[1995]
And poem looked to me like the eyesight that stayed behind. Claw and wing were the oars of my father’s blank craft. Every boy in Ohio was a girl in a bookstore caring for the latest creature of a flat god. Sadness hadn’t yet moved on from its stick figures and mothers were still blowing into perfectly round balloons. Pale dog drank from a paint can. Color could see, and see only, the future. A pinkness left my brother for the wrong kind of milk. Sister had been hugging those angels couldn't bend their arms. Zero, wizard of the non-event, was buying up land.
[untitled (v)]
I do worry that this love for all things will keep from you the name of the creature dreaming
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Tell them this was handwritten. Tell them Ohio locked itself in the bathroom to imagine deer. Tell them god’s eyesight was too still. Tell them I couldn’t sleep. Tell them I couldn’t die, but that I bled to sleep in a field I was eating. Tell them the field is gone. Is gone, they believe.
I lose in the dream
each child
in a way
I’ve imagined
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I am everyday older than my brother. Those years I did not have him, he did not have me. Gods die in the star they sleep in. There are eyes in my sadness when I look at my sons.
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect
KOSS
Diode Editions, 2024
The poet KOSS, in their collection Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, gifts static to the white noise of seeking and renders movement a thief of starless locations. We crawl colorless over the bodies that reach us. Eden was a eulogy. To a microscope, everything is far away. It is here I miss the child my child was. Touch is biblically lonesome, and leaves no signature that can be matched in the secular interiority of this open air temple where said we say the renamed name. Whether pre-mourning the severed magic of hand acts, or predicting scansion’s still life with time machine, this verse clocks history long enough to get back its ghost deposit.
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An angel eats a mouth and sees for shape a horseshoe deep in the story of satan’s toothache. My sister’s hair listens while I grow nothing. I leave the poem briefly to raise an addict and the addict says pain is god reincarnated while alive. You don’t come back.
I wanted to smoke and look at water. I turned left at a tipped over gas can and walked until I heard fireworks. A small tv was showing god the hole it needed help making. A dryer with a baby in it was won by two mothers. They tried to scream. I made a sound and the sound stayed that way for good. I recognized my kids for years.
Design
a late
animal.
God is everywhere.
Obsessed
with birthplace.
Some animals have had success dying behind god’s back.
I squeezed in an airplane
your hand until it broke.
(that toy
car
from our blue
mom)
Storks
can’t lose
blood.
kingsoftrain 