a trapdoor meant for a circle, a body
from a puzzled
lake, god
falling ill
in a dream, back
to back
cures
for skin
To heal her brother, she asks me to brush her hair. She jokes that when I’m done she’ll not only show me the scab but also remove it so I can see where her batteries went. I tell her the fish are biting and that my father is wanted. Touch leaves me alone and it must look often as if I am trying to get a pair of scissors to eat snow. For every angel sick of heaven, there’s a shadow passed out in a dream.
A skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven. My brothers don’t remember being taken by aliens, but still believe that god is serious about studying who misses us. My dad has a single idea much like a pregnancy test has none. I dream in twos. The unraised wolf, the worshiped stork. I want a better world, or to get food poisoning from hunger. I hope my son has one friend as harmless as an ear.
father making book covers in the nude
his longhand moving in the veins of a giant
his name an ant sleeping in the center of a band-aid
what if the end stops coming
a crow is not a star
the eyes know nothing
but know it first
loss is the salt of now
I miss the radio being off
even when
it’s off.
Forty baseballs going dark.
I lost someone
and lost their death.
Loss changes its name to loss and then back to loss. Time runs out of death. As a kid I wanted there to be a fish that was alive because it was the only fish. The gone, to themselves, will always be the last to have left. I don’t sleep and you don’t sleep and together our not sleeping is a blessing that disguises scarcity. But god has nothing and keeps even less.
In one stopped car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. In another, my sister takes photos of her dog. I leave my own car to find the icicle that will become the mirror’s rifle, but I know I’m to be killed by the wind for a thing as big and as little as rattling a scarecrow’s keys under any table that ain’t been set. No story needs told yet here we are outing angels to a god best remembered for how it covered the noisemaker’s brevity. Does shape forget its poverty, or poverty its shape? I ask you on a train about the wheel you’re asleep at. If the food came early, we’d call it starved. Dying is a chew toy. Be as unmoved as your attackers.
As quiet as a doll’s neck
a bell
dies
for the wrong
church
–
I watch it again and again
your goldfish
outlive
a bowl
that’s frightened
of sleep
–
No animals were created in the making of this harm
Do as nothingness has done
and cover
that scar
with god
–
There is a room
that knows
where you die
