be the abuser you want to victimize. repeat your father’s compelled evocations. if fat, absorb your mother’s least favorite hiding place. if not, borrow your brother’s future. plan it around a mirror.
it didn’t take long for the frog to become real to those around me. some would bring it back and pat me on the head and some would laugh when I told them it’d never tried to hop away before. some would say it was the frog that was depressed and some would pray for the frog I was lucky to have. when it began to speak, I told myself that’s just how frogs talk. god came to me sooner than most. mom joked that he must’ve known I had a frog to get back to. my sister maintains to this day she had no intention of eating the frog as she was only trying to impress the snake her eyes were made for. by the time I woke her up, her hunger had ballooned and she leapt at me the odd leap of grief.
as if god had poured oil
on an egg
about to hatch
I was up all night
sleeping
like my mother
before me
whose future
went on
forever
and I saw
again
the temple
of that hellish
artifact
from the first
suicide
yours
inspired
food
prepares
in me
a faith
–
a wasp attends its own crucifixion
–
in an area known for being receptive to memory
the boy
drops
cock
–
any advance
on god
please praise
remotely
prayer
dedicates
for god
his time
to memoir.
fiction is the blood of a short person
spilling from a tall.
I enter again the room of the screaming man
who was screaming
when I left.
silence is par for the quiet.
dad says we live on a rock from god’s garden of near death experiences.
says throw a fucking baseball.
–
I could not see through my father
so I put my hand there
and it became a baby
with all its fingers
–
I was not raised by scarecrows.
had a toy that answered to wolves.
tired of mom touching its food, the baby comes early. we call this moment the buzzard’s injured adoration of a surplus crow.
–
last supper, I see only men.
when toothpick young you see a snake go mad with second nature and a sponge dragging your mother through nothing’s data
the farness of heaven is the farness of twin. a packed theater starts a fire in a factory. a mother and a father clay themselves as figures put to sleep in a clawfoot tub. across the board, a boy is crushed after witnessing for the image of the crowd-surfing girl he was made in. you can’t eat touch.
I show signs of having been alone beside a machine. I can count on my fingers the fingers I’ve lost. I am not like a newborn. my feet are each one smaller than the last as are my meals. like my father before me, I have a hard time being drawn to what attracts me. like my mother, I cook for those who’ve gone in and out of the eating disorder condoned by the church of sleep. like sister, I watch as my brother sets forgiveness as a trap for god. not every animal I see is an illusion. my eyes open twice to be flashed by the same short life. anything I name I give a prime number. appear to the sick I remember.
