birthplace 1
This handheld pastless giant. Afternot of our unshaped animal. Patience, says the world. Knowledge can’t exist.
birthplace 2
I never got small enough for you to find me.
birthplace 3
The number of those telling me I've been here before is increasing. My son is dying. There is a book about being poor that so many buy. Pain loves hurt. Hurt is alone.
birthplace 4
I let my son drink too much. Ohio doesn't mean anything. I keep wanting to sing, but I can't sing. It touches me.
birthplace 5
A 14 year old jumps from a stopped car and instantly passes out on the wrong side of the road. I can't sleep because I saw three girls putting a shoebox in the ground. Touch only has brothers but it keeps looking. In a book of sex positions we swear we saw one called empty pool with a broken ankle. I don't know why I told you that kid's age.
birthplace 6
I die of touch in the creature that oceans its way out of you
I’m ugly
I’m ugly
On land
there can’t
be art
birthplace 7
In heaven you can touch everything and not know it.
birthplace 8
My nose puts blood on a baseball. A bicycle, halfway through my brother, disappears. Keep moving, says distance. To the lamb in my deadest eye.
birthplace 9
God learns about bones for three days in a treehouse that we pretend is on fire. Violence tells our bodies where we are. I can’t love our children more than once.
birthplace 10
The basement animals are taking too long to name. Brother is throwing packs of cigarettes into a baby pool that sister has recently filled. The hose is dead, still on, clothing an angel. Sister wants her hand to be smaller and promises god every anthill in hell. The animals aren’t many.
birthplace 11
I don’t have any friends. I eat to know that not existing is over. Nakedness is a memory exercise that returns teeth to grief. A hole trying to experience loss is interrupted by gunfire. We say death defect, and laugh. Glossolalia, or I saw in that church bathroom the ghost of the angel that medicated god.
birthplace 12
I am in the bath writing about touch again. I need rest. I need the mother of my rest. I dream in a book my father wrote. I dream in fatigue of light.
birthplace 13
I heard early. Moon, mom, moon. I held my breath because I saw someone holding their breath. I still like everything about it. Some rooms know the boat where self-harm happens. In the image, I’m of age.
birthplace 14
In the image, I’m age. A private blue string pulls me away from the movie’s middle. I’m alone. Hoarders strip in department store bathrooms. My angels are heavy with plastic.
birthplace 15
Survival begins to mean don’t kill god. I am in the summer of my summer body. Nothing I touch actually turns into a spoon but I’m still careful and sad from the waist down. I keep my arms busy in front of people holding babies and fall asleep that way.
birthplace 16
Another position we remember from puberty was something like no one dies on a full stomach. Before puberty, all photos look like illustrations.
birthplace 17
The holes in my stomach share a quiet brain. Instead of getting turned on, boys read pop-up books about Ohio snow. Ache is the distance distance leaves. You want to have a mother. It's blocking your view.
birthplace 18
I'll know two things. Being old, and being too young to remember. Toy death, and killing.
birthplace 19
My classmates are describing their perfect meal. Our teacher’s son has died recently in an odd but peaceful way. Three coats so far smell like cigarettes. Angels undress when I eat.
birthplace 20
Your animals have forgotten what they can eat. God is selling fishhooks online using the screen name of a twin created through repetition. Sleep gets into your son’s hand. Your son plays dead, and touch believes.
birthplace 21
A spacesuit made of grief, sure. I don’t have the details. We lost a couple of our children and all the squirrels. There were screams I didn’t know were screams. A purse full of hands was asked to be a baby. Okay, said the baby. My blood eats awe.
birthplace 22
Pain is death’s middle and only child. Ghost a light by which god reads. I piss teeth and call it discipline. You turn blue painting kittens on the bottom of a lake. Our fathers know each other as angels beaten for being in the wrong dream. Our mothers look alike at the same time.
birthplace 23
Ohio gives you a well-made baby and a dinner menu. Memory stops at a dog made of sticks. My stomach becomes a star.
birthplace 24
Swimmer’s ear. The far bone. God dreams of ants and surgery. I name a wrist but nothing scrapes mother awake. You’ll lose two kids and a garden.
