kingsoftrain

The clothes I had were eaten. When you are god, you will miss being able to stare.

It came out of the woods and never swam again. I had wanted to give it a shape, but want is an angel burning a star with its stomach. I was most nights writing toward want. I started a magazine with a man bent by god. The man had a name, but I didn’t care. He took my form and then one for himself. I still have some of his needs. If a thing lived, it was our bulimic bird with no young.  

naked in dog years
poems, 55 pages
April 2024

cover image by Noah M Smock

A note:
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~

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naked in dog years, 55 pages
April 2024

SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD

Lightning and earthquake feuding in an untouched doom where two angels, birthmark and bitemark, still dream of killing their tattooed sons. 

I know this place. Place is a bomb that other bombs find. 

~

The tattooed sons are in love. Son bitemark doesn’t have a tongue; birthmark does all the ironing. Their dead child speaks to them through a fishhook that is always hot. 

~

Faith is an eating disorder. Mothers faint in threes. 

I teach my brothers to suck in their stomachs and a junkyard refrigerator becomes our clock. We smell like a dead child. We smell blank. We search online for images of hands and for the word missingness. Flies made of wind and glass show us to our food. 

Our eyes go without.

~

Our invaders had no language. Your mother was suicidal until she told you how moved she was by her own birth. The needle had its moment of recognition. A fetus opened its mouth in a paint can.

Replacement can be a city. But here it’s a form destroyed for being described.

~

So many dead bodies, and no one has died. 
City of the predicted present.
The sons count hoofprints left on a whale.

~

Under the moon of a flat earth, they’re putting pills in baseballs. We’ve our choice of police siren. My Ohio horse could be your Ohio deer. We could be resurrected more than once to identify a child’s body. There is a language image does not know. Words sound different in hell.

~

I hate this city and its two sold houses. Every third angel is just a baby eating paper and being healthy for too long. Pain has a doorbell that turns blue when touched and another that turns blue when not. The last time you had sex this caterpillar had a ribcage. I don't always die. Sleep is the ghost of waiting.

~

Image is nothing more than the memory that our destroyers strip to.

I had an animal
that was naked
in dog years.

Bitemark speaks birthmark.

Keep amnesia young. 

~

Ask
the dark
the outside
gets nothing

Mad about bread
I broke
my birthmark

There was no bomb

A paper doll was shopping online
for a free
spider’s web

Our perfect blood perfect
bomb
weather

~

Bats lose their teeth over sister bitemark.

Blue 
here and there
skips

an apple. The bird

can’t get out
of the lake.
 
~

A thunderstorm turns on the microwave. We call it fixed and then listen all night to the bird in the broken dryer. We don’t blink for a year after a hand gets caught in a hand. We know it’s been a month since angel was on day two of having a ghost. Beyond that, the neighbor’s baby chooses one television over another. I can’t remember who I want to stop looking like. 

~

Birthmark and bitemark go as footprints into the dream of an Ohio bullet-hole. I want sisters but none of them remember being born. Sometimes when I turn off the oven

tooth and pill have the same ghost. 

I can’t say who death thinks it is. A swimmer distracted by water.

~

I drop my mother’s cup of fake blood as my father tries to find the movie scene that will give him his age. My thumb breaks in a past death. The mumbling of its break speaks a moral thing to the smallest body ever to be vividly isolated. I am hearing all of this through an eggshell that mom says belongs to the angel best known for keeping quiet about skin. Under my brother’s shirt there crawls a wasp that smells like god. None of the blood can be saved. 

~

A ballerina bites my ear. I play dead but am not recognized doing so on land by a swimmer. I started writing because people didn’t watch the movies I recommended. Being kind to your children won’t work. Give god hair. Tell god it’s human for tattoo. A ballerina bites my ear because a ballerina cannot scream. In every Eden, a set of false teeth. 

~

Real teeth, too, in Eden. I skip a rock and know it. Overhear with you how that baby isn’t going to shoot itself. Also overhear how terrible people often go to the bathroom more. Boy alone holds a dead rabbit over a junkyard toilet. Girl alone thinks it’s about to be alive. They’ll share almost nothing. A quick birth in a bitten place.  

~

I speak the names of my brothers into the book of bitemarks. I have more arms and they more muscles and they more issues with their legs. I am so poor that my work does all the work. My tongue does nothing. It’s not possible to be obsessed with sex. With death. You’re born with a mask that no one saves. Everything makes god sick. Stop being alone.

~

I can’t imagine
knowing
my kids
are alive.

Ask the angel of birthmarks
if god
is cruel.

~

There’s no horse that a horse can’t be. The egg filled with skin came after touch. Tattoo before birthmark. How many sons you suppose god killed before that shit took. I cry on my brother. A very long line of prose comes to me about his most lost mosquito. Most lost mosquito.  

~~~~~

SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD MACHINE

My handwriting is described as a suicide note written by a scarecrow and my brother’s as a tattoo scratched off by a god trapped in a silent ambulance. We’re on different parts of the baby. I cry my pencil into a detailed sleep. My brother cries himself to hell. I recall a same life. He recalls a current. The baby is our brother, then our sister, then both. We see it in pieces. Every creature knows how long we’ve been here.

~~~~~

EXIT

We moved, and they shot us.
We didn’t move, and they shot us.
We cried, and they shot us.
We slept, and they shot us.
We had children, and their children shot us.
We were childless, and their children shot us.
We bathed, and they cut us.
We cut ourselves, and they shot us.
In our dream, you wrote about us.
They shot us 
in our dream. Shot us in their.

My hands
cut little hands
in the dark.

In Ohio
where everything
comes from

I only 
watch
tv.

Shape is god’s campaign against touch.

Be longing.

There’s no horse that a horse can’t be. The egg filled with skin came after touch. Tattoo before birthmark. How many sons you suppose god killed before that shit took. I cry on my brother. A very long line of prose comes to me about his most lost mosquito. Most lost mosquito.  

telescope
where howls
the longer
eye, are angels

too hungry
is there a star
renamed
does every
empty child

have a stomach