{ -ing, circa }

from

[RETURNING]

I go places
in my ghost
that are children
when I arrive. they call me

high grass, lord
of the wind’s
blood. most of them

have lost
babies
with dog
names
to birth
or touch, our brief

attractions
to déjà vu

~~~~

in this dream, the father stops halfway up the ladder and blows on his hands. starvation is a drowsy snake. the dream has time to think and figures existence needs a distraction. when my son bites himself, it is because his teeth are feeling lost. I offer him to the dream but he is not godless enough to throw his voice. are you sick in a language that has a word for what you have? skin is the longest dream.

~~~~~

to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain. no cricket you hear is alone. in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong. his first sad poem is about an oven. his second calls dust the blood of a seashell. his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon. my friends they are made of grief and brilliance. they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft. I sleep and my sister paints my nails. kisses my head. she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.

~~~~~

this was after your brother had died everywhere

I was calling shotgun for poverty’s mistress
during a game of shirts and skins

I think by then
jesus had fed
nearly two of the five
thousand
with a sunburn
and an ambulance

& most animals were still having four dreams)

anyway, something flew into your mother’s mouth
and the look on her face
told nobody
it had teeth

~~~~~

from

[FOOD]

the boy on my shoulders says my hair is on fire. it is our longest running joke. he laughs so hard my ribs fall asleep in his childless stomach. he takes the cigarette from behind my ear…

his cough is a paintbrush. no father can kill god. the resurrected miss death.

~~~

a fish looking for its graveyard

I was in the dream
I was writing
down

~~~

keep the baby

eats
during thunderstorms

~~~

from

[SEPARATIONS FOR UNLIKENESS]

god bless the hypnotist who takes up smoking when it goes uncured (my transformative stutter…

god bless the breathing machine, the fog…

the donkey so beaten it recalls itself as a whale’s untouchable nose…

and god bless god for my short life as a father, for my son who says, meaning eyelash (cyclops…

~~~~~

it’s not my imagination that I’m the only foreigner my body recalls, but is that god can change with my stomach the shape of his tears

~~~~~

waiting for her cigarettes to dry, mother starts a bath and says above them that it’s not like any of you are becoming a rib. death, short a person, continues to eat the language god hasn’t. trauma makes a compass of time and place

and brother is not yet the sitting creature of a thoughtless life. I am not there but am allowed to be. I so miss birds.

(the ghost fame of each tadpole

~~~~~

a shadow’s private gravity (a fly on a grieving radar

~~~~~

the boy whose clothes have been taken will swim for hours and for hours know why the soul hides death from god

~~~~~

do they not
look

finished

ear to ear, the toddlers…

their tornado
still theirs, and today’s

sermon
still in the mind
of their mother’s
exterminator
boyfriend
who is having a thought
as rare

as his past, of a god

spotting
from a cobweb
a carcass

and deciding

~~~~~

apparition, or mom
at her most forgetful.

mouth, a shapeshifter’s
chew toy
godless
as a belly button
and babied
by grief.

face, face.

~~~~~

tell me again
how it is
that dream
stops
tooth decay
in angels / why it is

that I can hear
in the darkroom
post-god
the ghost
muscle

of weeping

/ when it was they found the suckling

and not the bones
of a wave

~~~~~

not uncommon in a household of grief

for one
to be bad
with names.

(the radio
an animal
that misses
its bones

~~~~~

I eat more in your absence than you do in mine. our animals never meet. I’ve a painting and you’ve a picture of eve reaching for an aspirin. an angel is a ghost on fire.

~~~~~

pushed a lawnmower. jumped on a trampoline. ate with symbolism the freer meals. painted for death what death could sell to a mirror. accused my hair of arson.

~~~~~

before an astronaut can miss a tooth

I see my mother

her face
in a cobweb

~~~~~

there are ways to be happy. you can say priestess and watch your father’s cigarette slip in and out of sleep. you can crush a pill for the dog that’s begun to move like the rabbit it died chasing. you can lick the spoon the mirror’s

(map

~~~~~

how long
for being god
should god
be punished

–

to how many mothers have you reappeared

–

are these
the pebbles

fingerprint and footfall

(have they been
betrayed

~~~~~

a dog-tamer by day, he’d lose at night his stomach’s paw to a sleepy hand. not there to feed anything, I’d set anyway a fishbowl down for a rocking horse. sometimes a woman would shock me with her finger then put on her shoes. then leave or not exist.

