Mother I’m sorry
your backbone slid
down the doublewide
kitchen wall
and surfaced from the sea of
your sigh
he came on purpose
to box my imagination
of what I should be
you
should be carved
a lithograph of incubation
buttressing the hatch
if lithograph was
another word for a sore
version of self
myself the residue
an exit
into the world which maps
without knowing what
direction to flower
according to the apple core
you created
a Disney world dose
of make-believe blankets
the want of a family
to be to be to be
ravenous as 1000 mothers
who find me smoking
pot on the church steps
and everything else
not a kid at all
not ten fingers ten toes
but a manger
stranger
than any baby can king
____________________________________________________________
Advice to My Brother About How to Forgive Our Father
Dear brother the trees
in our father’s lungs are hung
with white sheets
rip them down one by one
by fist or tooth or sighing child
by pictures by eyeholes
by murderer’s mug shots
if you stop to question the moon
it’s already too late
to be a sun in that black
absence be a sum of fears of
being a son of his breath and
close the gate behind you
you strange lumberjack
you digger of drunken night
you forgetful fuck you go
into the monster’s frightening
daylight like I have done
____________________________________________________________
Shipman is author of Cat Poems: 17 Wompus Tales and a Play of Despair (forthcoming from Kattywompus Press), Romeo’s Ugly Nose (allography Press), Human-Carrying Flight Technology (Blaze VOX), the chapbook I Carved Your Name (Imaginary Friend Press), and co-author of the chapbook Super Poems (Kattywompus Press). Latest poems appear in journals such as H_NG_MAN, The Offending Adam, PANK, So and So, Spork and TENDE RLOIN.