(the unicorn entries from upcoming collection

UNICORN DEBT

A mournfully urgent child in the darkroom of our undeveloped nakedness

In one word
Describe time


UNICORN FEAST

Asterisk to the spider’s eager pageant, Jesus waits at three doors for his father to get out of surgery. Cops put in handcuffs an unshocked boy and lead him to a room made of rooms. Ask for the mother of anyone. Ask the cops for our love back. Our love of how they are captured dying on an earth of runaways. I drank in the dream then drank in the dream I was having. At least cursive looks like eating. Cough, wrist. Angel, burn your way through the keyboard of touch. I did no singing in this world. 


UNICORN CODE

God makes a tiny phone then waits for it to die and we never hear from god again

If there is in my poem white space then I wasn’t drinking

My mother’s sadness is distracting to photos

Surgery means I am the only one who can position my son’s body not you not the fatherhand of god’s anti-touch

I was writing toward The Rose by Ariana Reines when the grief lightning of an unfound vein went bluely afield

They’re back, the bombed, their thenlife


UNICORN CURE

The cigarettes are gone I wrote with

I speak to a small ghost

I lose three teeth
freeze them
in a mirror

X-ray machines from heaven outnumber drones that move the holy spirit

We leave something on my son’s wheelchair and it messes up his weight for months

For 
moths

I don’t do much for my son
I lift my son and an angel matches footprints in hell

I break in a dream my arm for speaking
to a small
ghost

There are jobs you can do
Father jobs and mother
jobs
Your belly

has to be
from here


UNICORN GRIEF 

Given my soft bones and trash esophagus I thought I could write one first thing about beautiful deer. Ohio said no. Ohio said revelation is something time passes on its way to angels watching zombie movies that boast antichrist cameos. I was reaching for an icicle. Cold was a ruin my young birth couldn’t still. Obsession is so ineffective. Ask Joseph. If nothing happens to me, I want everyone to know I was suicidal. My rabbit hole plagiarizes the shape of yours. Rabbit abyss. Rabbit void. I just want to be naked in between your Adam and mine. Oh empty stomach on which I slide moonless from the eel of a lover’s hunger. Oh touch. Insomnia is the last stage of puberty. This display is called skinning the god in front of a star. I was reaching for an icicle in that last place that came with a dog. Wilderness, farm, fag. Slurs a way to keep horses from eating too much. Oh intimacy, distant frostbite. I was reaching for an icicle when southward the orange dog Jake gifted the gone inheritance of visibility to the blaze my eyes made of exodus. Dying has its moment in the museum of itself. 


UNICORN ADDICTION POLICE

Death can keep a secret for as long as you drink. If I’m running with my brothers, it’s a dream. Of course I want to feel better. I have a mother and a father. Angels eat babies looking for the astronaut’s fingernail. My singing voice in a church of blood forges a prescription for Ohio’s glass hunger. The empty bathtub passes out. 


UNICORN CONSPIRACIES

The mirror has family
Look, we are
in the garden
of brevity

(by very little, separated

)

No forgiven intimacy creates a star fast enough to keep memory in the kissed forehead of a burning child

Ohio deer
practice
freezing

Right, left
I hear my wife saying
to my son’s
wrist
in a dream, The last

church to hear of god’s death
sends an angel
to the first


UNICORN ISOLATION

Loneliness is the fast food of paradise. I’ve eaten snow to prove I have a car to policemen who piss themselves in church. In every iteration of my longing for immediacy, my son dies. Or is cared for by an eternal stranger. Water is made of the mourning that knows it can’t take bread anywhere. The day the writers left me in Ohio I was mid sentence mid sick son mid cigarette ( star 

to a ghost

) The blue remote oh hidden in the watching of its angel’s waist-high mirror)

There are two ways to be invisible to god. 
Learn the second.


UNICORN 

A church a church can be in. A star your father hasn’t made it to. For my children who are not dying, I also have love. Singing is a skin that time uses to deepen god’s attendance to the toothache of a snake. Cry for your mother without it sounding like language.


UNICORN MACHINE

Dog won’t eat. Angel grows in a tree an arm you’d die to see. Goes death to sing to its one perfect ear. A spider dreams god from the mirror. Deliver my butcher’s baby. 


UNICORN HUMILIATIONS

I had not become frostbitten in the correct way. The invisible were there to draw blanks on the legality of touch. Eden was to be a rehab for gods. Adam hallucinated that snake and Eve was just being nice. Suicide is the only dying that can change the past.


UNICORN FANDOM

A deer eats three cigarettes and god has to deal with that erection.

This poem will mention god because I caught fish with people who are dead now.

I am naked in front of pictures that tell me boredom has many rooms.
My mother and my father are singing in a church that can’t sing.

I like to think of Jesus asleep on a crucifix in a missing wasp nest.
I like to think that because it puts that dude to sleep.

Circles from a childhood gun on my toy forehead…

You can’t drink on the moon.


UNICORN MOM DAD

Jesus wakes up with a stomachache and all his guy friends laugh. Birth has three dreams about a door. I was so small as an infant I had to wear doll clothes. The size of your child changes bombs.


UNICORN EXIT

I can’t think I’ll know you from seeing you in a room. My eyes eat their own longing. Touch has starved every spider my hand’s become. Cain, Abel, cannibal. Ohio I tilt the blood balloon of my hearing over a swooning raccoon. Hop into my brother. Not when I’m dying.  


UNICORN EXORCISM

An arsonist’s muted lightning. A crow without warning. An egg full of paint. All of my obsessions in one silent place. Spell mother: The mirror predicts my double’s future. The kids die differently.


