(country (entries thru 5/19/22

country 1

Death is the only absence that absence honors.

Not seeing creatures 
up close
is home

.

country 2

No one prayed here
nor left
here to pray.

Hurry, math. 
The small gods

they lower
the footprint

.

country 3

Blue from making thin air,

we could almost
see
the snowball

in your mother's
stomach

.

country 4

A tooth taken by a tooth. 

The night 
on one 
knee. 

A child as friendless as a wrist

.

country 5

A bunch of insomniacs are making short films about nosebleeds. To them I am sometimes a sound effect. Handstand or handsand, I am too young to be watched. I don't have wrists and I can't take the bath your body took. Kiss loss. Kiss loss where

.

country 6

Lightning as it thirsts for a stray glacier's rib.

The unsought 
quiet 
of a surgeon's 
body.

Things
after they happen

in the sun of my disgrief

.

country 7

Two mirrors praying over the glass in our food. Death continuing to believe I know where god is. The pill that remembers your one thought. The choir of alas

.

country 8

I made a list, once, of all the weapons I wanted you to try and then, while barefoot, I was told that god would never walk and that my birthmark was a hole I'd never see. 

Here are two poems about nostalgia:

regret regrets not using its alias

this is the wrong 
tadpole's 
past

.

country 9

Two poems about his gun:

You can like your body but only if we can see it all at once. Sleep

is the new
sleep

.

country 10

100 poems about time travel:

The child young enough to be on my hip is waving to the nobody in the microwave. The dead have a past. But it's empty

.

country 11

We argue agonology in the exploded ghostgrief of god.

Repair is winter's last machine

.

country 12

We throw seashells into a cornfield.

There are children
we want back

.

country 13

A glove passed from baby to baby 

or a light switch 
left 
for nearby 
angels.

A hand in the middle
of being a hand

.

country 14

An orange baseball gives up in a white field.

Birth and death
no longer
miss each other.

A broken branch from my dog's sleep
is a big deal

and the saddest thing

.

country 15

We put the baby in the house and went outside. I wish I could be more specific. The baby was alone. It wasn't a house you could see from another baby. From the road

I mean

.

country 16

Again the hands know which is newer. A flame yawns your hairbrush still. The toothache on the top of my head wants its own toothache. For hours the child

Soft, like an exit

.