for Jon Cone
what am I / but unaware / as an echo / now / in my knowing / of this small / passage / he’s written
how god
upon seeing
man
said none
shall recall
his beauty
it entered the burning house to ask each boy what it should take. chinrest. mirror.
time to think.
mouth, scene one. a rocking horse drinks from a toilet. there is a ghost in the basement. a girl is circling the neighborhood in the car she was hit by. her skateboard misses one shoe more than the other. it seems to her that maybe far away a fetus is fixing its hair. she is not the focus.
we pray to the being god meant to rob
a child chewing on a stick
trying to pass for a child
a few of his friends nearby
human
and meant
to age
a mother, not his, reading a book
about a mother
not hers
her husband
in a monster mask
lovelessly
jumping
rope, a sandbox
emptied
by the orphans
of deformed
swings
eating is the closest I’ll get to making a film.
narrators
that puberty
ruins.
the wooden girl. brevity.
we set it on fire and it runs up a tree. something already in the tree is crying. tree digs a hole to god. we walk home. put the boy on the floor before he falls out of bed.
it’s late. my kids laugh in a dirty kitchen. I am in the hallway having just killed a wasp for looking like hunger. the wasp is in my hand. I can’t move. the boy who touched all the eggs.
snake was made
from the bones
of a circle
the rock thrown by an only child. the wasp the seashell of a mother’s desert. the zookeeper’s raft.
kingsoftrain 