before you know it, you’ll create time.

let now
give me hope
for the past

and there I was, sad

my robot
giving hell
to an elevator

and I was forty-one
and still not there
the day that kid
got beat up
for keeping sadness
close

and I was never the poorest
in any room

is this what being poor means or meant

grief
that we can brush at the fossil
of grief

I have no memory that is not a silence we sang in unison

is this a ghost or the future of my teeth

is your dad still a god

I interpret the wrong dream

do you
forget

for you I would covet the broken arm of a snake

in grief’s
heaven

shape is a future fashioned from god’s inability to reflect

–

(she thinks her hair came from an egg. she is not alone.)

–

there’s nothing in the food

was a clarity to being beaten. to arriving before clockwork. a clarity also in the poems of his abuser. psalm and caricature. snail and gasmask. I miss hand, he’d say. because it misses raft.

life is a shapelessness to which form describes its pilgrimage

dream a grave dreaming
of a cactus
for nothing’s
crow

the bridge
the broken arm
of god.

the ventriloquist, her immortal canary…

birth the jackpot
hit
by grief. a wiseman

mourning
his third
son.

night is the sound of my father’s adding machine. of mother narrating the life of a stone. lake is my brother’s action figure learning to swim on a full stomach. lake is a bird going from dream to dream as a mouse. hole is anything I bring home that isn’t my body. home from the city where sisters drink in silence to footnotes of future fictions.

inspecting my son
after a fall

the blind
and photogenic

the past disappears to haze the same childhood animal. touch carries non-fiction to belief. earth lands on earth and is somehow loved. there are dolls to skin and there are dolls contagious. any mirror is a fishbowl from hell. she was a good swimmer but was not eaten fast enough. lazily, I remain born.

the microscope god avoids by ******* his thumb

–

dream and blood- their unpainted rooms

–

the deer tipped off by mannequins

–

a zookeeper’s empty mom

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

no knife in the dog of absence. not a scratch on wind’s throat. winged things that belong to the tooth in your shoulder. lipstick. the unhummed ribs of your wrist.

let in them
a thunder, a counter

of breads
and sabbaths, an infant

struck
by owl

upon my double
being seen
I am set
to self
destruct

I am no sadder
than twin, no sadder
than dog…

my wrist
is nothing’s
neck

/ his stomach
attended
like church

what
will I never
see

lost
arachnid, a triangle

drawn
by others-

my legs make me lonely.

dream, put me down.

I try, but can’t make my bed. mom says maybe I’m grief. after coming back to touch me, she wishes herself a bird.

I hope she eats.

–

then

I had a word for marble that wasn’t marble. both were swallowed.

–

thirst is not the same as forgetting to drink. god talks up his handicapped friend.

the first person to use these steps went down these steps. violence is the new past. I see a dove and think god will never know who it was ate his crushed light bulb. I betray my ear. the seashell of the stomach.

some medicines / don’t work / how lonely

–

change diapers

else
you invent
evangelism

–

suicide, all those dates I didn’t

–

formless herself, she makes an image. animals

were the end
of god

dream is a boy dressed as his abuser sizing aquariums for the hand of a spider

the cricket
makes sense
because it looks
like silence

is doll
always
or never
sick

the cause of this grief escapes me and I worry can tunnel breathe. the snake in your love letter sounds real. it takes my belly to things

that are also

pills
minus the pills
given
by shepherd

I don’t know what she saw
in that jar

but she’s been hours

rubbing
my head
with a balloon…

dad switches out the bag on her head
and slips something in my mouth
while saying
mouse
in the dollhouse

I doze for a moment and see a priest
pretend to fall
from a horse, and a stork

act
as it should

I see myself
a form
forged
by a twin, a reincarnation

that perhaps impressed
my photographer
son

[hunger anomalies]

your son
he has
two brains
that’s great
but we’re looking
for water’s
stomach

~

[starvation names its food]

ask the sickest boy what a pig says to the pink phone of god

leave fingerprints for his hand to find

have words
with echo-

he will die
he will not die
laughing

~

[death has too many mothers]

in me like a sympathy pain

is Christ, her language

a fasting
echo

at a time
unlike this

the father
is all
appetite

the chicken, gone
he points

to its ghost…

–

my mouth
is a church, my clock
a Sunday spider

in a dry
toilet

–

(I’m passionate about my grief)

your shadow

dolled up
in the yard

–

cyborg, minotaur

not once
did I watch
them sleep

through the end of October, any monies I receive from the sales of my publicly and/or privately available self-published books will be sent to a poet friend of mine who was injured while clearing debris for others after Hurricane Irma.

as part of the above, I have a privately available self-published collection of selected and new that will exist for two days (10/30 and 10/31) that is titled {soft facts}, 315 pages, $10.00

it is available via paypal ([email protected])

body

like some use an alias. fingerprints

manna
for hand.

