kingsoftrain

coming up
we are
with names
for time
machines

free mail shipping or 50% off ground shipping AND 20% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code GETITNOW20

mine, self published, are here:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

some recent poems:

[credit sequence]

hunger my contraceptive

blood
my wristwatch

someone to boil
the mannequin’s
pacifier

~

[milk]

afraid of its shadow in a previous life. the drowning of nothing’s

orgasmic
child.

~

[coeval]

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

~

[abysm]

the untouchable redness
of certain
rabbits

the sunburnt scar on a fisherman’s arm

~

[no wolf]

I was a doorstep baby and brother a treehouse.

moon of the injured. moon of the blind.

~

[forgets]

the nude’s failure to stay awake in a laundromat. the suicide of the copycat toddler. nine types of catfish. a worm’s tongue. god’s last name. the orphan’s timekiller.

~

[spring]

mid polygraph, I lose
the baby

/ the loneliness
of its food

~

[dark earth]

animal then man then woman. god was the god of grief. one saltwater thing to another

why
a garden?

–

shadow

you unusable
rag

~

[his impressions of the experiment]

my closest frat brother looks at the toad and says frog motherfucker. tackles me. fact: there is a certain kind of toad that by staying still can kill a drug dog. in this country, a man can sell doves from the back of a white van. a man can run out of doves. my ghost is obsessed with caterpillars. it doesn’t matter what you say. they found that woman.

~

[breather]

infant, the sooner
than expected
search
for god.

I have this baby I’m not afraid to use.

you pretend to shoot
and I’ll pretend
to fall. we’ll make a day

of never talking.

the missing crow of thorns.

~

[imperfections]

they wanna put my teeth on a billboard. mom doesn’t care. cremate the moon.

~

[I lose you when I sleep]

I’d have gone grey
smelling
his hair
and he
to smoke
during the gospel
of the bruise

~

[mannish]

being alone never hurt anybody. I ask online about a coat hanger. in person about a stork. symbolism is dead. it’s not that kind of garden.

~

[I am, emptiness, out of breath]

in a wet dream on fire
the arsonist
fills
the mouth
he is trying
to leave

(it is not hunger that eats the horse)

I am past the age of what
in a former life
I died as, a spoon

is a fork

asleep in the hand of god

~

[the museum of minor fictions]

simpler, then

the seizure
that set
your father
to music

the baptized
bowl
of your mother’s
hair

the book I brought to burn
blank
as always

the pair deciding which hand
would come between us
which hand
would enter…

I caught the poor mask
sighing
on its own

I am ugly and you are not

~

[a dream for the blue pen in my father’s wrist]

her handwriting
knew
it was being
watched

~

[choir]

she remembered
not
his suicide
but her brother’s
cough, how it ruined

not
the scarecrow’s
silence

but the etiquette
of the crucified

~

[laconicism]

sex, make your face.

my father returned a clock
hair
fell from
a birthmark…

deaf as a housefire
my brother was raped
in two
tents, he pulled our mom

from a clown car
a tornado
died
in hell

~

[her impressions of the experiment]

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean. the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple. I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

~

[jetsam]

a bird watches my brother eat a parrot

my new diet requires me to have
the same
dream

language is a broom

between the legs of a showered orphan
is a sponge

from the story of her stomach’s exile

~

[estimations]

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

~

[rune]

I burn
sticks
for dreaming
dogs

/ forgiveness

you empty
crow

~

[the red church]

I babysat for children whose mothers didn’t want to come downstairs. I was driven home by men so drunk they knew my house like a muscle. the children ate what I made. I taught boys how to fake an illness and girls how to ask for pets. I could change a diaper and smoke at the same time but then it got away.

~

[upheaval]

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree. a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar. mom slips in and out of pregnancy. it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself. you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

~

[no after]

and what would you have me imagine? a change of tense in a tale of abuse. a baby licking the palm of a doll. a spoon. a robot’s broken arm. a chalk outline of a worm. hunger’s tacklebox. our allergic sister’s suicide note. a calf eating its first canary.

~

[swimmer of the blue snow]

a bowl of soup bleeds to death
in the eatery
of my praying
hands