kingsoftrain

to have
a past
I cut short
my listening
to the oral
history
of going
hungry
and let
touch
forget
its childhood
of gold
then watched
as my mother
pretended
to recognize
an animal
that would lose
an ear
but weigh
the same

I like to think of my grandmother as always on her way to an obstacle course for invisible children

(as combing her hair in a spiderless wind

after slamming my fingers in a car door, the hand looks for days as if god has tried to pry a nail from a piece of bread. people kiss me and I tell them my footprints can’t breathe. when a bug hits the windshield, my blood gets a star.

I write to missing things of knowing what took them. given the chance, what could god describe? I don’t know if what I hear is a sound or sound’s hostage, but it’s enough to make light remember losing a child and with it a boy and with him the fourth wolf he killed in his sleep. we don’t come from love, but we love.

patient me above a footprint with my spoon and my fork and then old jawing at nothing us as food misses our mouths in the after of an almost deer and then for a very long time an emptiness a kneeling a here and there balloon and now it’s just this falling asleep on trains that are also asleep that are manned by ghosters of the misgendered who misgender you me what knows what their sleep is sleeping with and I guess it’s possible to be alone if possibility goes years maybe without experimenting on nostalgia and now it comes to you how it didn’t seem to me to be a turtle until we saw it eaten by a shark and then I needed a name to give to its friends its turtle friends all dead in a kind of before