the power
fathers have
over death
is the power
to reduce
god
to a mother’s
inheritance.
my lawnmower is a dog.
my sound
is the sound
neither
make.
pray you
me
to the part of nothing
that is no.
an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.
you begin to draw me and I begin to hurt. I know what a brain looks like and I’ve heard what I can only say sounds to me like many rats worrying as one to keep dry. maybe I can tell you about my ears by telling you about my first bike and how its handlebars grew and grew. did you know your grandmother broke nothing but was always on the lookout for pieces of glass? anything she swallowed she swallowed to strengthen her knees. some of your drawings seem to believe what they’re peopled to believe. is being childish something melancholy can attain? I rode to where the school had been before it was moved. wherever it was, it was empty. a father carried his trampled child up a slide and a mother identified me incorrectly by the back of my head.
in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being
no one goes to the crazyhouse
for having a hand
that repeats
itself.
in a new place
my brother
does one
of two
things:
masturbates
or says
deja vu.
if he didn’t tell me
I wouldn’t know
I’ve slapped myself
awake.
one of us
then one of us
will die.
the looks my brother got when he sang seemed to say someone sold satan the wrong voice. stories of an all-seeing god pegged my sister as the loudest person in two rooms. to me, mystery had nothing to do with church. if I’d survived, I had done so to wear clothes. food and weather were the twins of a middle child.
starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.
water
is nothing’s
blood.
one of my eyes
is my father’s
alcoholic
eye.
says anonymous
a blood
dipped
balloon
is not
the baby
the angel
had.
says mother
into moral
isolation
the hands
you bring
are dry. says hers
sleep
orphans
fatigue.
pretty early your brother
is a dog
believes it can leap
the electric
fence. red handed
is the daughter
of empty. indian burn, noogie, crown
of thorns. the village suicide
a shill
for whimsy.
with what she’s learned online, she puts her age between nine and twelve.
–
based on the following, her attacker
walks.
–
(that’s funny, he didn’t sound invisible)
–
how do you pray
for a clock?
kingsoftrain 