a god touching itself in the ghost of a shy hand model. a boy failing to piss on an animal born to kiss nothing. a radar’s unreachable dream of giving blood. a daughter’s pillow for rabbit police. a shoeless painter’s sleeping bread. an earful of sugar with an ant for a mouth. an invisible puppet based on the death of a slowly named fish. no then no in the no of this field.
T.M. Semrad is a poet and writer. Her writing has appeared in Entropy, Nightingale & Sparrow, Pomme Journal and the Black Clock blog. She has an M.F.A. in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and was a recipient of a UCLA Writing Project Fellowship.
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~~~
My birth month May’s magic – Jacarandas
color the air lavender. Corolla
carpet streets and sidewalks so that the world
softens. Still tires and soles
crush petals into an oily smudge.
The world buried beneath a fairy haze
exudes a rank perfume.
Absent Affirmation
A selfie, my mother’s doppelganger, deleted
~~~
I celebrate father, hold up
his present, my face an aching grin
to give him a gift who gifted me. Later,
when I am grown,
he and I will walk together
alone, rehearsing for this future
on a dirt road between two irrigation ditches,
our two shadows stretched, his to the…
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I have my pipe
and you
your cigarette
each
our bone
with a raindrop
in it
our grandfathers
are dead
are still
dead
and we’re
near a water
a water that is really
a circle
afraid
of stick figures
some of which
I still
draw
their invisible
zeroes
kissing
in a thunderstorm
that god
can’t remember
Knowing one will have a seizure that the others can watch, ache invents three empty-handed people who are closely based on the two still dying on the roof of a strip club. My first thought upon seeing any horse is that each horse is all the time thinking of its mother. I wait not to be taken but to be taken by the alien attracted to god. The family we don’t talk about burns trash in a silent film. No woman loves grief, but will check its facts.
~
what nightmares might boats have. do small bits of Hansel and Gretel enter the oral history of stowaways. oh pacing son of god, why does father worry his belly over an ant at peace
inside
of a worm. what if our whales are mostly absence and death passes me like a room
~
At the end of the day, it’s a very long day. The mirror believes it’s covered its belly. You ask me what hurts and I say earshot and show you the traffic cone my mother lifted from the world of tire swings. Everything you’ve written about the void being free is true. I secretly want your fingerprint and you secretly collect stock images of the born again. Will god never finish
the wind
~
and its use? this yearning, this alien attendance to the unsupervised moment? a childhood, perhaps. rugburns on the bellies of those who fall asleep to the song of you swimming from the water in your body. god returning to find again that our absence has been rearranged by the last infant to receive nostalgia. our self-harming sock puppets fresh from the diary of touch. an egg in the churchbell’s brain.
~
There is a part of my left hand that seems to know a fish with a nosebleed. If I could open the book of touch, I would open the book of touch. My son has a cough that haunts the leg of a wasp and his singing lives in a blank mother’s bottle of glue. Death recognizes more creatures than god.
These are my hands,
spider’s yawn and blueless blue.
A son’s belly cradles the crushed eye of god.
Even in a glass,
milk
looks lost.
age three inside of my arm there is a dark cloud that longs to live in a fingertip. age seven I am told there is a cloud but darkness belongs to my arm. age eight I forget which arm and ask no one. age now god uses a mother’s grief to eat the tail of a ghost. age then the angel of insect discipline has more newborns than teacups and blows on the bird-rolled dice. whole bodies fall asleep playing dead.