~~~~~

being earlier drawn to a pilot’s imperfect nostalgia,

a hypothetical form
goes online
to cry…

(eyesight is sorrow’s smallest garden
(a whole

church
for the errors
of fiction

~~~~~

a shirtless child sets my food on fire. I want to cut myself but part of me is still teaching god air guitar in an outhouse. stun gun. riding mower. I learn how to point and bulimia

is the ghost

anorexia
isn’t.

mother, in goodbye, means goodbye.

~~~~~

there is
oh sin

a firefly

in my grief.

& the eater of chalk has the body of god.

~~~~~

look long enough
at a bird
it becomes
a bird.

frog
a boy

both arms
broken.

~~~~~

sheep because sheep looks as if it’s waiting for an angel to have a thought and sheep because the saying of sheep guides the mouth into silence and sheep because if you close one eye in church

the circle my son draws looks like a fish

and circle because I made for it a church and church because he once saw a rabbit that wasn’t and a stomach that was and the two of you

we could not lift

~~~~~

years later and I can’t convince my brother he’s been shot. he wants to be naked all the time. one day he wakes up with four legs and another with two he’s forgotten. he doesn’t draw but claims the things he draws can’t sleep. mourn god, he says. he says he can’t see me when I wash his clothes. so I wash his clothes.

~~~~~

[OHIO DEATHS]

every stick I throw

a ghost
of my grandfather’s
wand—

I don’t throw many
it is not a sight
to see

not some cow nudging awake the weakest deer

not pipe tobacco, not smoke, not that spider
from an injured
fog

not a small child
a dog even

trying to use
a spoon

~~~~~

god’s been gone nine months and all this talk he’s done of being stabbed in a dollhouse struggles to fill a baby

(do animals have songs

do they know

to miss
missing (leave the bragging

to grief

~~~~~

handstands and loneliness- what infantile reactions we have to existence. I want to eat

but how will they know there was nothing here (this finger

once a rib in the back of your throat

~~~~~

my son knows his birds by the hands he draws for them. anatomy is perhaps what you make it. grey bruise, blue tongue…

this dream goes nowhere. hell, these chickens

(as if their god was struck by a ghost

~~~~~

this body was never a child

(& birth a spoon
bent to the little

I long

~~~~~

father cuts my hair as something gentle he can do underwater. he’s broken the bowl that caught his mother’s mouth. we have our mirrors and you your nets. I am the last of his one-eared boys.

~~~~~

his cigarette going bald, father prepares his food while we touch ours. god swims long enough to miss wind. if there are two babies in the same room, they switch cribs but not teeth. god is a time-traveler selling nostalgia. I can never remember which of mother’s ears is insect and which is litmus. it’s always the second meal

comes from heaven

~~~~~

I want to be loved so badly that I promise your raccoon the sea. dying means:

my boy falls asleep drinking from a toy boat. god has no friends but even better

my mother has one was born

without a birthday. can an angel

do this? says ghost.

(grief is a thing taught to breathe by its stomach

~~~~~

it’s dark and all of us are in the wrong stone.

the floor is clean where I learned my shapes.

~~~~~

I cut the pills
sometimes
in advance. (love

that no matter
the day, there are three

god spent
with his son.

~~~~~

(between

online
searches
for tire
swing (mother

sells chalk
to a ghost

~~~~~

I didn’t miss god or think I was ugly. had mud enough
to make
from memory

the scarecrow’s
stomach. I ate my brothers

they ate
me back. any loss

became a hole
in a snake, any needle

a worshiped
feather…

~~~~~

think of wind as a thing that’s mastered its nothingness.

cradle
the unfinished.

yes think, then cradle.

hands shape their own leaving.

~~~~~

I wait in the outhouse to hear the ghost of my brother speak.

time
to him

is grief gets a puppy, spider
a tail

(in the story of the fish
that wanted
to pray

~~~~~

mom says she ain’t had a dream since trying to bring jesus there to hear her poem about the fetus and the bookmark as found in her collection (a warning describes home to a crow

~~~~~

because in an insect, terror has no room to grow. because I can count on a handprint the number of times you thought me from nothing. because my daughter does a somersault and thinks she’s pregnant. because god worships the storm for its light touch. because I can’t sing. because when I do, my mother knows where I am. because on all-fours I call my blood to bathe me in its blue past. because loss eats its plate. because I brush my teeth over a circle my son will make in dirt. because his ghost mans a ferris wheel he refers to as piggyback. because my father can forgive a shape and I cannot a poem.