birthplace 25
The violence did not survive the poem. I know you wanted to see god. My stomach didn’t actually become a star. I am not good looking and all this has been to say as much. Also, ghost, also. The angel’s diary is light on imagery. Hurt travels by not moving. Yes, they were nudes, but not until I put them face down. Someone had taken from you the only year you’d die.
birthplace 26
The machine
broke
that was making
blood
Machine went everywhere
Machine was found
in the drinking blood
New kinds of birds
were found in the ocean
Some of us were late
we didn’t
get to die
(Old kinds of birds
in god
birthplace 27
Later I am talking story ideas with my son and he says the ghost and the zombie are the same person. He is angry and sad. Haunted and there’s nothing to eat. I’m not a storyteller. Geography is a cult. The cars here stopped running a few days after our last three dogs died on a movie set nowhere near a houseboat fire. Pretty recently touch is a way for the hand to stop remembering dreams. I tell my son before bed that sleep is the loneliest place. He doesn’t respond but in the story I have him say that we’re here to be godless. When he gets sick on an outside animal he's never seen, I look.
birthplace 28
There is a deepness in me and there is a deepness in my brother. Some places exist only after you reach them twice. We listen to music, and god works on a cure. The slowing angels decide it’s okay to be seen. No one dreams underwater. Here is what to do if I live.
birthplace 29
Sex positions in the order Ohio puts them in:
They find a finger living in my hand. There’s never been a tongue that can de-age touch. God is faster when you’re drunk. I forget my gender, but only for you.
birthplace 30
The car moves through a woozy dog and we get our first nonviolent horse. Inside there are stories about the executioner’s daughter and her famous piggyback rides. I like the rain when it’s raining but am sad when I know simply that it’s rained. You can die from seeing double but not from looking at my father’s paintings of impossible cameras. No one wants to find a baby. God is still learning to faint.
birthplace 31
They close the high-dive and open a rabbit church.
birthplace 32
In ours, Jesus practiced dying so we’d stop writing about it. Buried a starfish and never came back.
birthplace 33
The mirror describes nothing to the perfect fork it prays to. Eating follows me into rooms god cannot. My brother says he knows the active shooter, then passes out a year later in an animal costume. The fork, the fork, the fork.
birthplace 34
It’s hard to love everyone. A star gives its shadow to a bomb. Wait, the creatures, too, need love. Death grew small from being death.
birthplace 35
The poor don’t have a hell. They argue on the earth. There are guns so soft and so heavy that rabbits think rabbits die of silence. Anymore, television tells me what I’m watching. Worship comes before belief. Look, I took the pills. I took them to disappear from my want of attention. The moon’s one dream is about the moon being out.
birthplace 36
Our first album was called Meanancholy. Orbituary was taken. As was Lowhio. I come back here sometimes. To sing to my son, but I don’t. I read to my brothers. His body made a garden. His body found out.
birthplace 37
I drank while drinking. Ohio, too, comes with subtitles. Notifications bell from my bruises. Touch starts the church that touch burns.
*****
FROM THE BOOK OF HIATUS
i.
There are many ways to be afraid.
All of them are the stomach.
ii.
When there are enough people in hell,
there will be a hell.
iii.
Ohio erotica:
A face left between the shoulders of a humanlike deer.
Touch as a death too small for a ghost.
A resurrected toddler who still can’t make a fist.
Mirror
on frostbitten
mirror.
iv.
At night, the sound of a lawnmower.
The black grass
by morning
gone
v.
I worry the piano will hear my baby.
You keep
having hands.
vi.
Two thoughts had by Ohio surgeons:
The crow that warns you of the next, but not of the crow after.
The cow’s head there is for every cow.
vii.
Surgeries provided outside of Ohio:
Cigarette smoke
inside the egg.
viii.
Hunger pains in a soft ambulance, Ohio has a few sounds left. Glacier, private prison, etc. The coughing animal, too, that like any good baby will become a small dog and spare the naked driver. Crawl with touch, touch. My eyes don't believe in the dark and death sees only god.
ix.
Talk about this whale in a way that mentions singing
Not a specific whale
just this whale
There were two of me because I thought I was dying
x.
