as if asked to bathe an angel father drops mother from an open first floor window.
with little effort my brothers move a trampoline over her body.
I talk over with two actors in prison garb how to shoot the scene having only one phone and one pane of glass.
all were rich father included when the window was closed and he was on fire.
~
[mall nuns]
a chicken with its head cut off takes part in a melodrama fit for a swan
-
both halves of my daughter live thinking they are survived by the other
-
mall nuns.
just nuns taking a shortcut.
-
my daughter uses a pencil when pretending to smoke.
nesting failure
makes her sad.
-
I spend my days seeing things.
as if youth is a museum
-
poverty isn’t
~
[virtuoso]
mommy I am stones. I am in the blacktop river. my veins have been used to unpiss cows. like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are. the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten. they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move. I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed. I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing. if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t. there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped. I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.
~
[cinema]
when as a father one arrives early
one is lonesome
and given by no one the task
of remembering the empty lot roped off
and daughter needing both hands for the rock
~
[podium]
a toy tugboat in an unfilled baby pool
a dead spider beneath it
I could talk nightly on these-
my dreams would look for missing children my dreams would turn to salt
~
[proximal]
this is the holding father bent from the weight of his child
ear to eardrop
a hospital tree in aftermath hunched to the loss of discovery