~~~~~

I wore
to bed
a dog’s
collar
and in
the dream
broke your leg
on mine
do you remember
being spanked
the ant
on your cheek
lonelier
than a stick

(I think
god
he put
my hand
in a hand
done
with growing (there is

the star I sleep under

the toothache
you

~~~~~

god is the word food spells in my mouth.

you have to be this tall
to be hungry.

(there is a ghost looking for its rock collection)

our absence
unheard of

~~~~~

up at this hour
with my thumb
in my mouth…

older
than mine
your missing
child…

the spider

it’s thrown itself on a drop of blood

~~~~~

I’m here, says the soul.

the body will need me
when you’re gone.

~~~~~

I find my hands wrapped in yours in a field we call rifle. you’re vomiting in a dream and your son is asking

(is a shadow a boat that’s been killed

~~~~~

if caught
early,

sickness will erase the body’s memory of dying.

(late,

will make
from god
a trapped
ghost

~~~~~

permission
to report
sightings
of uncommon
roadkill

and
or

to estimate

multiple
longings

~~~~~

you’re getting better but birth is still a joke that grief gets wrong. that luck forgets. dog is too old to look at the animal it younger replaced. care is mostly silent. a cricket in a cake. my tiny saw.

~~~~~

every year
on your birthday
a buzzard
falls

to earth
from the mouth
of a flat

footed god
and gets

(its chance to carry

the owl’s
food

~~~~~

at the very least, I think god could’ve given loss a tail. I take it anyway

my cut of longing-

say keep my daughter from caterpillar and my son from cigarette.

from each other

both

~~~~~

I am seven
maybe eight
and some boys
are counting
the holes
in my shirt
and asking
if I bite
I tell them
what I love
and that I’m studying
the poor (that I can talk
underwater
but it doesn’t
help
there is always
a book
that poverty
pretends
to read (a lake
that hates
my shadow

~~~~~

because a ghost can do what time cannot, a father gets over being ugly. I have a sister who rings a bell and you a mother who swallows a whistle. the order of my love is wrist, wrist, neck. my brother thinks he’ll be crucified for having two left feet. acts like a dog when it rains.

~~~~~

the clown while cleaning a paintball gun watches a kite as if kite believes there’s a puppet in a cornfield. this is what I mean and don’t mean by loneliness. I learn smoke by combing knots from my mother’s anthill hair and snake by setting a rope on fire. certain diets will bring the baby back. whose blood is this, whose ball

of yarn (were soft things said about losing teeth

~~~~~

today, I will cradle nothingness for a star I’ll never see. ask my sorrow what it remembers of yours. soften the mirror

in its yester

place.

~~~~~

the room
listening
for a room
in the home
of god, the soft
chase
given
by toothbrush
to birthmark, the nothing

we want
like children

~~~~~

[SPIRITUAL CORRECTIVES]

you think
you might
be art. her mastering

of his blindspot
for imagery…

(every rock you throw is a bird that can’t breathe

~~~~~

sons says he falls asleep reading to his teeth. son whose size has gone to confess.

put

oh son

god’s hand
through a wall. a fingernail

on my tongue (rib

in luck’s
grave

~~~~~

I don’t have time
to be smart
but everyone
in this movie
thinks a snowglobe
is a moth
on fire

–

for years I thought the pain I was eating came to my mouth in a dream

–

argument for there is: were it otherwise,
we’d both be the child of two rotting forms

argument for there is no: a country dog
nodding headcounts
to a family
of sticks

~~~~~

about the birdhouse
dad found
in a church-

I ask
the wrong
storm

–

is your son a mouse

chewing
on a star?

–

our blood
wants to pray
outside

~~~~~

the worst advice that hunger gives is to dream of eating.

let your mail tell you where to live.

let there be
in god’s mouth

a bread crumb dressed as a fingerprint.

the shape of this stone makes me worried for symbols.

~~~~~

sobbing

(a form
of abuse

–

sleep

(god
mid-miracle
dies

–

saltshaker

(the cowbell of grief

–

sobbing

(there is a boy
for every
boy

–

born

(outnumbered

–

window

(they caught the person who was painting our baby blue

~~~~~

smoking over the empty crib, he calls anything that’s crawled on me the lost hand of god. I don’t care if you’re alone. for the skydiver (whose thoughts on crucifixion

~~~~~

if presence

be a nakedness
survived
by nostalgia
and by
homage, then presence

a milk
in memory
of shape

or shape
oh shape

–

would-be astronaut

your head
is too small
(but oh how light

the gun you make
of your hand

–

I am not as alone as I remember

or only
our only

possession

(the belly-dancer’s
muted
radar

~~~~~

I know it happened slowly-

his private
recognition
of every
face.

a leaf in the mouth
of his jesus-on-the-cross.

that aggressive dove.

