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October 6, 2025 / barton smock

publication announcement, TELL 5PM IT’S GOD SOMEWHERE (poems, Oct 2025)

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.

can be purchased via: 
paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock

A reading, here
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1
August 23, 2021 / barton smock

Poem-A-Day at poets.org

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.”
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1
January 5, 2026 / barton smock

sang a tooth in a rock in a mirror of salt

Who does the mother go back to

In me
(with the rabbit
 patience
 of porn)
a devouring
slow motion
stops
the spread

of deer

(I thought I’d been sick
 I thought my brothers
 had been sick
(I thought 
 this:

my son
sees himself
on his stomach
eating sleep

in heaven

) 
God’s first doll
mocked
by Joseph
for dreaming

of glaciers) 
because she knows
her mother) is dead

her mother 
is dead
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0
January 4, 2026 / barton smock

2025 publication and non-publication recap

Some places I put myself this year, and some places others:

Published two full-length collections:

TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE
poems, Barton Smock
125 pages
October 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
selection from the work

angel tantrum
poems, Barton Smock
171 pages
April 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
selection from the work

~

Re-published an older collection with a new cover image:

naked in dog years
poems, Barton Smock
55 pages
April 2024
new cover image by Noah Michael Smock
selection from the work

~

Did a reading of my latest two full-length collections

~

Had three entries in the scaffold top 50 microwritings of 2024

~

Combined four of my older collections into a single publication to include:

My first chapbook, infant*cinema, published originally by Dink Press (now defunct) in April of 2016

A collection, shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner, self-published as a footnote to infant*cinema in June of 2016

A chapbook, Skin To Skin In An Unmarked Life, published originally by Trainwreck Press (now defunct) in March of 2021

A full-length, Ghost Arson, originally published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in December of 2018, but no longer available there.

~

Had the musician MIDI Janitor include my collection '57 Letters to Ethan Hawke' in his book selection entry for Ammel

~

Had an entry included in Mercurius Magazine's 'The Surreal-Absurd: An Anthology of Contemporary Surrealist and Absurdist Poetry' 

~

Had a poem of mine appreciated in an entry at Tom Snarsky's substack Pier's End


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January 4, 2026 / barton smock

words toward the work of others, recap, 2025 (Ghayath Almadhoun, Catherine Cobham, Katherine M. Hedeen, Victor Rodríguez Núñez, Antonio Gamoneda Evan Nicholls, Alina Ştefănescu, I.S. Jones, Danielle Chelosky, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Darren C Demaree, Nadia Arioli, Vik Shirley)

I Have Brought You A Severed Hand
Ghayath Almadhoun
translated by Catherine Cobham
Action Books, 2025

Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You A Severed Hand, as woundedly clocked in translation by Catherine Cobham, changes the present without using time in a verse that pours milk over disappearing and reappearing blood. It is an absolutely beautiful, howling, undisguised, and sighing work, a pilgrimage of homage, an interest earned by yearning in nostalgia’s plastic cocoon, that pays with grey ransacked vividity the debts redacted from receipts of attention. Palestine is here, then there. As is Syria, Sweden, Germany. One can feel America pretending to be here, but love is too flooded a being. Language, too, is here. A light pining for glow. You can go home again, but cannot go housed. Almadhoun writes un- and re-policed in the nonfiction of the surreal, and hesitates so quickly one might go to pieces in a photograph of the lost lost. Saying a work is necessary is currently and old-head American. If I stop here, get this book. If I don’t, do the same. 

~

Burn The Losses
poetry
Antonio Gamoneda
translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez
Action Books, 2025

Memory never has enough time. I finish reading Antonio Gamoneda’s Burn The Losses, so noiselessly translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez, and call a toast, then, to the brain of oxygen. With backstories seemingly visible to amnesiacs only, Gamoneda’s verse addresses the trivial recollections of our most urgent forgettings and de-creates in a more discreet afterlife a body plotting its revenge on any new constant restlessness. The skin is a flooded sorrow and the body agony’s breathing box. To swallow this, you’d have to believe the egg never went off and that the sadly chewed piece of gum in its yellow was real. Starve your disbelief. Starve mine. Let childhood burn me like a horse. Let this work, for what it strips from repetition, echo. 

