My dog leaps
out of sage steppe
like an unexpected visitation,
like water suddenly
gushing from the plains
after months of unsuccessful drilling.
My dog is born
out of glacial till
and cattle mutilations,
mapping
her circuitry
in the bones
of feral horses,
pushing the purple night.
A twisted
cat rears its ugly
ass into the sky
as if to performs
some elder necromancy
on the corpse
of a nighthawk.
Later that night,
I use my cell phone
as a flashlight
to confirm
the identity of the bird,
But it is nowhere
To be found.
The "goatsucker"
is mostly active at night.
It started
With the wind.
Mimicked
The sound of bones.
The cat hallucinates
Terrible
teenage encounters,
Sheds like a sycamore.
Leaf shadows hover
over ancestral grounds.
I rake the path,
but never travel it.
Palms facing
always somewhere other.
Two
orbs entomb
my parents ashes.
Barked
at by a squirrel,
eyeballed
by an owl.
A raven,
despite its dead
metaphors,
follows me
like a satellite.
It seems it's always something.
Granite outcrops
shift into
unrelenting thunder
and Dagon dredges
elk shed from the stone.
Tilt your head into
a landslide
and pray
from upside down.
Dangle your
wolfhand
from the darkness
of the river
and commit a crime
of bibliomancy—
The story always pans out the same.
Bone in snow
covered spring,
will you tell
us what you know?
The thaw leaves
traces in maps of ice.
What abomination
will we dream now?
In the spiraling clouds.
In the stalactite humming.
The witch doctor
frog man lingers
in the willows.
A delta-glyphic
half moon shines,
crystalline,
through granite.
The big cats are non-alien
in darkful fog
and wash over outcrops.
A cold branch
drops into colder water.
The big cats
drop quiet like deadfall
and the beetles turn
the mountain grey.
*Or this version of the first stanza that plays on The Neverending Story and Stranger Things title:
In the spiraling-nothing.
in the upside-down.
the witch doctor
dogman lingers
in the willows.
If you are a good
boy, then
you will get what you want.
*
I want pizza, please?
And can Jacob spend
the night?
and we can drink
Fago and play Nintendo?
*
Jacob's mom
drops him off
and we play
Double Dragon II
until our eyes bleed.
*
The mornings
are spent toppling
over dirt mounds
and falling into
the freshly dug
basements of suburbia.
This is a trap!
The rat is pregnant.
The rat had an abortion.
The rats are not pregnant,
they are both female.
Charcoal and Sniffles are expecting.
There's a bun in the oven,
a calf in cow,
a half-calf with root beer
and cinnamon.
Cinnamon is the name
of the first born baby rat.
Cinnamon is midnight black.
Root Beer was born in stillness
on the classroom sky
When the halls glow red.
you can hear her,
after hours,
pegging at the beams.
We passed by a frighten
cat and then we had a child.
At two years old
I painted myself silver.
Silver gives me less
anxiety than gold.
Gold is a realist's
painting of astral projection.
It doesn't really happen that way.
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