2017, slight edits, from discontinued collection ‘everything I touch remembers being my hand’

TREE
OF NOTHING’S
APPLE

I know a woman whose shadow will never be the same.

We are eating from a bowl that wants to go home.

*

SURGERY, AGE EIGHT

These names, before you were born. Colorblind orphan, yawnless fish. Ghost with calendar.

Look at me
when I’m invisible

*

NOTES FOR INSECT

I will never know a ghost story

god does not

*

DOORBELL, HOUSE OF NOTHING

I cured my son
in another
language

that of a perfect child
born
to draw
a circle-

doorbell, house of nothing

*

MOOD PIECE FOR APPLE

A father remembers making dinner and whistles at the sober. His death nudges a turtle in the direction of some absent creature chewing gently on its tongue beneath a poster of a missing dog. Lightning prays wheelchair and preaches lawnmower. There is a woman here said to live on hair. On whose mouth we survive. Birth thinks only of itself. Not a day goes by in the grocery of touch.

*

SUICIDE
ETIQUETTES

the microscope god avoids by sucking his thumb

–

dream and blood- their unpainted rooms

–

the deer tipped off by mannequins

–

a zookeeper’s empty mom

*

FURTHER ANNOTATIONS FOR
SON

god closes the food truck and waits for his carefully chosen porn to buffer.

even
over this
a star

*

A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR THE SHY

The suicide of a mother’s
swimming

instructor. The browsing

history

of little
ghost.

*

IN THE BORROWED DRESS
OF A MORE
VIVID
SIBLING

oh
voice, my immediate
orphan

*

I DREAM AT AUCTION OF A HELL FOR GHOSTS

and stork
is never
home

*

FORTY
-ONE

alien that I failed

my boys
are lonely

*

CHASMIC

Each drawing I do of my face is uglier than the last. God sends me hands I can’t use and prays for his hair. If I have a daughter, she is returning items to a small mirror. Keep me if I don’t.

*

UNTITLED

I was dead
I thought about death
I died

sleep was the only spotlight my mother could avoid

if you see a wolf, know suicide

has stopped
working

swimming with father, I said jesus is not the best scarecrow
and father said
swim

I still can’t find Ohio in the the bomb-maker’s Ohio

*

DEATH
& PRAYER

i.

to be called forth
from nothing

how perfect

/ no melancholy
is fair
to insect

ii.

would that we could be separated
later
by birth

that we might enjoy
shape

/ the darkness of being remembered