kingsoftrain

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

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 sexuality:

Cain faked her death.

Ghost is that itch the wall can’t reach.

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.

two
Ohio
types
of sleep

the bee
that stung
my bee

And what would you have me say? That I feel it was given to another, the meaning of my hidden life? We name people every day. Our yearning, overlong. Our mother’s mothering of poets and of the creatures they can’t use. This priest with an ant farm. Eating’s moral theft.

Ohio we:

save pills as a god might
the eggs
of a ghost

The boy, before going to bed, has me kiss every toy in his room. If one is not there, it is missing, and its absence is more vaccinated god than bad child or raccoon’s eye. More mother than sister on wrist number three.