choking
inside
a whale

/ sucker
from the world
of hands

image
made
no beast.

think of it-

death
was human

[windowless the museum of weight loss]

brother puts the basketball under his shirt so he can light my cigarette.

we born
to miss
animals.

[under god]

we are photos
of a dreamless
fact

[annihilatives]

this dream again where no one likes me

the overeater I sleep for

[infancy]

who is my brother?

a boy
fishing
from a ruined
helicopter

–

where is my sister?

being seen
by a ghost

–

am I alone?

dumbfounded
by rest

–

has anyone called my mother?

these tracks belong to the animal

drinks
from your father’s

bowl

–

is there a name?

for some
words

–

tell me there’s a church.

small to a turtle

[upside]

/ this talk of home

/ bush of the hissing baby

/ snow

that can see
blood
in the dark

/ events

my body
held

/ first haircut,

broom, crucifixion

[boy lord]

boomerang,

the toy of the lonely and the gospel

of the weak
dog…

perfection
is bad
art

[war footing]

a parrot
sawed in half
by peace
or quiet

~

[ballerina]

dog whistle, nothing’s church-bell:

my mother, handcuffed

still worships
wasp

~

[mothers, acoustic]

we are maybe
inside
an Ohio
factory

childless and ready

for a refresher
on orphan
etiquette-

word is
there came
a cow
from the nothingness
that drank
nowhere’s
father

and sleep
is death’s
babysitter

~

[darker farms]

food
saved
from a house
fire

–

the cult following of nostalgic paranoids

–

a star, this deer

as it prays
for moth

~

[annihilatives]

the first murdered woman was not killed by her sister.

stop me
if you’ve not
heard

~
~

also, {name calling} is my newest self-published poetry collection

it is available on Lulu

book preview on site is book entire

free PDF is available. also, free hardy copy available for review.  both upon request.

poems, from it, are below:

~
~

[entries for listen]

mirror
to window
we’re moving
away

~

[entries for fixation]

the name of this scar
is
they couldn’t hide
the canoe

mom says there’s an oven
at the bottom of every lake

that I was born asleep
surrounded
by toe touchers

is art
world-building
for the geeks
of grief

have you crucified

starfish

~

[entries for children]

remember, it is dark and memory is god painting with the blood of those he would create

food on my plate, I am always one suicidal hairdresser away from my past…

lead your lives, touch

[cognate]

to build something inside the church
they had to close
the church

those who wouldn’t normally disappear
were said to be helping

shape began its story
with veal
and ended
with the man
dad choked
for nine
months

I imagined
foreign
injurious
objects
and my brothers

spoke
from a sandbox
of seeing

a late
deer

on the roof
of a nursing home

~

[supplication]

is voice
the shadow
of song

swimmer
whose blood
has feathers

~

[notice]

hooked on silence, oh sleep

/ long before its descent into me

~

[apple]

in defense of snake, this is my mom’s curling iron

/ ghost
a vacancy
I cannot
dismiss

~

[we got our hands on some fingerprints and did not feel poor]

the invisible man’s ghost, them polaroids

of sister’s
feet…

dream differently, microphone

~

[god and time are the same age]

a child, an oven

how both
distract
touch

~

[annihilatives]

go home, sadness

–

of exposure
to birth

~

[no kids in Eden]

door to door we are selling knock-knock jokes

I am the body
travel
came with

[otherhood (i)]

loneliness the born artifact of my father’s rented dream. god the hobby of replaced machines. forgiveness the eldest stowaway and mistress of the seasick hologram. the monster you became to attain formlessness. mom a rabbit. her dying frog. hunger erased by what it loves.

~

[otherhood (ii)]

it is not real, of course

the trailer park
on fire, the accepted

field-

wheelchairs
crossing
without us

to present oneself so falsely-

be happy
for the work

it’s no small animal that the world came back for us

only god himself can enter the church of the easily missed

so make
of boy
a stray
being

lost
like you
my memory
twice

/ my death I was here to gather proof

/ my children
to paraphrase

a creatureless forest
in the minds
of men
with shovels; a field.

