{ 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

*