kingsoftrain

interruptions, this new year.  and pauses.  my youngest son was hospitalized with flu and pneumonia, and he is immunocompromised, so plenty of scares to haunt fear.  all are okay.  recovering.  a grandfather died.  not so much an interruption as a finality.  silence, with a semi-colon.  last year will always be the year my grandmother died, and this year will always be the year my grandfather.  they loved each other.  grief plays, at least, leap frog.  have continued to write what I am calling ( diets of the resurrected ), along with some other aches and afternotes.  as such, will be below.  I hope you all have space, or are close to something.

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further, from ( diets of the resurrected )

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two
Ohio
types
of sleep

the bee
that stung
my bee

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Eating is magic.  Hunger a rabbit removed from its environment.  I can make some sense now, I think, of death.  Of a grandmother’s life of cooking and loss.  We wore our frostbitten noses.  Did things with frogs might an infant laugh on the inside where a nothing was still in boxes.  Took from blood

its blue
now.  Which was wrong.

~

Ohio sexuality:

Cain faked her death.

Ghost is that itch the wall can’t reach.

~

pregnancy
dysphoria
has been found
in angels
to spread
like fish

do you remember
in an oyster
the arm
of a squirrel

mom
is a dream
leaving
a pack
of cigarettes
under
an Ohio
pillow

or,

facedown, a photo

of God
with braces…

~

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

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While close, this is not your messiah’s insecticide.  Are you happy with my body?  Sex is the breathing my teeth do for your hair.  Faith a stork in a sea cage.  Food is no expert but grows anyway

brevity.  They say crow after an apple sets a stone on fire.  Lonely people for appropriate play.

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I want for my son a more regular sadness.  Not touch with its vacant déjà vu.  Not the stutter, untapped, of his far beast.  More the fasting of an unknowable fish.  A marionette

gazing
at a toy

car.  Are these hands?  They say so little.

~

Ohio auctions:

The unseen wildlife of the ill.  The handwriting of a moonless toddler.  A whole language saved on an angel’s thumbnail…

~

I can’t tell if I have nothing or if I’m down to three photos of God.

I sleep
to know
that you’re
asleep.

~

I will take for my childhood a mother’s unicycle, a father’s raincloud.

The broken moon of any man on crutches.  A dog drinking water in a white house.

Brothers
who draw me naked.

Bones from her smaller baseball.

~

Sorrow a glove.  Grief a mitten.  I see in fire the small

for a whale
whale
that my son
saw
in a wave.

Ohio gets to keep its hidden season.  Poverty

its sixth
finger.

Childish, but everyone who’s looked out this window has died.  Our family was too close.

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Ohio stories:

I am fondest of recalling my sister when sister in her sleep
could sell drugs to angels.

Men walk away from their fathers one of two ways with our favorite being Stars Reading Snowfall Before and After My Career-Ending Injury.

Our mother was a spider
once
it’s why
she smokes.

~

Their translating of the terrible things we’ve said has created elsewhere animals that don’t need to eat but bite anyway anything that moves.  Neither silence is real

but both belong to God.  My son

my moodkiller
of ruin

in no dream I’ve had

pours gasoline on himself and leads an abandoned bear onto an empty school bus.  Am I pretty this third

time

if my parents are yesterday and grief?

~

Her Ohio of war and sleep:

what if I said
I see
in a land of tire swings
your fishboat father
rubbing perfume
on the knees
of stowaways
would you consider
the cricket
God is trying
to land

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My mother knew she was pregnant when from a darkroom her surgeon emerged holding a piece of chalk.  Before I had hair, I had hair my sister sang to.  Interesting men didn’t make it to earth.

~

Early for foster home karaoke, she announces God as the exit sign over the door of her body and sleep as a museum owned by death.  Because I am lonely with not being there, I call it her best scene.  She doesn’t clap.  A ghost gives birth to a chair.

~

Jumping rope in Ohio:

We burn the house might God see everything we own

Her movie puts them all in one place
the photos
a photo
prays to

When I kiss my son, his ankles glow

Mom I did not succeed

~

As if speaking were a way of taking back what one has yet to say, the people are quiet.  A group of smokers, perhaps, expressing their fear of needles outside of a funeral home.  Who know of no god that can bury a swimmer.  Whose children say birth as bird and are not corrected.  Whose food is a memory of water gone sick.  Whose dogs get passwords from dolls that blink.

~

Moon’s hair on a hospital plate:

oh with the eyes
of a lost basilisk
does god undress
in deprogrammed
rivers
my son’s
deer drunk cow

~

Shaking the  breadcrumbs from his pipe, grandfather goes quiet on pointing out the weak spots of passed over anthills.  His poetry disappears but not before it buries half a baby in the backyard of a surprised mouse.  He is not sure what surprises a mouse.  Nearby, I am only here to chew the distance from the foods my kids won’t eat.  I have with me a change of clothes and a lunch box named God in three toothaches.  The fish aren’t biting, and we say it’s because grief must be getting an x-ray and that it likely looks a ghost praying in the last of its birthday fog.

~

Moods for dying wildlife:

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

~
~
~
~

i.

a circus worker
smokes
as one
who dreams
of being brainwashed
in Eden

the details
need some space

every bee sting
has a ghost

ii.

wash oh please
my forehead
with a mother’s
handprint, be

as sweet
as my brothers
fawning
over the belly
of the lover
who’s by now
removed
their matching
imaginary
tattoos, score

the earlobe
of a nail-biting
infant,

die.

the angel in the mirror
is not alone
all the time

~

keep a look out for Dylan Krieger’s book, Metamortuary.  I had a chance to reflect on an advanced copy, and it it is emptying and restoring and riotous and detached and possessed.  also, The Mothercake Cycle by Kolby Harvey is just a standalone thing that cancels beast.  I hope the holidays don’t mean too much to any of you.  and I hope they pass as some vivid calm.  I am somehow sorry for speaking so much and also for not saying more.  is capitalization a thing?  this brings me to how I am glad that my children introduced me to Juice WRLD.  there is a new vanishing in these soundcloud musicians that make the blips of our notified lives seem starred and starry.

here are some small things from (diets of the resurrected):

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Whose death got you into heaven?  The baby is older now but has the kissing wrists of a failed skier.  Your children don’t love you because they will.

~

Ohio postscripts:

Shy, I could not collapse in front of mothers who were born on the moon.  As for the children, they’ll die for baby.  For any last fact that others exist.

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Dream supply:

A pile of white leaves in the corner of my father’s mind.

Wind and skin, or the angel’s
forgotten
spells.

No longer a fire hazard
the wagon’s
grey hair…

The suicide of God’s first.

~

Not much happens before you can say Ohio.  Still, we keep quiet.  Depression breaks a mother’s toes and we listen, in a stickless field, to what we hear.

It continues.  The misgendering of past selves.

~

My son writes to me about the piece of glass they can’t find in his ear.  He says it is like a dream.  That he can describe its shape between the hours of this and that a.m., and its size to a newborn making a grocery list.  He says they have people who look like him, which helps.  Like her, which doesn’t.  My writing isn’t even close.  Aponia, I write, and also, ballet.  Everything in the cold is cold.

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