/ birth outgrew its crooked coat

god
as spotlight

unmanned
or not

what in the history of blood
has blood
discovered

mom is hanging laundry from the future

regret is still looking
for a god

I learn cocoon
and boyishly
cross my legs

the lightning
when you saw it
was it clean

give childhood
some time

let vengeance

travel

/ say it wrong

my name

while whale

watching

our lost
way
of thinking

forgave
different
films

lose them all, dogface

teeth were pills
god couldn’t
swallow

[two koans]

deader
than his animals
that could speak
to language?


[roof love]

alien
to me

were the ashtrays

failed boats
of teeth

for my angry
quiet
brother


[rattle]

forget, sorrow
your anniversary

in case
you’re not
alone


[firsthand]

are they gone

the cats of the doll-faced arsonist

how does one
earn
loneliness, or slip

from an overlong

baptism


[doll traffic]

it is not a darkness to call it the demon’s untouchable telephone

I’ve referred
to worse
and anyway
time is the gospel
of disappearance

in stories, my brother has a tail
and speaks
mailman

perhaps there’s not enough to do

the tree has horns

the brainwashed and the blindfolded will then switch children
and you will spend a year
a year
at least
throwing a slipper
at a farm machine

dream: grief a mile
grave
an inch…

you won’t eat much
and your eyesight
will trade its crow
for a bar of soap

your father will fake his death
to distract
room service
from his country
roots
and an insect
inside a stick
will die
and the stick
will live

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream: a mummy obsessed with what doves eat

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

drea­m:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream:

dream: sock puppets on oxygen

the present happens at different times. fetus, comma, tadpole. surgery, please tell this mask

my face went down on nothingness.

asleep
I am headless
in a clawfoot
tub
the half-awake
boy
on my chest
the disoriented
pulse
in the hand
of god

whose nights come to them in food

wrote lullabies
for cocoon
and stuttered

you drive a clown car into a crowd
it is how you mourn
the accidental burning
of a doll’s
body-sock
and this I understand
as a city
kind of thing
as a way to eat
darkness
among friends
darkness
from a stomach
a way to lose
blood’s password
yourself
in bread

as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue

dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine

go on, birth
take silence
from a baby

dream: a contortionist on a stretcher

bulimics
at a tortoise
crossing

bring little, for I am a small room.

my clothes are yours and have always been lonely.

from nowhere
came beauty
to avoid
god.

bruise, ye
from nightgown
to blanket.

be kind, history

to those
in my dream.

as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue

dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine

go on, birth
take silence
from a baby

poems from my most recent self-published collection {name calling}, available on Lulu:

~

[boy with bible]

scissor his hair
with fingers
from the hand
of your longer
arm

picture him
as a hardscrabble
mystic

gay

/ the frog shepherd

~

[entries for loss]

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

~

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

~

[entries for transformation]

i.

is there blood in something born outside,

a history that works in one ear?

ii.

time touches nothing. is the *** of my bruise

/ a scar

~

[entries for water]

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

~

[a letter, silent]

a letter, silent

dropped by a word
into window’s
bible

–

cot, diving board, empty pool. southernmost

search

for earpiece.

–

medusa

her headless
horseman

suicide
is death’s
unicorn

it is common for the male cannibal to carry the skin of the due child

fasting is a sin and starvation a commandment

orphans are given home movies and edible pillows

language is a head
we bring it cake

no person was made in the harming of this creature.

hands off, angel,
the baby’s
glove.

leafing through the milkman’s picture-book of outhouse graveyards

happy to taste the gum on the buried shoe

reverie a learned behavior

god a tornado warning and hearing
a ghost town, this

a cigarette from the purse
of a past

/ mother

she puts down the book once it begins to read like it remembers being written. it’s my book. do you know this man? his sight returned while he ate. boys play freeze tag to sadden birds.

allow me, wind, my unnoticed resurrection and forgive my smaller ear. the *** we had saved to cut the bread of bilingual angels is now a ghost watching sleep improvise. church bell beats dog-whistle and rocking chair empties horse.