~

EASY TIGER
Evan Nicholls
Future Tense Books, 2025

I hold that Evan Nicholls is a scholar of deep sense. In poems and retitled images of original origin, the work as pasted into the copied beginnings of Easy Tiger is one or seven of an insistent reluctance to write what came before as a prayer overheard in a chapel erected in a field leftward of the anchored fact of our uselessness. I opened my gaze to the fish-caught world. I found my hopelessness still hopeless but tenderly surrounded by the brutally beheld. I’m not sure this is absurd. Nicholls plucks from our humanness its exiled objectifications and places them on a mood board for belonging to the extracted. Collage, sure, but collage rescued from its overlooked layering. Not just anything goes. This is sorrow cooking for a sadness that’s gained an appetite in a place voided of elsewhere. This is a comet losing god’s ashes. Blood gluing itself together in a pencil dreaming of a horse trying to sleep in a tree. What angel slang. What a deadline given to forever. Ah, Barton. Easy there brother. Anyway, imagine putting your finger on all the touch in the world. Then try.

~

My Heresies
Alina Ştefănescu
Sarabande Books, 2025

Silence is a museum we enter speaking. Time is the time machine. Touch is the root that deceives the radar’s caress. This verse, grimheld. Grimheld, this verse. The decolonized vandalism of this verse. Verse as it de-translates its own final music in the pro-climactic body of Alina Ştefănescu’s My Heresies. Oh star, imagine a flare that discovers rescue. Oh humanly spun cobweb, hum dreamily our ear to betray some cocooned child orphaned of its silkworm petulance vibing while saying kill the rabbit before it makes the hole. The child, joking, of course. But we get serious. This is serious. I don’t like my death. The single question it asks is not sufficiently profane. I cannot in front of my children wear the clothes my dreamform shrinks. All sadness can be traced to surviving the inquiry. I was beheld in an egg by a bacteria enamored of cradling the belly button’s extra summoned eye. I don’t know how to learn. Curiosity, stage IV. I lose the coordinates of my surgery. An eel barters with yearning in the stomach of darkness. God is a coin dropped by time. That’s how long this lasts. By this I mean the not yet attempted circle indebted to the attended forwardness harnessed here in the fleeting searchedness of Ştefănescu’s double vision. I did at one time read books but they did not bell me to check my notifications. There’s a lot of salt in me. I don’t see myself. What I am saying isn’t important. Isn’t heard. Ştefănescu’s mirror is a thing peopled with a loneliness that impregnates everyone twice. I didn’t say much here. Leave this place where I said it. My Heresies is ongoing. Go.

~

BLOODMERCY
I.S. Jones
APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner
Copper Canyon, 2025

Ah what an urgent patience is given an anxious peace by the immediate vision of I.S. Jones as versed in holy thematics that pin nostalgia to a renamed surrounding. Our place in common is Bloodmercy, a ghost psalm that kings a father’s absence, and a landmark that earns its place with celestial hardness, wicked accuracy, and remnant reminiscence. Existence can’t solve the living. Twin butchers climb too high the tree of boredom. Bloodmercy is a work that occurs in the genesis of again. Oh how sound ages want. Oh how a mouth prays to itself to know its shape. Debone, in the reading, in the aftermath of Abel’s bent childhood of straightened witness, the belonged body. Killing doesn’t cure murder. Sisterhood is a shelter stormed by pattern. Abuse a scarecrow of bored angels. Violence leaves history to those arriving. What Jones reimagines beats us to the dream. 

~

IN WHICH I PASS OUT READING Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’

I dip my body in a paint that makes rain cry.

Alcohol is a warden.

I read re-predicted nonfiction.

I miss
my mom
with god
with god
I miss
my mom.

What if all I’ve taught my children is how
to love me.

I want to touch all the writers
in the places
numbed
by what
they read.

I watch that one movie where you pretend to be
disabled
poor
my smarter

brother.

Possessed by return

god
is unbearable.

Imaginary
bombs
imagine.

~

words toward Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s vernal nude painted cave angel burned wifi connected thing of a collection ‘Disintegration Made Plain and Easy’ (Piżama Press, 2025)

Dear Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, 

I wrote so many letters to Ethan Hawke. I was overweight with doom. My imagery was photographed fasting. A thorn and a spear dreamt of being on the same side of god. I have read or now am reading Disintegration Made Plain and Easy and got get super drunk. Ethan Hawke disappears in the capital of absence. I’m not funny. My joke about ache and echo never grows balls enough to go long in the tooth. Nakedness goes from person to person. I fall in love with an animal pacing outside of a theater so full of self harming children that I yearn for that future where I continue to read your book instead of reviewing every film showing at a covid porn marathon. Let’s not be sick. Am I in front of a mirror that believes in god? Anyway, into my dream comes all of my skin looking for a map might it find the blue pen that sends the devil’s blood to hell. Last night was perfectly boring. Last night was perfectly boring.    

