the only things that grow here are creatures that don’t mind being eaten. my mother has given me two hands with the same name. if the second eye we open remembers having nothing, then our sleep has reached god.
from collection [Ghost Arson]
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
*
HOW I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER MY SISTER
in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down
the ice cream truck
with her bible, or
as farewell
to nothing’s
church
of neither
*
from collection [MOTHERLINGS]
JAW NOTES
it is okay
(in the afterglow
of a mother’s
childhood
hiding place)
to live
as a dull
child (on bits of eggshell
from the angel’s mouth
*
BREVITIES
if told by your hands to set myself on fire, I would pray my father into a snake and death would cry in a whale for every bee that lost its voice.
*
from collection [Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean]
MATERIALS
ache as…
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show me
the fireflies
of yours
that get
sad
around human
stomachs
(there is
a table
rain
will set
Blue Bucolic
poems, Rebecca Kokitus
Thirty West Publishing House, 2019
~
In reading the poems of Rebecca Kokitus, I can often see the jigsaw puzzle no one saved from the fire. Can feel the pulse of a mother as taken by a rubber band. Can hear the blip of a sporadically working radar and can match it to the click that sounds itself out in the knee. Knee over which a walking cane was long ago broken within earshot of those familiar with brevity’s limp. If Blue Bucolic is here a return to tiny and frostbitten things, then it is there a reheated examination of anti-smallness. It leaves. It belongs.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here:
https://www.thirtywestph.com/shop/bluebucolic
my children haven’t gone a day without their stomachs. sometimes I lift my shirt and I think they mind. I want to tell them but won’t about the party we can’t throw for a dog whistle. fish are still building the sea.
the one about loneliness. about the quarter, the cigarette, and the egg. about the odds of three hungers having an ear-shaped dream. about the dog-haunted car of my youth and how to cool the body with bread. about pulling over for the ambulance we’re in. about the number of rocks a stone counts in the hawk-like after-weight of a baptized child. the one about losing track of what I’m eating before I eat and the language god hears in both. the two about god
cutting god in half.
i.
a mosquito
on the thigh
of god
losing
its mind
ii.
an old
idea
one had
of stars
iii.
waiting with an uncle
for any
colorblind
doll
to pass
the salt
iv.
child in a hospital asking does time have enough food
v.
is snow
the mother
of distance