when it was said
cannonball
I heard cannibal
and wondered where
was my helmet

my dad as a boy was bullied
by evocation, as a man
by the flawlessly
deaf

puppet to puppet, I only have two hands

the future
is all
you see

for her date with the giant, mom is putting on her face. our time, invisible chameleon, is over.

brain of a white mouse.

poetry and suicide
the two left feet
of a child
forced to play
horseshoe
horse
a waste
of strangeness

the spell we’re under for mocking the wrong ballerina

it learned here to roll over

there
to be
on fire

childhoods of dog-breath and wand

in my plainness a seesaw

in her dream jaw her dreamboat’s jawbone

in our daily belly

in the church of rolling our own
a film
ghosting
a film

in a rug made of bread a tooth made of bread

in mannequins where small things kneel that are living

in claw-marks and in jigsaws of the crucifixion

in

crows balloons of the strangled

[entries for tone]

it learned to read by being called every name in the book and it wrote eulogies for the children of getaway drivers and it knew nail as the light bulb of a dream journal and it did not know which palm print went with which birthmark on its mother’s vision board and it had its hair pulled out in a cornfield by a boy / god was too / young to have

[entries for Ohio (ii)]

how absence is to me a bowl and to you a basket. how brothers fight over the last fish and the first snowflake. how sisters arrive whole from the museum of shortcuts. how a baby dressed like another baby is not abused. how a father slips a bear into his story of a mousetrap. how a mother points a set of wind-up teeth away from a square of wet cement. how on a soundstage I roll my ankle while you lift alone a magician’s birthweight. how ****. how it listens in a bathroom stall to the click of a viewfinder. how they horse. and ache.

[no animal makes up for lost time]

toothache
come home
I’ll wear
a shirt

[untitled]

why does uncle
love baseball
and throw
so hard

what’s a city

kid I come before you
knowing full well
I won’t remember
my answers

the left hand is for pawing
at the broken
rabbits, these buildings

think god
will jump

who does memory
impress, who

can it warn

/ I left you for nobody else

as a stick figure on a forgotten gurney dreams of one day washing a flower or of drying a wet bird, I run the bath to put the tub to sleep then use my body to bury the water.

when your son finally speaks, he’ll say the kids in his very first dream were all sick

/ kiss only those
who blame
god

place a wet diaper on a skateboard and send the skateboard across a non-busy street. we call this summer. the older kids arrange on a stretcher the pieces of a woman’s bathing suit. the older kids come for the skateboard. our tortured turtle is bad with names. the tractor has yet to reach the deer. this is also summer. the orphan keeps two diaries.

a one-legged boy
and a lame
bird

in a roller
skate

I like everything about your story except where it starts.  a little longer in the dog’s mouth.  I couldn’t separate the gnome’s suntan from the minotaur’s heart transplant.  maybe your parents could write me a letter?  how many missed meals does presence eat?  it did make me sad, the snowball fight beneath a boneless moon.  and the daughter born to fake her pregnancies.  look, we all have a brother who can’t move.  who puts a clock in a time capsule.  suicide?  on other planets.

mom is talking to her wounds. dear baby I don’t have to carry. dear purse I don’t have to fill. her dolls draw blood and her animals say goodbye. there’s no substitute for loneliness. memory knows more than what happened. dad is an oil slick seducing a satellite. his dolls eat pillows.

am giving the balloon a head of hair and my brother his skateboard a set of teeth. are we teasing the same creatures, yes, with mom’s eardrum. all our birds have one father and the father foreign concepts of farewell. sister is urging us to hug but we know from stick that river had a nightmare.

snow, we let it fall. our cigarettes nod off. ear shaped mouths fill with cake. our mothers open windows, and worry. lovers leave a bed, unmade, on the moon. a stolen truck swerves to miss a charging bike. a young boy, mid angel, says he can feel the blood in his body. he says it to a girl and she punches him. I wish to remove the clothes of every figure we drew as children. a blind boy with acne makes light of god and god’s face. we call the boatman’s wife from different hotel rooms. our sisters refuse towels and we put our hands in and out of a glove. our uncle

we can hear him ******* on a broken lawnmower. we pass our father and **** him for taking, already, the cat’s frozen head from the madman’s shovel.