TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE
poems, Barton Smock
125 pages
October 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.
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A reading, here
I have all the words that have gone missing to say that I am thankful for being in the August 2021 run of Poem-A-Day at poets.org as guest edited by Kazim Ali
Read the poem here
about the poem:
“I can't speak for all fathers, but my own fathering is littered with necessary and fake finalities. As such, I wrote this poem by hand on a small piece of paper while worrying about the long and short lives of my children. In the spacing of the poem, I tried to honor the little room I'd given myself for its projected concerns.”
Satan built a machine that pulled bullets into hell but so many kids lived that god noticed. The date of this poem is weakness. The date of this poem is the daughters of fathers in ICE drew each on their right knee a face and a blue ghost released its chokehold on breathing. Here is the value of my body if I believe in christ. Here is an angel made from a cop tired of not beating a person. My son is sick in a past that hallucinates brief futures might the illusion of miracle settle on which mother to heal. The date of this poem is drinking is easy because everyone can help you. All bellies are moonmad. Polish the empty eating of humane absence.
Jake was an orange dog that came with the farm. I ate quiet bread and trucks left for the fire. Car horn, airbag, bullfrog. The reigning often of the overruled present. Look, poet. My uncle took a gun into a phone booth and crickets ended Ohio hunger. Too soon, they said. A mirror is the smallest thing in the mirror. I fasted and saw: a cigarette in an icicle, children being had in a museum of sleeping positions, god found by her sister. Drinking is easy because everyone can help you.
Mother Fur, Nadia Arioli, Fernwood Press 2025
~
“It is not enough to bear,” writes Nadia Arioli; “one must erase all evidence of having done so.” This book sheds light on what it costs to bring another person into being,and stands as a bold refusal to hide that cost. In deeply embodied writing, Arioli pits archetype against reality in order to illuminate the human and profoundly animal experience of motherhood. Arioli’s gift for word-on-word poetic friction builds a devastating heat that makes honesty inescapable. This writing demands we understand the exhaustion, tenderness, pain, and absurdity of birth and motherhood and the fact that each of us owes our existence to “life pulled from a wound.”
Lisa Huffaker, teaching artist in residence for the Writer’s Garret
Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is that rare commonality that is both an interrogation of crowded stillness and a confessional written in the ghost dark of movingly lonely observation. Spiritually tactile and physically worshipful of the exhaustion that invents fatigue, it is a verse that musics itself beyond the chorus of admittance and into the recalled invitation of a witness that acts as the inner life of the photo. A work of protection and parenthetical braveries, it is full of a draining care specific enough to parent emptiness in all its bullied and stray forms.
Barton Smock, author of Wasp, Gasp
Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is a wonder that begins and ends with tenderness-a new mother teaching her “son / to use / dandelions / instead of / flame,” a new mother coaxing a banished family cat into her lap to be loved. But Mother Fur is no Mary Cassatt painting of early motherhood, all “pink and green… a sacred circus.” It is instead a hardscrabble landscape-one of loss, the complexities of familial bonds, and the search for identity, all centered in the unlikely mythic figure of Grendel’s mother. Grendel’s mother, who lives and breathes and struggles in a sequence of fifteen astonishing poems that comprise Mother Fur’s fearless animal middle. Grendel’s mother considers, yes, many things from her inimitable vantage point, even the need
for “convalescing”-which she boards a Greyhound bus to accomplish. What a ride.
Robin Turner, author of bindweed & crow poison
To enter the gorgeous music of Mother Fur is to become one with lyrics that sing of a new birth, these songs resonating with the beautiful mystery of the rebirthing moments within our lives. A triumph of compassion and lyricism, Mother Fur unveils the growing truths that await us all.
Dwaine Rieves, author of When the Eye Forms and Shirtless Men Drink Free
I tried but could not replace Vik Shirley’s deer. All darkness being the rabbit’s blindfold, I could not unsee the blur in which it went by. There is no other human I could be being so deer-deep in attending these called-off moments. Being present is not the answer. No way in deer hell does anyone love us.
Lord lick the lamblong loss from the last of my life.
The age machine ghosts its own fixations. The age machine creates a parentless only child then asks two animals the same question.
Hey guy
no birthmarks
in heaven.
Eating as an artifact of the angel's glassblown breathing.
Dude just say
the silence of god
The cigarettes are gone I wrote with
I speak to a small ghost
I lose three teeth
freeze them
in a mirror
X-ray machines from heaven outnumber drones that move the holy spirit
We leave something on my son’s wheelchair and it messes up his weight for months
For
moths
I don’t do much for my son
I lift my son and an angel matches footprints in hell
I break in a dream my arm for speaking
to a small
ghost
There are jobs you can do
Father jobs and mother
jobs
Your belly
has to be
from here
Small thing, the world. A star burns itself on its health. What is this jawing. This forming a sound around the mouth in a mouth. Who wants to be here. Loneliness is always learning a longer word. Say it. Say it somewhere. All my children are in the same house right now. I don't know how today is gonna go. For hours, my son won't be with me. At this very speaking, he's asleep on my leg. His teeth the same teeth he's had in dreams. I can see them.
I shaved my head in a dream kept from me by my mother
My sighing twitchy brothers are dying of each other
There is a way for this to end
A crow
on the moon
lasts
forever
I got an email about having 70$
I was like
left
or left
I imagine it’s there
The unwarned
loneliness
They’re going to take
my son
into a room, moon
God makes a tiny phone then waits for it to die and we never hear from god again
If there is in my poem white space then I wasn’t drinking
My mother’s sadness is distracting to photos
Surgery means I am the only one who can position my son’s body not you not the fatherhand of god’s anti-touch
I was writing toward The Rose by Ariana Reines when the grief lightning of an unfound vein went bluely afield
They’re back, the bombed, their thenlife
I hold myself in the dark
That’s
the whole
poem
You want a mirror, a god
of the anti
rare
Father, mother, a cry
( baby
shaped
things
kingsoftrain 