communions, consumptions, entries thru 4/8/25

COMMUNIONS (entries 1-10)

We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain. 

~

Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.    

~

The hurt horse beats to the lake a delirious deer. Leave the deer out. Let it change color. Let the horse fill with mud so that when its neck breaks the neck of mud also breaks. Raise a frog an arthritic god. Scarecrow, crucifix, body bag. I laugh in church and in the motherless church of war. Brevity’s longest male. Meal. Male.

~

I can count on my teeth the number of your teeth gone soft in the knees of boys. There’s nothing you could’ve done to make me beautiful. The ghost of body image believes in one ghost. We’re all too young but see anyway the unfinished angel blowing on the stomach of christ. Mother from her father wants only the pea behind his eye. Distance is clickbait for god.

~

Teach the baby to suck in its stomach. Go bitemark bald to the burning of tire swings. Pretend you can be nostalgic in America. Do this by having at all times handfuls of woozy spiders that prevent you from making guns of your hands. Do this by drinking. I wasn’t worried but then my phone started working in a dream. In heaven, every mirror is an exit wound.  

~

I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.

~

I count the same money and think of my body. I send to a stranger a TikTok of a man crushing dried insects with a red rolling pin. I don’t watch anything anymore that requires sound. The last scream I heard was god’s and I named it god. The stranger messages me twice that they recognize the man. A lonely world, but for kids.

~

A ghost sets itself on fire with a cigarette once lit to mark the end of emptiness. No one cares about my body. Touch still doesn’t know that skin is the god of touch. I hide my daughter’s mouth in mine and wait for the angel of those on suicide watch to notice my teeth. The ghost is so still it’s looking at hell.      

~

( or maybe I hide my daughter in a ghost and these are the ghost years lost to the god of fast food whose son is a hunger pain whose son is a hunger whose son’s childishly staged crucifixion shocked time into a fomo that found eating to be a bone from an extra past where I practice chewing upside down get pregnant for no one

~

I am not going to tell you the name of the movie but 1983 I thought my mom was asleep and she thought I and our closeness got near enough to be seen watching the wrong murder put a lookalike in the right life anyway the past like your body is always new and before the eclipse I pressed a bottlecap into your thigh 

you will never 
know
what this
is about
but sing
fuck all
to your double

What if I am close to knowing
why
I have brothers

Life is the line drawn between death and death

Once I’ve seen your body I look at your body

~~~

CONSUMPTIONS (entries 1-7)

God died doing math in a nightmare. Not everyone was able to hide the body. Men without mothers bit themselves thinking it would lead to nakedness. Angels did the same but thought nothing. Fire chased an empty bus past the cemetery of the three things I couldn’t name. Into a small life of startled handguns, people in photos were born. Gameshows, I said plainly, above a hole the ground touches for being hungry.

~

God’s stomach is a cigarette trying to eat on the moon. I am asleep in my homage to sleep. In hell you have to give birth to everyone you’ve killed. You can’t have your kids.

~

I dream in longhand. Watch slasher movies to control death. No I will not be doing anything for my mental health. God was the first weapon meant to heal time. We don’t all live here. Blood reads but not with all this blood. Be last, be small. Hide your stomach from emptiness. Check your children for bones. Hairdryer for pills.

~

I wanted to smoke and look at water. I turned left at a tipped over gas can and walked until I heard fireworks. A small tv was showing god the hole it needed help making. A dryer with a baby in it was won by two mothers. They tried to scream. I made a sound and the sound stayed that way for good. I recognized my kids for years.  

~

Mother with her paintbrush and me with my fever. There are no miracles. There are no miracles because of what miracle does to memory. When I fall on the ice, ache takes one of my hands as a shortcut. Never reach god.    

~

Shape is the shape I must become to receive the world. There is no bomb called grief. No bomb child. The bells were rung I held my son. You can love your brothers forever. Thunder misgenders echo no more than once. Oh no Ohio forgiveness forgave forgiveness. What if you can’t stop writing this poem. My mother and father have the same password. Sometimes when I’m touching you I’m not. Touch tombstone for the mourning cosmos. 

~

The turtle dreams of strangulation in a green emptiness

A star is the graverobber of god

I texted the writers not all of them

Writing is sometimes being drunk while putting a mouse back together in a mountain

We can kiss here
is an eyepatch
for your moon
tattoo

I don’t know why anyone would want to see anything

What if his son
stayed put