Object Permanence

For the time being

an ampersand is a boy

clutching his knees

to his chest as art.

On high, the god of form

wears a face on each wrist.

Only a god can take and give

time, but the one in front of

the gun lasts forever.

The boy is parenthesis,

his shoulders curved,

the huddled wings of a bird.

The boy’s arms are too short

to box with god. He breaks down-

beats of sweat in his sleep.

If life is music, the rest is noise,

this earth a museum of dead boys

walking. The god has a finger to

his lips. He wakes to the boy

taking selfies with The Scream.

The boy knows a picture

will only last longer.

Frequent warnings read

Storage Almost Full across his

screen so self-portraits he

outsources to the cloud.

As I Lay Dying sits in his book

bag. The page dog-eared that has

the line: My mother is a fish.

•

Right now

the comma

is a lobe.

From afar the god clutches

his head, in an effort

to cover missing ears.

The redbone boy was airborne.

As we speak, he bleeds in the street.

The backpack has landed as parachute.

The god yowls watercolors,

the way the sky weeps

oranges in lung-shaped

segments of grief:

quarter, half, a whole.

A bullet is a form of punctuation.

From a distance it appears

the boy is fucking up commas.

Roger that.

The god of variables — a-

bridged & for-

lorn, dribbles mercy

on the mother of

the slain.

The boy’s headphones skip

down the sidewalk in the hands

of another mother’s child.

The skeletal god’s got bars.

A rib cage full of tally marks

collection plates in memory

of chicken-scratched bones.

The writing on god’s wall

was formerly known as art.

•

The boy’s chest has become

a focal point. It rests in

his mother’s arms, a still life painting.

The god is MIA.

The boy’s mother repeats her prayers

again, & again, & again, & again, & again.

Repetition leads to the longing for a god,

for a sound as signal, for the absence of a note

or limb. Think of the bo(d)y as con artist.

The boy’s mother knows a period is

something missed. She knows objects

can disappear behind a god’s back

but that doesn’t mean they are gone forever.

She holds the boy’s cracked

phone in her hands, as if it were

the whole world.

A boy is what he leaves behind.

What a mother struggles to forget

her muscles store as memory.