~

Now Flourish Northern Cardinal
selected poems 2005-2025, Darren C Demaree
Small Harbor Publishing, 2025

Addiction is the breadcrumb that the body follows to wine. I don’t know what this turns into. Darren C Demaree writes inside of the southern flying vividity of awestruck nostalgias. Do you know Emily? Does anyone? I’ve been here, twice, with you. By Emily I mean say another’s name. See what happens. See what doesn’t and make a mirror to weigh the moon. Here is what I know: I stop drinking to read. The reading takes a lot from forever. Takes, enough. I’ve said it before I’ve said it, but Demaree is a writer of possessive avoidance that owns its meeting of obsessions. His faith in nowness is a verse that caves into tomorrow with crumbling’s last seed. Put sleep to sleep and the sheep to bed. Demaree’s ‘panic of the living’ will sober one to resurrection. I’ve been reading for a minute, here, in an Ohio that can age one to the closest hour. Demaree’s Now Flourish Northern Cardinal (selected poems 2005-2025, Small Harbor Publishing) is a thing that’s been a thing named by tomorrow’s animal. Leave it like Eden. Find it like nakedness. Lose it like a cloth you moved over the skin of a loved one’s cosplaying ghost. I don’t know. I call things beautiful all the time. Yet, I have no time. Now Flourish Northern Cardinal deserves the clock you’re looking at.

~

Mother Fur
Nadia Arioli
Fernwood Press, 2025

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.

~

THERE WILL BE NO OTHER DEER PLEASE READ VIK SHIRLEY

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.
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January 3, 2026 / barton smock

movie list, 2025, recap

Saw 243 movies last year, up from 233 last year, and making 2025 the year of my most newly seen to date.

Average rating was 64.22, up from last year’s 61.59

Most disappointing were: Eddington, One Battle After Another, After The Hunt, Magazine Dreams, Jay Kelly, and Messiah of Evil. Not sure our male directors should be doing anything for a little while if they can’t get the verbiage of the current moment written correctly or if they can’t avoid both siderism, stilted fetish, shoulder shrugging I-did-a-thing provocations, etc, etc.

Most surprising to me were Baby Invasion, A Grand Mockery, and Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

Top 20

Sharp Corner
Paris, Texas
Train Dreams
Alabama Solution, The
Stalker
Sovereign
Monkey, The
Killer of Sheep
Baby Invasion
Nostalghia
Vulcanizadora
Sorry, Baby
Big Bend, The
Wings of Desire
A Grand Mockery
Mastermind, The
Die My Love
Girl With The Needle, The
Grand Theft Hamlet
Reflection In A Dead Diamond

Full list is below, highest rating to lowest, followed by any words said toward.


100
Sharp Corner
Paris, Texas
Train Dreams
Alabama Solution, The

99.33
Stalker
Sovereign

98.67
Monkey, The
Killer of Sheep
Baby Invasion
Nostalghia
Vulcanizadora
Sorry, Baby

98
Big Bend, The
Wings of Desire
A Grand Mockery

97.33
Mastermind, The
Die My Love

95.33
Girl With The Needle, The
Grand Theft Hamlet
Reflection In A Dead Diamond

94.67
Perfect Days

94
Friendship
Society of the Snow
Weapons

93.33
Bang Bang
Things You Kill, The

92.67
Best Wishes To All

92
God's Creatures

91.33
A Real Pain
Black Box Diaries, The
Killers of the Flower Moon

90.67
Sinners
2073
Perfect Neighbor, The

88
Wait, The
September 5
Descendent

87.33
Black Bag
Sacrifice, The
Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The

86.67
Eric LaRue
Irishman, The
I Lost My Body

86
Bring Them Down
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

85.33
Last Showgirl, The

84.67
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Presence
A Nice Indian Boy
McVeigh
My First Film

84
Warfare
Baltimorons, The

82.67
Conclave
Harvest

82
Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Bloody Lady, The
28 Years Later
Phoenician Scheme, The
Assessment, The
Sew Torn
Welcome To Leith
Wake Up Dead Man