AI COLLECTION OF YOUR UNICORN POEMS

He cried forever. And I was sad.


UNICORN SURVEILLANCE

after reading Meg McGuinness

We set a thing on fire and told it to find home using only small parking lots. The brightest moment our bodies starred was our mother as a boy finding a hole unresponsive. To keep god alone, we began wearing creatures that were still alive. Could we cry quietly enough? No, but we tried. Rabbits came but not from all over. I don't believe in holy places. The kid we kill has already passed away. There are moving pieces due a static inheritance and/or you hate my teeth. Here is intimacy: Unicorn speaks only angel and angel only unicorn. My sickest son will be yanked from my arms by bent men who can't hold him. The mirror looks at my body because it can't. Sister, see, the alarm my ghost sets for me. Death ran through all its sleep in seven days.


UNICORN ATROCITIES

this
your one
past
life


UNICORN OHIO

Televised CPR.
Abortion dolls.
Hitting
for Jesus
your head
on a wasp. Angel 
suicides
in alien's 
heaven
or you could

hear nothing.


UNICORN BASICS

By the time god dies, she's still alive.

Angels
give their memory
to buzzards. The longing

in my son's head
is all of it


UNICORN HELLSCAPE

If on a tooth
you break
a tooth
god 
will correct
the overbite
your child
died with, Made it

to the moon
my mother's 
silence, Emptiness

longed
long enough
to lure
a caterpillar

into swallowing
its own
exodus, Jesus

smuggled shrapnel
into heaven, I'm ugly

here, too


UNICORN PALM READER FIRE SALE

Not a bigger problem than this trembling god, but snow is the afterlife of color. Is your time gonna be here when you’re gone? I want the whales back but don’t want to include a single whale. Take me to your follower. I pitch sadness to sorrow but never hear. I cut myself in the dark to see if the creation of the weapon I didn’t vote for still makes other children smell like smoke. Don’t love them too much or you’ll pray them to life. Sleep comes to me twice during the same haircut because my barber doesn’t drink but she does say under her sister’s breath the distracted angel of our father’s search history sucks on the rib of a suicidal cartoonist. Here is how I know I cannot write: It’s not me sobbing but it’s also not me playing the piano. I unsee a cricket turn to salt but fail to quiet the echo that eats it. I’ll never forget having a mother.   


UNICORN CESSATION

Drinking gives me time to drink. 

I miss my son, he's here, I practice.


UNICORN EXIT

long 
as you can
stay sick
on the earth

stop
the babies
the weapons
are young


UNICORN GHOST

In rabbit astronomy, a hole touches a hole. I want you to imagine the loneliness of being a thing that others its own cure. Death loves the disabled. I am still hurt by the art you don't like. My brothers have started running. Dearest brothers I was hit at a different clip by those who would say a prayer over weapons buried in the garden. I don't think anyone should receive an award for writing prose. School shootings, that's why. Also psalms. Also haiku. Also the age nostalgia reaches in America and the age it doesn't in Israel. Death loves the disabled. Did I say that already? God sure misses being notified of the yearning we've created.  


UNICORN ACCEPTANCE

Once you eat the eye of god
the eating
and the eye

last forever. Existence

has no mechanism
to recognize
death. We need

animals. Holy

grief sale
we need

animals. 

Image mourns too early 
the mirage
that haunts
sobriety. This drone

that drone 

There was room
at the inn


UNICORN WEAPON TESTING

Creation became small enough to hold us. I won’t be putting my feet on the earth and that’s gonna have to be ok. I have been told more than once about my sentences. My deep-in-thought newborns. About the rape fantasy cut-off I’d have made had I not in second grade pissed on that mat in music class. God having to hear god, imagine. I wanted to kill myself and tell someone. Language started with a deer. In the deer that heard it. Snow remembers being snow, but you have to be there. The internet stops to pray in a prayer.


UNICORN PARENTS

A ventriloquist falls silent in a film that shows hell. There are places in heaven that are too close to god.



UNICORN MAP 

They gave my insides to the animal that had smelled me in heaven. They are trying to grow the loneliest woman.



UNICORN DEATH SPIRAL

On the jesus
of our headache
That mouth


UNICORN IMAGERY

There’s nothing to do
in this unicorn


UNICORN FOOTNOTE

Moms don’t die this way.
The poem is easy to read.


UNICORN YESTERDAY

A movie I had muted was playing and my son coughed and coughed

I am tired of my own love

When I am sad in a poem about my parents
I mention
an animal

Before my kids
I died
from seeing
them die

The cricket of my loneliness is the ghost of an ant

Time
ran into god


UNICORN BELONGINGS 

I walk into three churches with the same bomb. When I am shown the video, my dog starts to choke. My dog the same dog that once ate all the snow in our neighbor’s yard. My sons got death threats that my daughter did not. No one dies from loneliness. Ask them. I was invented like you by the person who saw me invented. Sickness is heaven’s shy witness. In the gods that I learn about, I am very sad. My father’s hand lives on darkness and on the two stones it threw. I wasn’t my father for so long. I was dying but I was not my aunt. Faster, nakedness. Teeth tell my bones the time.


UNICORN ACCESS

My son dies and my card gets charged three times. I am stunned by no single thing. When I read I read so little under the star of my drinking that touch becomes the lost ambassador of a body I can draw from memory. I can’t imagine my brothers being loved. I can’t imagine my brothers being loved on the same day. I hate how I sit in chairs in my dad’s house. My mom says I write to hurt. My son’s stomach is a shape he forgets devouring. In the angel’s ear, plastic is the voice of god.