home video 

a ghost
film reel, flickering
across a room. 

god with his video camera,
kneeling & catching each moment.

all the tapes stacked in library
shelves, the angels, begrudgingly 
organizing them by name & year.

in the summer i got my first
video camera, the tapes the size
of smores. 

aimed at billy & ryan i made
spirits of onion grass 
& ukulele.

waiting by the desktop computer
for the snippets to download,
we lived twenty minute lives,
as long as the camera could remember.

all the while, god standing at 
a distance, taking his own version
of our young bodies,

playing them back in his 
living room that night, all alone.

in one frame i aim the camera right
at him, staring at each other,
only on my recording we never see him,
just a rustling in the pine trees,
the unshakable feeling of father-ness. 

long after we're all dead &
my own video fragments 
are crunched down & used 
for backyard guts he'll take
his projector & turn the handle,

gently, slowly at first,
he'll release our apparitions
onto the house on noble street
& the space behind the garage 
where we buried all the goldfish,
them too, swimming in the soupy 
august night.

video children, we'll record ourselves
again & again, god, sitting in 
the adirondack chair to watch.

i don't know where my old
camera went or the little tapes
we used. i've checked closets &
shoes & under pillows.

i like to think that it's continued 
the work without us, at least for now.

growing glassy insect wings &
darting from ceiling to ceiling,
one eye blaring open,

swallowing the house's 
every movement. not me, not me

it won't find me.