as hunger’s sole worry is that revenge has no one, I do not reply when the boy gets an erection so painful that he says he can see me sleeping in his past. what does your stomach know of mine? to believe in beauty is to let blood do all the work.
who better to orphan the cyclops than she whose other possession is a neglected baby breathing on its own in the flawlessly managed absence of god
–
too old now for baptismal abandon, my dreams eat the pigs that Dorothy touched
you are not allowed in the barn where underway is a puppet show for which your father dreams. instead of holding your breath, you are catching grasshoppers and keeping them for an amount of time your sick sister would call ridiculous. you are too young to know, but know anyway, that your dentist prefers the rhythm method. I am sorry for the things you know. for our hearing of this riddle mistaken for language and for any mouth openly tricked into being small. space is not lonely but we were wrong to change our poems.
eating before surgery, the child is like a dream cut short by a violence that promotes longing
–
mother & father if you want to help there are two images left
–
memory has all the time in the world. three babies are carried from church for crying, or one baby for crying thrice. I orbit the idea of an animal not thinking of itself. my transparent sister wants to be a surgeon. if you remember, brother made for the groom a bible so light it could be held by a cobweb. and then it was.
–
you will have to trust that my parents entered the world after a long absence and that they brought with them no appetite large enough to entertain a child whose sole skill was to avoid being eaten.
–
I am watching my younger brother roll his ankle wearing high heels. a boy with a stick is a boy with a wand. kids die in their sleep because they are boring. because they dream of things that can really happen.
–
I smoke a joint in a barn and worry I will see a barn owl that will crush my barn owl dreams.
–
I wake up behind the wheel of a car just in time to kiss the driver’s neck and the driver makes a fish face so horribly that a child giggles in hell and there is no place where nothing should be
–
a woman with a spotted neck asks me for a drag as if I’m hoarding flashbacks. is my son still sick? would amnesia know it’s outnumbered? in country, I knelt openly. the daughter of a spineless mother was delivered without incident but in high school began to smell like gunpowder. an ant carried an ant from the shadow of a mushroom like luggage.
–
touch your father
see if your mother
comes back
–
death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. rename fish for the winners of midwestern game shows. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.
–
the doll’s feet stick out from under a hotel bed marooned in the ceiling’s mirror. across town, a silent alarm is pressed by the anonymous smoker of wedding cigarettes.
siblings form a circle around a one trick pony. some believe the jack-in-the-box is broken while others believe it’s patient.
–
fuck that first kick in the oblivious virgin and those mating rituals observed by the responsibly poor…
object permanence is a rabbit named vertigo
–
online I find instructions on how to make my own scarecrow. I wake my sister and have her put on her pajamas while I take the overcoat my father is using for a blanket. when we’re an error of a mile away from everything, when we are not siblings skin-to-skin in an unmarked life, I have to push the ATV with my sister on it. she is crying about flooding and I’m telling her what the scarecrow will look like. she wants it to have a cape. because my son isn’t born yet, there’s not much to like.
–
no, not a dog digs in the dollyard of my adult sleep. but there are nights when the bones of my most afflicted boy are the bumps that stir his siblings to spoon each other and in the morning I tell them how their grandfather, propelled by the moth in his mind, walked three times into our door to rid his head of his god, of his wife, and of the secret knock they shared.
–
after his suicide he writes he’ll be back with a note so perfect
–
holding a baby as if she’s had it thrown at her, my mother steps out of a museum. it has stopped raining. it has also stopped snowing. in god’s blue puppy.
–
boomerang or pop-gun, grief makes its choice. your father hides his blurry hand might god invent scissors. there is a model of your city and some leftover glue.
Simon Henry Stein is a writer and composer whose work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Always Crashing, Electric Lit, and XRAY.
~~
Five Fragments from Pale Calendar
1.
the rules unravel
some old vermillion or burnt curtain
I was a light-tongued fortuneteller who would not
bleed as planned
by the throat
by the throat
now is the time for all young men
2.
are there still trees there, and meaning
not subject to spin
this is not the right concrete, and not stolen
come home, all is forgiven, in the hills
too few enemies to gather a light
3.
I always was awake is what you
could have presented as an explanation
or a gift
condensed to a hot white point
nothing is parallel or straight
any other embrace or salutation
all the forever
now all of the nights have names
some of them are named after…
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kingsoftrain 