kingsoftrain

The boy balances a basketball on his head outside his father’s bar. His mother is somewhere a girl on a trampoline who sings to a white pup named Fossil. The baby he keeps seeing hasn’t done much beyond biting an arm and eating a crayon. His abandoned sister is giving birth so calmly she is not blown away by the fact that it’s only her second time wearing the blindfold her angels wear to fish. His brother is in therapy to process the loss of others who think we’re gods when we smoke. I joined the boy once to look at an empty crib. He drank tea from eggshells and I declined. Nothing goes missing, he said, when your hair is a nightgown. I swatted him to let him know I was dying, then swatted him again to let him know I would live. The tea was gone. The rest is sadness.

at the longest
party
thrown
for god, does water

dream it’s found

the spot
where ghost
went in

I worry that God is not nostalgic.

–

I forget
near bathwater

my son’s
body.

–

Name a movie missed by a ghost.

there is no earlier dream
no slipping
from the past

of every beast we haven’t eaten

–

god has two sticks
dog
and echo

–

all snow was born in a cigarette

I can tell by my arm that I am not always there when they burn my cigarette.

–

Abortion. Tire Swing.

I don’t know all seven stages of staying warm in Ohio.

–

Loneliness changes often the name of its creator.

Ohio handcuffs:

two poor people
trading facts
about circles

perhaps you know
it already
that when jesus
got to heaven
he was still
part human

to preserve
our obsession
with longing

this mark
death makes
on god

I no longer sleep on my right side because it feels as if I’m too far from the earth that stopped my heart.

–

God
will do it

but you’ve got to give him a bone from the body of an angel.

–

I pretend to be sick because I believe that I am.