutter’s
dream
to find out
I’m pregnant

/ what do you feed
absence

/ in most kitchens, the microwave
is above
the oven

/ tornado

it does not
put

a bedpan
in a projection
booth

/ before it is born, the mouth of the hole is open

the holder
of stomachs

licking
clean
the doll
of a depressed
ventriloquist

who have in them hypothetical warmth

who have been saddled with such predispositions
as needing
to survive

as needing to be evaluated

who have multiple
lonely
nailings

words well known

but in strange places, arranged
strangely

upon a cave wall
by which
boulders
pass...

who prefer air quotes
made by those
without fingers

whose nights come to them in food

wrote lullabies
for cocoon
and stuttered

let in them
a thunder, a counter

of breads
and sabbaths, an infant

struck
by owl

you’re dying
when someone
closer
dies

touched by death…

entered?  no.

impressed?  
absorbed?
I don’t think it matters.

the days before increase in number.

mother
I count
on my fingers
yours.

a ghost
sets itself
to dreaming
of a single
rubbed together
stone
and my bones
remain
in blank fire

the childish
babies
of loss
older
than we’ve ever
been

the woman buzzes in and out of her woman head like the thing her husband didn’t swallow and so became

fly
for the second time
in its short
fly
life.

but if I am back to the woman’s body I am in the kitchen eating portions so small the house misses itself only in passing and is able to deceive its ego with work being done on its ego by inhabitants of such stunted shrinkage they collar me as a child and threaten me with residence for as long as my skirt can avoid the breeze

and
or

cover the insect that holds my water for the blunt force trauma of self preservation.

sister Cain falls in love with me through her brother.  
     I physically blame her with both hands.  

she has left my brother’s lips  
on the lord.  

I try to kiss her at a baseball game
but am drunk
and kiss instead
my male
abuser.  

violence begins with me.

after three days
in the church
of my father
     in the house
of my mother
in the arms
of my youngest
least evil
brother

     the neighbor girl
ran away home.

from my father
I gathered
that the poor
have many
kids.

from my mother
intuited
the poor
to be dying
at a rate     faster

than.

     took it upon myself
to kick my brothers
when they were
up.  

give them sugar
when down.

become
less evil.

I lost you before I lost you. your stickmen were free of anxiety. they left a church to the potbellied ghost of your muscle. their word for tree was branch. what god couldn’t finish they called wind. baby an air that stopped breathing.