from ‘rocks have the softest shadows’ (self published Dec 2020)

DIETS OF THE RESURRECTED

This rabbit hole we use for the shadow’s mouth. These squirrels bowing in the priesthood of sleep. Do we have briefly what we want? Each of us a bad hand that drops a baseball? Is fasting a weight class?  

A tadpole is Ohio’s nightlight. Babies, when touched, belong to the same alarm clock. 

~

I think of my mother in her block of ice summoning a curling iron and of my father sending a robot to prison. Of a leafblower named mercy hugged by my brother for outing my sister’s electric chair. Of nakedness, poor nakedness, always playing itself in the story of had we not been invented we would’ve had to exist. Of how daughter she highlights an entry on hair loss in the cannibal’s diary. Of how one holds the owl and one pours the paint and how both, knowing how to dream, choose this 

and how they are both a boy in a bottomless mirror asking if death is still known for its one mistake.  

~

Poverty created the moon as a place for loss to process God.  

It helps to have no one.  

~

Ohio alibis:

Two sisters learn from the same angel how to use an insect bite as a fingerprint

~

Ohio solastalgia:

In hell I am passing a cemetery when during a housefire she makes a memorial to the last time you won a staring contest 

~

Moods for dying wildlife:

Missing pacifier spotted in fishbowl. Barbershops on fire in the childhood of your puking shadow. Abusers who rename their dogs.

~

How we end up in Ohio is

I saw in hell a star

that in heaven
I did not


CORRECT ACHE

an angel leaves heaven to touch paper as a circle from my childhood rolls toward an empty jack-in-the-box. I am old enough to be sad and too old to separate deer facts from church facts. my children fall asleep before their hands fall asleep.


ELDER ACHE

show me
the fireflies
of yours
that get
sad
around human
stomachs

(there is
a table

rain
will set


BURNINGS

Tattoo

the spider in my left eye
is also
on the kitchen
floor
of a house

that’s gone


Frogsong

depression
decorates
a bird


Miscarry

perhaps a deer
had stepped
on my wrist


MATERIALS

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


FILM ACHE

at a certain height, nudity loses meaning  

-

if bunk beds collapse in a museum made for emptiness, does Ohio 

roll 
from a crystal 
ball 

-

no hawk
is a wasp, but every 

wasp…

-

I remember also when you called a tattoo

postage
for the afterlife

-

I see a tornado
and my teeth
turn yellow


THE CRUCIFIXION

I’m in water up to my chin. No one looks at my body.

~~~~~

rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages
poems, Dec 2020
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