newborn
with back pain.

(the cigarette that takes the pulse of our ghost)

it is raining

on the feet of god

this story again
my flat
brother
on his bike
with baby possums
eight of them
under his ballcap-

the mothered vehicle
of home, the doubled
kindness
of road
and ****-

how taken
from heaven
we lived

it was easier / in the whale / god elsewhere

god perfecting / the alien’s

coffin

–

fish and bird
loose
in the same
mirror

–

moths / of a softer / ma

map
in dream
what you can
of heaven

be the hurt
child
who fascinates

(birth) *****

thunder
with the soft

horse of male

privacy / my angels

are graves
in a country

of wind

in a nightmare

(praying over
his father
to highlight
the size
of the first
computer)

he disproves

god

(son) who breathes

for a snake
made of milk

say even god / would leave / this church

to step on the bones of a star

as if waiting
for you
to hallucinate

it is there

the sea

-

eating secrets in a dream

is the owl
with hands

-

I think we buried
darkness
wrong

the elderly
our unpraised
orphans
with healed
and self-taught
toys

~~~~

cancer is a pop gun and when I say missing I mean her body was seen by the lonely / her body / was having children but only those / we’d seen / in photos / I mean bus

of a christian
swim team

~~~~

when cooking, mama says she is burning the uniform of the country I was dragged through.  she knows better than to come from rib.  cheek, maybe.  or fishhook.  

~~~~

scar to my wound, this man believes in god. the last thing I learn is what I know. Franz Wright’s final book is called The Toy Throne. I understand this man when he says he was born with a disabled child. what is lightning

to a fish

~~~~

faith a shoelace in an unbroken egg

I stare at the letter x

~~~~

the plate

in god’s head
is a writer’s
dream.  she crows

her three
words
for stoplight
as a doll

bites down
on a stick…

math is maybe not the best look for grief

and hunger

too academic

~~~~

after suicide, everything that happens is the past

~~~~

I am not a ghost,

hand
I use
the least

~~~~

the mothers they were rehearsing in the drive-thru
the *** talk for boys they thought
were still
alive

-

crush a white tick / you’ll become / a projectionist

-

sleep is a bleeding stopped by the eye

~~~~

with god
prepared
to remove
its white
stomach, the dream

sees brain
as the print
of its thumbless
hand

~~~~

/ to a breathing machine in a swimming pool

the angel says whale

/ my nightmare

has a whale. it takes grief

from a mule

/ my brothers are ****

and star. claustrophobes

haunting
the hard
to forgive

~~~

alone in that no-name church of dream

scales of grief
and thrown back
fish

[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.

guessing
the animal
at the end
of the chain
that’s eaten
the matchmaker’s
rib
but what
do we know
of weather
and its persons
gone to salt

her eyes

loot
the imagination

unreal as it may have been, it was a trauma only he could imagine. recovery is a prison run by fish. light’s one song

the past is bleeding

in one dream, a carousel horse. in another, a stomach.

–

dream is a shortcut

when there are no mothers, I will crawl toward the one sitting with what her legs couldn’t burn and I will ask my blood to be the same fish

mouth pain / in a clean / house

–

the weight
of sister

–

the passwords of worried creatures

a stroller’s
body
of work

–

treeless (quiet)

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.

and, beheld, she imprisoned the god
seen by those it changed

in the blue church of my father’s thirst

I wear it

(hunger)

like an eye-patch, and emerge

starless

from the uncooked blood
of my shadow

abuse has no before,

no after.

small windows for unfeeling birds.

I saw nothing fantastic.

an angel
freezing to death
in a somersault. a mirror

coming out of its skin. emptiness

the size of a pea
no pea

empty

everything but the barn is red. the barn is the shape of red. one can jump from its roof and never land. deafness, my proven

ladder, puts her mouth into words. she wash in horse

her father’s hands

/ of a grief misplaced by loss

if it’s missing
from your life

know
I’ve eaten

[for Kazim Ali]

pain has no spirit, I am never

so sad
that I can’t
scrape
the neighbor’s
car, probably

you won’t
survive, babies

are all
the same, I recite

what sounds
pretty, it seems

less happens
in the winter, to animals

and bread

‘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

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

I don’t have very long
says the stone / all sadness

recent

dream’s oldest pig. stork’s

bucket
of footprints. god

the signal
it sent

pain passes out. boy is almost

body.

the hands
they look
unswallowed

but (dear hate)

I’m the same
person
I always

wasn’t (tree

with frozen
stomach) (the wrong

grave) (movie)

that ended
god

birth
knows everyone

(I know by cobweb)

the childbearing age

of a ghost, that dream

has taken
mirror, and also

that I cannot reopen
the mouth
my mouth

erased

memory (my

mother’s)

of personal
space

the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

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

the mother is not so human as to be beautifully flawed. the mother is too perfect. take her poems. they are good somewhere, but translated. wound comes to me in a headlight. her visions return spineless men

their undrawn
ovals.

i.

to be called forth
from nothing

how perfect

/ no melancholy
is fair
to insect

ii.

would that we could be separated
later
by birth

that we might enjoy
shape

/ the darkness of being remembered

I am from the future (I miss

you) there is a way

to contort
the body
and deepen

scarecrows (my son

has an illness)
I’ve seen

in pictures

a year older than his violence

the over-feeder
of goldfish, the quietest lover
of his voice

would bruise
when his ghost
would blush

I pine more for the being god was thinking about when he made you. visually, the moons of pain. where circled by what. the one-eyed lambs.

I don’t think I was born to see my face. my father looks like he’s about to say nothing. her vocabulary comes and goes.

before touch has a body, we can see only

the hands of god
how they fumble

loneliness
and imagine

birth
for a family

of small
permissions

the day you were born
you were killed
in a dream
where some
were wounded.

I was there / to look / at the sky

I don’t know the name of the animal that slept with god. that ate the pea and left a rib. that moved the angel’s grave. with help.

angel of the old well
speaks to god
in rabbit, I wish

jack-in-the-box
your films
were longer

thinking for shadow

(all my homes were entered at night)

and then for the crow
hit by the crow
our baseball

had he not been all those years
writing a review
for the last book
in the world
my father
would’ve been
a poet

there are only so many crows
one can see
outside a laundromat
for the drowned, scarless hawks

so maternally nudged
into the travelogue
of my staying

suicide took the person she was named during.

I am old, here. a klutz abstaining from revelation.

bald as any
lover
of maps.

daughter has a language keeps her quiet.

penny
is a pillow
for my father’s
blood.

lamb- every other

I am the light at the end of blood

or blood is my favorite dress

I was a fish. it wasn’t enough.

–

we’re the founders
of absence. off the clock

–

like newborns