dear eggshell belly. dear mother. dear church of my father’s owl. dear Ohio. dear owl the deaf bee’s church.
the homeless woman pokes my belly and says in all creation I’ve got no middle. says she catches herself sometimes pretending to be homeless. says we ought to stone god. says we do with prayer. says the first spider she talked to could speak but didn’t. says she has the two jobs my dad’s between. says she can hear mom or mama in the radio of my brokenness. says angels can’t go mad, can’t parallel park, can’t feign surprise. says she eats with her ears. says she can stop anytime. says I’m someone’s sugarbones. says sound is what god knocks over looking for his mouth. says it could speak its name and it wasn’t spider. says to hell with speech though it be our singing’s salt.
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.
