Your mother has gone feral.
Cleaning her hands with mint leaves
after digging for earthworms among gravel.
She quit driving after mentioning empathy for
the deer that was caught in the crossing of a west heading road.

The night she talked about that:
the antlers, the halo, the grill of your car, which had been baline, got sharper, metal body becoming Deep Sea Angler machine.
The backyard a ripped green dress she fenced
herself whole nights in,

thumbs regressed, and hips became bits that unhinged:
she can scratch her ears, she can press her foot against the temple that her claiming mind has left.

Your father sews
his pincushion into her forest and that
father your mind made as a patch
enters that
growing darkness,
and sews a sawn-off through it,

Orion and a
scatter pattern of stars
if Orion kept his belt
unbuckled if on, if not on,
on his knuckles, had a nice house, which is
too, on

its haunches,
where you


hang your shirts on
question marks,
the tags curling upward against
the base of your neck
like inflections.

Don’t let them see us, don’t tell them what we are doing. We’re moving. We’ll do it at night, I’ve no idea what friends she’s

been keeping.
Until then you’ll have to abandon
those rooms,
you,
as much a detective as
any skinning knife or x-ray, a flashlight alive
on a saw blade,
circulate
the basement, find
no compelling evidence,
so you move
into the heat of the
higher rooms, your
belt and shoes
falling beneath you, your bare toes
seeming somewhat like leftover hooves, and you start to
interrogate your
toothbrush’s bristles and fang, all the sharp parts.
Her closed bedroom,
The ghosts of furniture.
The kitchen,
Stove top dinner plates
brought into
the delicacy, the holding cell of our
dining room.
The star witness hung and swimming above
them, a luminescent
jellyfish out from the

darkest
deep

of the ocean
seeped into the
ceiling
moulded by the
drywall mud ball of the moon, petrifying
your life into seizure’s crisis and flash,
the birds into their flak jackets—

on burnt days
she’s found
lounging under the porch
sufficiently clothed in its shade.
The loose fence board creaking in rhyme with the wind,
a spider in a dandelion flame.
You had

a dog but something carried it away.




Loose tenant that finds what you miss,
Comes out of your kitchen, in your house a fish

out of water
with a line at the tip of his lips,
sum up your relationship with a kid,
monster
and closet. Go to bed. Brush your teeth,
well I hear laughter outside tonight,
the mystery.
You want to get along, you and that thin
shirtless thing that dens in your guest room,
your bathroom,
while you cook and clean,
you will look to me
and turn
out the light. Sweet wife,
please, hold me
in a low heat tonight.