A son’s hair as a map
eggs
can’t use
xi.
Wasps at night. The heads of my brothers attached to my brothers.
Time gives us god just long enough for it to get away.
Sleep is for the perfectly made.
Our crooked dog leaves our chewed-up place.
xii.
I have three stories about god and one about death. How long until you’re alone? When my shadow wouldn’t open its mouth, light took the teeth of my ghost. Babies were heavier, then. Our cigarettes ate quickly in the dream that our eating couldn’t have. Now there is a spider that can make a spider do nothing. A wasp that’s believed its way into your thumb.
xiii. and xiv.
An ambulance carries itself as the dog of god. Nothing here is to scale. In prison, Ohioans hide bread in the bread. I out-hunger an abducted ghost. I set a bowl of soup in a shadow and wait for a rabbit to turn to stone. We call this road theft that it can’t be taken. I don’t know place. A tooth in my mouth that wasn’t there.
xv.
You’re the saint of how much we miss animals.
There are two
cruelties
left.
Not in the world.
xvi.
Gods take time.
Photos named
Sight’s
late ghost…
And all the babies.
So far they seem
one-sided
xvii.
We didn't think god would make a single thing. And now we're alone.
xviii.
My sleep crawls into hers
She hovers then holds an aerosol mask over the nose and mouth of our smallest
The machine isn’t trying to tell us something
But cries anyway
To its missing stomach
If you google Vici Syndrome
If you google
Bird’s beak
Most of you have been
Already
To your last place
To me the loudest noise has always been geography
Death tells god it wants to die
Not knowing where one is
Was
Heaven and the end of heaven
*****
SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD
Lightning and earthquake feuding in an untouched doom where two angels, birthmark and bitemark, still dream of killing their tattooed sons.
I know this place. Place is a bomb that other bombs find.
~
The tattooed sons are in love. Son bitemark doesn’t have a tongue; birthmark does all the ironing. Their dead child speaks to them through a fishhook that is always hot.
~
Faith is an eating disorder. Mothers faint in threes.
I teach my brothers to suck in their stomachs and a junkyard refrigerator becomes our clock. We smell like a dead child. We smell blank. We search online for images of hands and for the word missingness. Flies made of wind and glass show us to our food.
Our eyes go without.
~
Our invaders had no language. Your mother was suicidal until she told you how moved she was by her own birth. The needle had its moment of recognition. A fetus opened its mouth in a paint can.
Replacement can be a city. But here it’s a form destroyed for being described.
~
So many dead bodies, and no one has died.
City of the predicted present.
The sons count hoofprints left on a whale.
~
Under the moon of a flat earth, they’re putting pills in baseballs. We’ve our choice of police siren. My Ohio horse could be your Ohio deer. We could be resurrected more than once to identify a child’s body. There is a language image does not know. Words sound different in hell.
~
I hate this city and its two sold houses. Every third angel is just a baby eating paper and being healthy for too long. Pain has a doorbell that turns blue when touched and another that turns blue when not. The last time you had sex this caterpillar had a ribcage. I don't always die. Sleep is the ghost of waiting.
~
Image is nothing more than the memory that our destroyers strip to.
I had an animal
that was naked
in dog years.
Bitemark speaks birthmark.
Keep amnesia young.
~
Ask
the dark
the outside
gets nothing
Mad about bread
I broke
my birthmark
There was no bomb
A paper doll was shopping online
for a free
spider’s web
Our perfect blood perfect
bomb
weather
~
Bats lose their teeth over sister bitemark.
Blue
here and there
skips
an apple. The bird
can’t get out
of the lake.
~
A thunderstorm turns on the microwave. We call it fixed and then listen all night to the bird in the broken dryer. We don’t blink for a year after a hand gets caught in a hand. We know it’s been a month since angel was on day two of having a ghost. Beyond that, the neighbor’s baby chooses one television over another. I can’t remember who I want to stop looking like.
~
Birthmark and bitemark go as footprints into the dream of an Ohio bullet-hole. I want sisters but none of them remember being born. Sometimes when I turn off the oven
tooth and pill have the same ghost.
I can’t say who death thinks it is. A swimmer distracted by water.
kingsoftrain 
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