–

I was dreaming I guess
in the face of brevity

–

of god’s glassrabbit ocean

we peck
in the darkroom
at the wrist
of a fish
our body language
proofing
the baby’s
dream

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.

hand-like, unfixable, the hugger of its neck

sympathy pain, crib

of a normalized

hunger

the enhanced sameness of being alone. the last name of a circle. suicide has done its homework. pretend you’re the someone pretends to be you.

to koan
the world
makes perfect
sense, to motto

it makes
none-

two vowels
in the word
poor

oh
voice, my immediate
orphan

god closes the food truck and waits for his carefully chosen **** to buffer.

even
over this
a star

I tell the mechanic my car sounds like it’s drinking blood / I am not trying to be funny / end.

–

abuse, 1980: because a tornado won’t touch a house on fire

–

in the nursery, the babies with elderly features…

a father remembers making dinner and whistles at the sober. his death nudges a turtle in the direction of some absent creature chewing gently on its tongue beneath a poster of a missing dog. lightning prays wheelchair and preaches lawnmower. there is a woman here said to live on hair. on whose mouth we survive. birth thinks only of itself. not a day goes by in the grocery of touch.

I don’t see
size-

stormcloud, stone

it’s no
gift

–

it is hard
kiddo
to be a mouth
in the land
of embrace

–

love
two of your fingers

the rabbit they make
they wound

[soul]

warn a crow
you’ll forget
your past

~

[untitled]     for Kaveh Akbar

all this time, ghost, we’ve been writing about the wrong body. poems talk of me like I’m here. nostalgia adrift on an oyster boat. empty acne on the face of god.

~

[untitled]

heaven wasn’t called heaven until it was full. we are made of water and there’s glass between us. when my son is asked to rate his pain he says his blood feels like a feather. I sleep at the foot of his bed often, a crooked something, a melancholy numeral…
his body- I don’t know. it repeats what most are made to recite. my brother has a ghost can see cats.

~

[untitled]

we are brave
because
one at a time
we are brave
but the mother
hamster
eats her young...

these mouths
age
in a dreamless
noise

~

[dream tells me it is because I miss pianos]

dream tells me
it is because
I miss
pianos
that I follow
a specific
cow
through nondescript
neighborhoods
none
abandon / dream

does not tell me
which half
of hide and seek
you were
when baby

imagine having to haunt doom. sole cornstalk in the dreamworlds of tree. I cannot track the beauty of my children. it’s as if they are egging the model airplane of a pilot who loves matches, declawed cats, and wax museums. imagine chickens. leaving the anthill.

I believe my mother when she says we are here to forget the girl god was trying to impress. that we are to follow starvation to its wrongly named foods. that breads are condemned

birds. scissors the writer’s churchbell.

grief in the near future

(practicing)

safe
grief

(i)

no one in heaven is named after god.

place is an animal. animal a cure

for déjà vu

(ii)

my hands
are the hands
my hands
could rescue

(iii)

I was wrong. now is not

the afterlife
of the present.

not
yet

(iv)

our towels are asleep in the oven. our surroundings

lonesome.

/ mom severs mother from the **** vocab of our nakedness

~

[accident]

because
when mine
stopped

your sadness
was still
moving

~

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

~

[dear you]

I am at a word
for loss

~

[nostalgia]

my father
he was in
this poem
yesterday
so deeply
that I-

****.

they repo
even
dark.

~

[goodbye]

my penchant for last things does not end

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.

drunk above a son I cannot feed, I don’t long to swim

but do
to have my mother’s hair
combed
by a horse-

birth
oh when
was I tamed

a brother sleepwalks and beats his sister. daylight, brother looks for her abuser but can’t stay awake long enough to catch the person he doesn’t know he is. sister fears what he may become. I have two children, Object and Permanence. they examine my spotless body

like aliens

who cannot hurt their own but want to.

–

boy has no name
so town
has no name

–

when my younger brother was born, his program made him human. because of this, my mother was thrown in jail. my own program gives me the power to look like anyone I’ve seen. I need you to write down what you look like because it’s me to the rescue.

–

her hand is a ray gun that can only stun babies not yet born. her grief is a time machine that wants to grow old.

–

as they had no memories of being children, mom pretended she had been their mother and told them stories of the funny ways they’d been in trouble.