kingsoftrain

Drinking gives me time to drink. 

I miss my son, he's here, I practice.

Not a bigger problem than this trembling god, but snow is the afterlife of color. Is your time gonna be here when you’re gone? I want the whales back but don’t want to include a single whale. Take me to your follower. I pitch sadness to sorrow but never hear. I cut myself in the dark to see if the creation of the weapon I didn’t vote for still makes other children smell like smoke. Don’t love them too much or you’ll pray them to life. Sleep comes to me twice during the same haircut because my barber doesn’t drink but she does say under her sister’s breath the distracted angel of our father’s search history sucks on the rib of a suicidal cartoonist. Here is how I know I cannot write: It’s not me sobbing but it’s also not me playing the piano. I unsee a cricket turn to salt but fail to quiet the echo that eats it. I’ll never forget having a mother.   

If on a tooth
you break
a tooth
god 
will correct
the overbite
your child
died with, Made it

to the moon
my mother's 
silence, Emptiness

longed
long enough
to lure
a caterpillar

into swallowing
its own
exodus, Jesus

smuggled shrapnel
into heaven, I'm ugly

here, too

By the time god dies, she's still alive.

Angels
give their memory
to buzzards. The longing

in my son's head
is all of it

Televised CPR.
Abortion dolls.
Hitting
for Jesus
your head
on a wasp. Angel 
suicides
in alien's 
heaven
or you could

hear nothing.

this
your one
past
life

I'm sorry.
I need something beautiful.
I don't
have any
skills.
Touch
goes twice
to heaven.
Bomb 
threat 
suicide note
it's easer
to kill
the unloved.
My son
dies more
than yours. Hell
thought hell'd
be longer.
am I supposed to hear my brothers crying all at once?
In a poem
called God
all this
for motherless 
women.

I did not feed them.
I did not bathe them.
They were my brothers in the unicorn
puberty
of a bewildered
timeline.
I did not home, I did not love

A dove brought back
a better dove)

I still break 
brother
that one
bone
in that third place
where babies make
the face
of god) I still tell my son

that Jesus had two brothers 
die
in the same hunting accident. 

Numb
my brain is like an angel’s hand.
My son buys a gun from a man 

who follows naked things out of the water.
I confuse waist
with wrist
and can’t keep from dry heaving
in front 
of a puzzled infant

reeling
from its time
with memory

I keep killing the same animals. My government invents names for my neighbor's weapons. I got an email from a prose poet telling me I didn't invent white space. Violent imagery is a deepness deferred. Sorry, deer, and also, deer. For fifty years I've had a mother and a father. I don't have a sister but I text her brothers all the time. I love my children but I love my children because they're alive. It is not real

the egg 
with a lightbulb 
in it. Is there no end to god's momentary travelogue? That burning kid had more patience than christ.    

A cold church

Hand inside
its orange
mailbox