as our rescuer, god could not go with us into hiding. how many times must I accept my heart let alone stop my brother’s? your father is sucked through a straw into a spaceship summoned by your inability to dream. your mother, on paper, lives under a tooth. I can hear my guts scrape against the baby whose melancholy is brought on by the loneliness of my health. the world is mostly weather. we associate in shifts our sister’s body with the inside of a furniture store where nothing screams
you.
how to grieve, how to startle
an echo.
the map is desired that maps the afterlife.
my only (is for a hope)
that bores
god.
by now
my son
knows more.
my sadness is broken. my mother sits beside me on the top step as I fuck with the laces of shoes I’ve had on for hours. I am trying to place myself in front of the woman who while holding a bowling ball asked me to kill my cigarette. mom has been falling asleep in front of a tv turned on by a mind of its own. I don’t want to be touched. god for now belongs to the hand that went crooked and circled every date on this month’s calendar. after eleven guesses I say jesus mom is he gay. I don’t see how this will become me knowing all along. my father is a man of many words he can’t pronounce without some stranger getting knocked up on the radio. there’s nothing in the water, nothing in the air. I get my people from the store and bring them to a carnival that exists because of food poisoning. I think my belly button is a cigarette burn that makes me want kids. I have a brother who will wet the bed well into his ninth year. I include him here as the brother around for this.
~ On mother, father, god, dog, pussy
what if the eyes in the back of my head
hallucinate
what if
the eyes in the back of my head
during surgery
during
a haircut
~
~ On foreclosure
the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I
am rowing
(in wheelbarrow) (in wagon) otherwise,
noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat
~
~ On the past
my life
four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-
it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably
here, ably slow
full view
of the aging
marksman
~
~ On phobia
as I refuse
(to enter
the ocean)
I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug
~
~ On the need for a watchlist
if one can talk of it, one is most likely not poor. we called you to life to give you a name. god became the man men wanted to be. god wore a dress he could see through. a short history of heaven made its way to hell to have its location shared. your mother developed a stutter. your fake cry took on a depth of meaning made us dip
(psalm
for satellite)
into your brother.
~
~ On paternity
as his mother has heard only yesterday how he was born to some nobody that everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear. as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream of putting a cricket on the witness stand.
~
~ On my son having little to no vision
I am on count eight of ten-
ten, the future.
I call you raindrop,
your hiding place
water
–
staring contest-
the only child and the twin, then
the lonely
victor
~
~ On decompression
the zombie movie about buzzards. the hours that go undetected in the parents of forty-eight special needs children.
~
~ On lore
I have two dreams of running into the newly pregnant late bloomer. in the first and most recurrent, I am operating a remote control car I’ve lost while worrying about a brother’s closeness to a certain pilot. in the second, my mother is talking lights out to nostalgia’s previous owner who agrees with her that the roofs of buildings need to be smaller. in both, I get the sense my father has already hit the pop fly under which he collapsed muttering baseball, baseball, ghost of a baseball.
~
~ On suicide
I was here long before you guessed my age
–
(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)
–
the dog won’t eat. might it know
we come from the family of sitting and dying?
~
~ On contact
hold kitten
like a rifle. pop
a paper sack
at your father’s
ear. ah, your father
who was made to kneel
for two
maybe three
things
(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer
from the wreckage of his church
it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person. if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry. I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek. it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come. the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray. I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path. for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises. also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge. instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.
brother is digging barehanded in the backyard a hole for what he hopes is the alien of god’s choice. as for existence, my mother’s is low on mine. my father is keeping out of the same sentence any mention of heroin and totem pole. no one including you cares for my sister’s worry that this no this is the bottom of a rock. if asked, I will say I was visiting with my arms the museum of rowboats during the regional spike in baptisms we as a family failed to interrupt.
dropped on its head for saying footprint, the baby begins its work of collecting only those sounds it can scare. its father mothers otherness as one who watches a film to make the world worse. its brother hunchback and sister backstroke are viewed as two stomachs waiting for hunger to dry. because my mouth is empty, I talk all the time.
summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine. say it with me this was not that summer. as a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.
I have an ear for each parent I believe in and a hand for each god I don’t. I have yet to make a body that doesn’t become bread. in the process of comprehending the smallness of my twin’s brain, I lost the only friend I could talk to in code. my son won’t use a spoon as he fears it distracts his food. the fork is next and the knife, safe. my daughter is a drunk and also a soup that gives the same nightmare to the mouths of my angel.
it is for my ears that god gave me a stomach full of cotton. my mother’s fingers are made of bread. her blood she says is dieting for the blank book of beauty sleep. I have an inside animal unable to move on from the rained out magic show. its only joy is to bring me shoelaces. after building houses, my father shakes himself barefoot in the railroad car of a train his angel plans to swallow. I have nothing for my throat.
kingsoftrain 