night, you (miracles, forgeries, edits 2012 etc)

Dad is trying to load bullets into a flashlight. His tv show is having trouble sleeping. Sister opens the oven for a doll she thought would be taller. We like you but not when you’re lonely. The first groundhog calls to us horribly as if it knows there will soon be a woman who swallows a cigarette to see a broom catch fire. That my mother can sleep, a pea goes dark in the eye of a deer. I think of my son and how it’s not every child gets its sickness from god. I jump rope might I later move into the land of plague my acre of miracle and find for snowfall the farm machine that once cleared lambs from the formlessness of habit. There was a day I followed a sheep. There had been a party at a house next to other houses. I had been there. Probably, the sheep wasn’t real. I sent a big-wheel down one driveway and it crossed and went up another. It made like it was going to roll back, but didn’t. I kept my eye on the sheep, yard to yard. It seemed no one anywhere had ever been home. I borrowed a red ball, kicked it under a car and it stayed. I was surprised at how much this disappointed me. Some doors were open and the sheep would go in the front and out the back. In one of the houses, a piano was briefly played. The sheep came out and the playing stopped. I did not go into any of the houses. Either I would chin handles of lawnmowers or sit on the edges of dry pools and put my feet in without taking off my shoes. At one point I pretended to be on the phone and the sheep let some grass fall from its mouth. My stomach purred. A moving van idled. For my hunger, the sheep made good time. I watched it from the empty cab of the van. I turned on the heat. Those poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz, that castle. I wondered how many of the houses I’d passed had porn in them. I can tell you today they all did.