I wrote, just there, of a mother whose hair was a ghost fighting a ghost for her head. How easy, to lose a poem. A ghost, a head, a ghost. A boneless brother in a shrinking bathtub. How easy to leave out the wind, because it’s only the wind. With its one memory and then its one.
It’s hard not to want
the premeditated
yesterday
of it all
The brief health of your son’s
dream-seen mouse
The toy’s
eye
pinned
to its memory
of being
removed
Every cigarette
god’s
little suitcase
The finished half of a field
broken bottle
by
~~~~~
OCCASION I
I am on the train that will take me to my brother and he is on the train that will bring him to me. He has only just seen the great bird I’ve envisioned since birth. I make myself in his image and use his inside voice to describe the bird. My train arrives early. Once off, I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it. I pace. A woman asks me if I have a light and I say sharply no. I apologize to the woman and explain how nervous I am to meet my brother this way. She says she understands. She says she’ll probably see god before she sees her sister. I offer her my cigarette and she takes it with her. My bird is getting smaller and I don’t know who to blame.
~~~~~
OCCASION II
To rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel. To let the water from a mother’s body but not before telling her that god lives in me so long as my son is outside. To have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to. To die listening for the never arriving marble of grief and to drown while pulling imagery from those years spent on land openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.
~~~~~
ANNIHILATIVES
I.
as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue
dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine
go on, birth
take silence
from a baby
II.
dream: a contortionist on a stretcher
bulimics
at a tortoise
crossing
III.
you drive a clown car into a crowd
it is how you mourn
the accidental burning
of a doll’s
body-sock
and this I understand
as a city
kind of thing
as a way to eat
darkness
among friends
darkness
from a stomach
a way to lose
blood’s password
yourself
in bread
IV.
the present happens at different times. fetus, comma, tadpole. surgery, please tell this mask
my face went down on nothingness.
V.
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream: a mummy obsessed with what doves eat
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream: sock puppets on oxygen
VI.
the brainwashed and the blindfolded will then switch children
and you will spend a year
a year
at least
throwing a slipper
at a farm machine
dream: grief a mile
grave
an inch…
you won’t eat much
and your eyesight
will trade its crow
for a bar of soap
your father will fake his death
to distract
room service
from his country
roots
and an insect
inside a stick
will die
and the stick
will live
VII.
the first murdered woman was not killed by her sister.
stop me
if you’ve
not heard
VIII.
this dream again where no one likes me
the overeater I sleep for
~~~~~
~~~~~
DRIFT MUSICS
You won’t
drink it
but ask
anyway
for a glass
of milk.
Vigil.
That bone you broke
while swimming.
~~~~~
ENTRIES FOR ORIGIN
my roommate’s father lives with a puking man I call future in a skipped year rewatching a tv show about what poor people film
~~~~~
MEDITATION
Summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine. Say it with me this was not that summer. As a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.
~~~~~
DOCTRINES
Dropped on its head for saying footprint, the baby begins its work of collecting only those sounds it can scare. Its father mothers otherness as one who watches a film to make the world worse. Its brother hunchback and sister backstroke are viewed as two stomachs waiting for hunger to dry. Because my mouth is empty, I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path. For one, I have never been completely covered in bruises. Also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge. Instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.
~~~~~
I’m happy that this is all there is, even if it’s not.
Forgetting is the sooner life.
The bomb is never here long enough to know it’s found us. Son in bird years you’d be dead. A stomach holds on to its hand-shaped sleep.
some recent reflections at isacoustic.com:
~~~~~
through a small ghost
poems, Chelsea Dingman
The University of Georgia Press, 2020
Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you’ve entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from and made by, achieving not only something to be seen, but also something protected from watching. And in this protection are many spiritually assertive mercies, elegant and ruinous, gifts from reversal of which the most healing might be that when a thing goes, loss doesn’t always get there first.
~~~~~
Toxicon And Arachne
poems, Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2020
Of course, being a weak writer, I want to say rare. I want to say rare in as few words as possible in the direction of Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon And Arachne. Somewhere two toothaches are perhaps reunited. Somewhere one is unpinned from the world while feeling in the dark for a donkey born without a tail. I also want to say playful, but no. Sadness loses all its money to sorrow and there is a jovial genius to the trauma of wordplay. I think what McSweeney does is done with what I’ll call, in my lack, the endangered available. Mouth of a gift hearse. Erasure’s only prediction. From such given, McSweeney recreates addendum without precedent. Think of what one hasn’t read, that is being written, and how briefly it will exist unwitnessed. And how fast the work of de-witness. And how suddenly we’re having the dream that just recently we lied about having. I love this work for its slowness, for the uninfluenced offhand of its disruptive healing. Here is a line from McSweeney’s poem PT Cruiser: ‘That’s like, harmonic. Monstrous.’ I am injected, I guess, to vaccinate the new you. Loss has two syllables: loss, comma, loss. The verse of Toxicon and Arachne lives in the present and in the present it took.
~~~~~
Ribald
essays – Alina Stefanescu
INCH, issue 44
Bull City Press (2020)
The writer Alina Stefanescu is a student of curious worry, loyal to irreverence and a giver of passage and path. These essays, on sight, put one in the middle of understanding, where one knows perhaps how to read, but not yet how to re-read. As a child, I heard of a child who stopped playing hide-and-seek because they would forget to hide. I heard this from a child distracted by god. None of this is true, but it could be. Ribald is a work that continues to begin, that opens the body might it out what’s been baked into, that offers the unexpected as a cure to prophecy, that misplaces to protect.
~~~~~
a trapdoor meant for a circle, a body
from a puzzled
lake, god
falling ill
in a dream, back
to back
cures
for skin
To heal her brother, she asks me to brush her hair. She jokes that when I’m done she’ll not only show me the scab but also remove it so I can see where her batteries went. I tell her the fish are biting and that my father is wanted. Touch leaves me alone and it must look often as if I am trying to get a pair of scissors to eat snow. For every angel sick of heaven, there’s a shadow passed out in a dream.
kingsoftrain 