kingsoftrain

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the…

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~

some recent poems:

[musics]

a tongueless form eats from the psalm of your shape. I say birth

you say
assault. we are code

maybe
for embed. our mother pawns

the paw
in her stomach

hoping to afford an impression
of the hand
that created
hands.

I have prayed to a cautious god.

~

[safe musics]

the amnesia
of my jack-in-the-box
gave way
to boomerangs

and motion
was the capital
of grief

~

[ain’t musics]

this story again
my flat
brother
on his bike
with baby possums
eight of them
under his ballcap-

the mothered vehicle
of home, the doubled
kindness
of road
and kill-

how taken
from heaven
we lived

~

[body musics]

for fear I will want to be the…