~~~~~

what is hunger but looking at the shape your mouth didn’t bring? what is the past, the present, the future

but glue stick, puberty, grief

god but the nothing

my hair
does at night

~~~~~

rabbit’s wheelchair

to re
trace

the half
circle
of loss, god

checking
on the length

of her flight

~~~~~

can you tell whose handwriting I use

for fiction
and for non, whose scar

was rubbed
the wrong way

by doll, whose mother

keyed cars
while pregnant

~~~~~

[MATERIALS]

mothers
while jumping
rope
reminisce
on those
crucifixions
not postponed
by thunder

~~~~~

nostalgia no longer has a church

if these are your children, I’ve lost years keeping them away from bugs

like her, I’ve never seen her starvations touch

it’s like waiting for god to donate hair

~~~~~

I hate baseball but enjoy covering my left hand.

headache
oh pearl
of birth

~~~~~

a painting of your whereabouts. the popcorn stoning of your first wheelchair. soft edits. pentagram. spider.

the look of a thing that wants no hands.

~~~~~

eating for the child lost by ghost, you are the second of three people who know god’s middle name. oh how I’ve written to avoid reading. to impress death.

a babysitter’s tattoo. the bird-sleep of ache.

~~~~~

she is cooking with the father of an ex-lover a meal for someone who’s just had surgery. god is there but might as well be listening for thunder. she hopes the dream is not a big deal.

~~~~~

god twisted her ankle on a toy phone while thinking of the child you love least. mother was passing for an underwater attraction based on the inherited imagery of oblivious angels. photo credit had been done to death.

~~~~~

an aversion to sleeping on my stomach. needing to be alone after eating in front of people. my father asking in the library for books on Nagasaki. field trips to indian mounds where bullies would worship my retainer and put mud in my mouth. my permissive mother and her essays on the grief of a social god. not understanding how in some films there were women speaking on what was heard in the distance and how in others just men sitting around to surprise satan. my brother threatening to run away and me showing him how my ghost would look breaking his toys. sticks from a dogless future.

~~~~~

Q: what is a ghost?

A: you have a mom and god finds out

~~~~~

you have to count them quickly

the bite-marks on my son’s arm

–

either you touch a goldfish
or become
a dentist

–

does it matter whose dream
my mouth is

–

make art and make it empty. god has run out of room.

~~~~~

it gave me nightmares, from mating call to church bell, that air conditioner in our third floor window. thematically, the poor are closer to death. my people don’t move. god is where you left him. god where I put.

~~~~~

as you do not struggle to recall the titles of those empty sermons we composed while biking uphill after our sister’s head, I tell you that a baby eats like jesus in a haunted house and that dad was right the lawnmower dies because it knows where in the yard his mom was deep enough to bury doll and I deny that hibernation is real

(is more a ghost started by two wise men dressed as animals

~~~~~

boomerang or pop-gun, grief makes its choice. your father hides his blurry hand might god invent scissors. there is a model of your city and some leftover glue.

~~~~~

eating before surgery, the child is like a dream cut short by a violence that promotes longing

~~~~~

you are not allowed in the barn where underway is a puppet show for which your father dreams. instead of holding your breath, you are catching grasshoppers and keeping them for an amount of time your sick sister would call ridiculous. you are too young to know, but know anyway, that your dentist prefers the rhythm method. I am sorry for the things you know. for our hearing of this riddle mistaken for language and for any mouth openly tricked into being small. space is not lonely but we were wrong to change our poems.

~~~~~

who better to orphan the cyclops than she whose other possession is a neglected baby breathing on its own in the flawlessly managed absence of god

–

too old now for baptismal abandon, my dreams eat the pigs that Dorothy touched

~~~~~

as hunger’s sole worry is that revenge has no one, I do not reply when the boy gets an erection so painful that he says he can see me sleeping in his past. what does your stomach know of mine? to believe in beauty is to let blood do all the work.

