{ a. like. part. }
some alike & apart / from Dec 2018 & Jan 2019
*
[centipede]
a bookmark made by mother from the fingerprints of god. a stretcher mourned by a ladder. the last nerve of grief. recipe from the beginner’s guide to poverty. neckwear. dream’s comet.
*
[snow notes]
waiting
to photograph
an Ohio
bathtub, my father
chainsmokes
in a stalled
car
(a peephole
disappears
and a rabbit’s
foot
*
[my brothers leave Ohio for other parts of Ohio]
(the pets
last longer
than a bruise
*
[form notes]
you are poor and have the wrists of a beachcomber. god writes a play about sleep. I rest my eyes and my father’s microphone becomes the nightmare my mother has where she presses the fingernail no ant is under. you think you’re the ghost of your mouth.
*
[sleep]
/ the broken hand of my whale-watching mother
// bruise
that plays
god
/// an owl
from the waist
up
*
[entries for son]
I lose in one ear my hearing when you dream
–
what god
would say
don’t die
*
[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
*
[softenings]
ghost wouldn’t dream the angel but to see it naked. wouldn’t dream god but to understand. moth
but to disrobe.
*
[moral narcissism]
fossil, cloud…
it’s okay to like your little life.
I have proof.
*
[detections]
we talk of teeth and of how a son closed his mouth in a dream. two of our children hug and as one are mistaken by mirror for the jawbone of god. dog is half-thunder, half-ambulance. limp if you love me.
*
[goings]
i.
there is a form god’s form doesn’t take
ii.
(I thought if I held my son a certain way…
iii.
boy to see a tadpole faint
*
[I listen with my brother for frostbitten thunder]
(as sleep makes oven the birthmark of the home
(as god spots crow at the grave of a rooster
*
[every bird I take from the ocean becomes a handful of snow]
& somewhere the small machine that your father fixed
is on its only leg
*
[in the bewildered minority]
stoplight.
the unbrushed
hair
of a weak
showerhead.
pre-grief erections.
owl
hymns
for pulled
ears.
*
[in the book about nothing]
where so many
are survived
by the eldest
babymaker
still abusing
his dinosaur
is the spread
of loneliness
you remember
stopping
*
[could be you’ll die]
in front of something
god remembers
*
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