{nic}

POEMS FROM {surprise for me a crow}:

[birdthings]

/ those who’ve boiled mouthwash in a baby’s bottle

/ my ice-fishing father’s crystal ball

/ the leaf
that prays
for hand

~

[in no language]

does echo
have a word
for dream

~

[cult notes]

to find
in the moments
after
the vision
that yes
you’ve eaten
everything
in sight, that a baby

yours
or not

is asleep
in a somersault, that you worshiped

prayer and fell

for hunger’s
childhood

~

POEMS FROM {name calling}:

[entries for dimension]

at birth
it says
iceberg, and then

crown

–

I have this story that can put
for you
a banana peel

on the floor
of the delivery room, this other

–

with a scarecrow
midway through it

looking all
tore up
like it was used

last night
as a fork

~

[entries for surrender]

sorrow the mudwrestler of my drought

whose tooth fairy
does
impressions

can we erase
what silence
films

a dog
a smaller
prison

~

[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 orgasm to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

~

POEMS FROM {paw five}:

[transformative melancholies]

frog
in the throat
of a lowing
cow

dad, smoking

two nearby deer
nosing that headlight
into place

poem is dead

~

[father with his stomach missing]

a fishhook left in a dream

a peeping
tom’s
basilisk

~

[farness]

the last robot to name its baby.

two smokers
back-to-back
in the high
corn.

the spoonfeeder’s ferris wheel.

litterbug’s
shadow.

~

[anklebiters]

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

~

RECENT POEMS:

[some near thing]

it’s late. my kids laugh in a dirty kitchen. I am in the hallway having just killed a wasp for looking like hunger. the wasp is in my hand. I can’t move. the boy who touched all the eggs.

~

[the poor don’t get amnesia]

snake was made
from the bones
of a circle

~

[toys made in human silence]

the rock thrown by an only child. the wasp the seashell of a mother’s desert. the zookeeper’s raft.

~

[atomy]

the white doghouse. the closed drive-in. the animal we shared to avoid miracle. our empty child

mostly
from books.

~
~
~

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