It was not a full life
That’s what I want
you to say
I thought birds
were choking
I wasn’t
young
Also
when you get here
who was there
to hear
Despair is a stone with teeth. Useless, but I prefer it.
Hope has name after name for the insides of hope.
Or maybe despair is a stone with no teeth. That’s here all night.
My son dies and my card gets charged three times. I am stunned by no single thing. When I read I read so little under the star of my drinking that touch becomes the lost ambassador of a body I can draw from memory. I can’t imagine my brothers being loved. I can’t imagine my brothers being loved on the same day. I hate how I sit in chairs in my dad’s house. My mom says I write to hurt. My son's stomach is a shape he forgets devouring. In the angel’s ear, plastic is the voice of god.
The farness in me, far
I walk to where
my children are
Born to surveil god, we disappeared
A prayer
asking a shadow
when
can I eat
Invisibly
rare
insect
spirituals
Ghost
after ghost
hired
by loss
They are about eating and sleeping and/or eating and sleeping in front of god. I should have been clearer. Moth after moth, the writing left me. I put my nudes in tornado country mailboxes. This wasn’t dangerous. I had a car and I had a gun. I still can’t see myself doing it. An angel can be killed by two things. A baby is one.
My naked brother
drinking from my hand
before his scene with the microscope
I can begin
to describe it
The chewed-up bird in a repaired egg
A perfect dog carries a sound past a quiet cop car
Past a cigarette burn, a soup bowl, and a tattoo artist
Past a field
in pain
The untouched brain
Babies kill angels all the time. Resurrection is genetic. I yesterday handed my sickest child to a police officer whose two memories are hunger strike and gun range. When I look at you, you have a mother. I thought it would help to get a thing back. Clocks at night, clocks at night. I’m not alone in a machine that makes me.