~~~~~

it’s midnight and our mail carrier is trying to recall aloud a proverb in a language she doesn’t know. her hound, barefoot and dressmaker, has two names. she wants to smoke but can’t bring herself to imagine god’s forgotten thumb. her tv is on and I watch it as if dreaming was always a sin.

~~~~~

it skips our father like a language the meal she pulls from her tinfoil purse and god he stops at the roof of my mouth and brother short of beheading an egg…

(fluency

our only comet

~~~~~

grief the star of my overlong nostalgia
& owl the mouth I put on god

(in dream the embedded curfew

~~~~~

god is just a patient creature that swallowed a lonely. did you love him? as an infant blowing kisses to a bruise. a mother born to look seen.

~~~~~

as written
the word
why
looks a thing
forgiven
mid-bite, a chicken scratch
left
behind the ear
of a boy
by an angel
erring
on the side
of pink, a puzzle piece
blocking the airway
of a god
with a tail, a worm
suspended
in the grey
afterlife
of a swimmer
once the weigher
of nothing’s
limb

~~~~~

in their hermit’s longhand they write of sobriety the unreadable grief and then subconsciously outbid god on the hamster wheel from grasshopper’s dream

~~~~~

years from the event of my body, we pass in the grocery. I tell your children they are attached to nothing, that my arm cast is made of fingernails, that a bruise has a shadow, and that a mouth is where a mouth goes to die. truth has no attention span. it is not my favorite dream. partly this is so because I can remember how with a grey marker I drew on my belly the easier fruits might the identified heal the recognized. (but the kids are ugly and seem to know

~~~~~

one thing leads to another and they call this the past. I don’t sleep because I don’t love god. son I am a barber in the body of a dentist. son loneliness is just a museum of recent prayer. there are crows I haven’t seen.

that other crows have.

~~~~~

we were allowed to keep any item we could draw perfectly. mothers counted cigarettes and fathers died in threes. no one had a sister but all

her hidden talent. on the hand of god, the scissors I lost…

~~~~~

a genetic forgetfulness
in jumpers
of rope

all the turtles
have been touched

~~~~~

ache as a hairstyle. teeth that pray for frostbitten squirrels. a shadow, a circle, their secret

limp

~~~~~

with my body as a thing that existed from the waist-up, I became to swimming what I’d been to lightning and told my brothers that to dream they had to fall asleep before god touched his food. loneliness left its skinny tree and followed my mother into an outhouse where once her sister had counted smoke-rings and where twice they’d sung for their mouths the one about zero the forgotten letter. my father looked at me and I at my son. time waiting to create the sick.

~~~~~

it’s not a children’s book but does have chameleons looking for their dead. I wrote it might you remember that I’ll watch anything. my brother lifting weights while he says resurrection that lonely mouthful. horror movies to win back my abuser.

~~~~~

[SOFTENINGS]

ghost wouldn’t dream the angel but to see it naked. wouldn’t dream god but to understand. moth
but to disrobe.

~~~~~

to make is to disappear with something at your side. god is still remembering where places are.

~~~~~

I don’t know how sick
to tell you
he is

–

it could
well be
that violins

put the humming

in the wrist
of god

–

sleep is where
one learns
to faint

~~~~~

I know now how one looks after losing a baby

says the maker
of frog. how to get

mouthwash
to an angel

no…

can we imagine
this, can we imagine

for the scarecrow at the chalkboard

(fossils (I ask

because we are naked
not nearly
enough

I ask because so often
it comes
before child

this word
beaten, to put

our shadows
to bed

~~~~~

hunger has no moon

yet
these noises
are made

the children
of chew toys

whole lives

the sound of god

choking
on a dot

~~~~~

I am looking with wolf for the dream that raised it. I mean, not really. but I do miss you.

wolf or no

~~~~~

is there a path
my mouth
didn’t take
does birth
adopt
the poolside
language
of a signature
absence
is god
a swimmer
a talker
are there
hobby coffins
for nesting
dolls
can we

(kiss

~~~~~

on all fours, I am bad with names. a hound

in the path
of god.

I drink from the same bath
to the angel
muscle
of my mother’s
mouse
(as things
underwater

yea high
hallucinate

~~~~~

sound horn
if you bruise
easily, if you’ve seen
a tattoo
artist
with your
half
of awake
pining
on the floor
of a nursing home
for the oceanographer
who trades
nightly
a jack
in the box
for the ghost
of a turtle

~~~~~

the immediate church
of say
pretty,

this snow an over

shadowed
fog, a story

where old
rib-finger,

long struck by lightning

(tries to use
an ashtray

~~~~~

to get its dog back, the angel had to burn a bush. tell me I’m pretty. father fusses over a line-break and mother over the milk we trade for paper. I’m sad, but tell me anyway.