we are brave
because
one at a time
we are brave
but the mother
hamster
eats her young…
these mouths
age
in a dreamless
noise
heaven wasn’t called heaven until it was full. we are made of water and there’s glass between us. when my son is asked to rate his pain he says his blood feels like a feather. I sleep at the foot of his bed often, a crooked something, a melancholy numeral…
his body- I don’t know. it repeats what most are made to recite. my brother has a ghost can see cats.
for Kaveh Akbar
all this time, ghost, we’ve been writing about the wrong body. poems talk of me like I’m here. nostalgia adrift on an oyster boat. empty acne on the face of god.
warn a crow
you’ll forget
your past
imagine having to haunt doom. sole cornstalk in the dreamworlds of tree. I cannot track the beauty of my children. it’s as if they are egging the model airplane of a pilot who loves matches, declawed cats, and wax museums. imagine chickens. leaving the anthill.
I believe my mother when she says we are here to forget the girl god was trying to impress. that we are to follow starvation to its wrongly named foods. that breads are condemned
birds. scissors the writer’s churchbell.
grief in the near future
(practicing)
safe
grief
(i)
no one in heaven is named after god.
place is an animal. animal a cure
for déjà vu
(ii)
my hands
are the hands
my hands
could rescue
(iii)
I was wrong. now is not
the afterlife
of the present.
not
yet
(iv)
our towels are asleep in the oven. our surroundings
lonesome.
/ mom severs mother from the nude vocab of our nakedness
~
[accident]
because
when mine
stopped
your sadness
was still
moving
~
[dog years]
the longer
I grieve
the more
~
[dear you]
I am at a word
for loss
~
[nostalgia]
my father
he was in
this poem
yesterday
so deeply
that I-
damn.
they repo
even
dark.
~
[goodbye]
my penchant for last things does not end