81.33
Freaky Tales
Dead Mail
Buzzard
Steve

80.67
She Loved Blossoms More

80
Night Call
Greasy Strangler, The
Together (2025)

78.67
Sacramento
Predator: Killer of Killers
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning

78
Serial Mom
Companion

77.33
Relay
Saturday Night
Hotel (2004)
Rule of Jenny Pen, The
Mickey 17
Mountainhead
Babygirl
Men of War (2025)
Ice Tower, The

76.67
Surfer, The
Tornado

76
Line, The
Birdeater
Abundant Acreage Available
Nosferatu (2024)
American Sweatshop
Roofman

75.33
Restless (2025)
Beast of War

74.67
Snack Shack
Ugly Stepsister, The
Final Destination : Bloodlines
Rabbit Trap
John Candy: I Like Me

74
Toxic Avenger, The (2025)
Bone Lake

73.33
Damned, The
Frewaka
Keeper

72.67
Sasquatch Sunset
Bring Her Back
Good Boy
A House of Dynamite
Dead of Winter (2025)

72
Bad Day For The Cut
Hand That Rocks The Cradle, The (2025)

71.33
Love Me
Ballad of Wallis Island, The
She Rides Shotgun

70.67
Dude Bro Party Massacre III
Borderline
Surviving Ohio State
Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery
Black Phone 2
KPop Demon Hunters

70
Naked Gun, The (2025)
Shelby Oaks

68.67
My Old Ass
Aggro Drift
Thursday Murder Club, The
Day Of The Fight

68
A Deadly American Marriage
Mecanix
Dangerous Animals
Superman (2025)
Vicious
Adulthood

67.33
Accountant 2, The
Toxic Avenger, The
Highest 2 Lowest
Toxic Avenger II, The
Conjuring: Last Rites, The
Oh, Hi!

66.67
You're Cordially Invited
Never Let Go
Black'47

66
Fight or Flight

65.33
Help

64.67
Surrender, The
In Vitro
Citizen Sleuth

64
Drop
A Chorus Line
Traumatika

63.33
Being Eddie
One Battle After Another

62.67
Holland
Death of a Unicorn
Titan: The Oceangate Disaster
Somnium

62
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
Wolfman, The
Predators (2025)

60
Have You Seen Me Lately

59.33
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story

58.67
Ash
58
Grafted
Aqua Teen Forever : Plantasm
Hell Of A Summer

57.33
Magazine Dreams

56
Get Away

55.33
Carman Family Deaths, The

54
It Feeds
Jay Kelly

53.33
Heart Eyes
Murder in Moncaco

52.67
Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, The
Anniversary
Five Nights At Freddy's 2

52
Echo Valley

49.33
Marshmallow

48.67
Coyotes
Violent Ends

48
Happy Gilmore 2
40 Acres
Truth About Jussie Smollett, The

47.33
Honest Man: The Life of R Budd Dwyer
A Creature Was Stirring
Dying of the Light
Eddington

46.67
Lost Sons, The
Pickup, The

46
Final Destination 2
Southern Fried Lies

45.33
All Of You

44.67
Citizen Toxie, The Toxic Avenger Part IV

43.33
Final Destination
After The Hunt
Carpenter's Son, The

41.33
Final Destination 5
Family McMullen, The

40.67
Havoc

40
Messiah Of Evil
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

38.67
Night of the Reaper

37.33
Silent Hour, The
Clown In A Cornfield
Push (2025)

36.67
Greatest Beer Run Ever, The
Superhero Movie

36
Wolf Man
Locked

35.33
Child Star

34.67
Gorge, The
My Dead Friend Zoe

33.33
Cleaner

32.67
Woman In Cabin 10, The

30.67
Afraid
Until Dawn

28.67
Honey Don't

28
Draft Day

27.33
Here
Another Simple Favor

26.67
My Oxford Year

26
Friend, The
Five Nights At Freddy's

24.67
Idaho Student Murders, The
In Our Blood

23.33
Astronaut, The

22.67
Final Destination, The

22
Life List, The

20.67
Oh. What. Fun.

19.33
Two Night Stand

18.67
Back In Action

17.33
Champagne Problems

16.67
Hurry Up Tomorrow

12.67
Strange Harvest
Perfect Date, The

6
House On Eden

2.67
Wrong Paris, The

2
Sidelined 2: Intercepted
Escaping Ohio

1.33
Christmas On The Alpaca Farm

0.67
Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story
War of the Worlds (2025)

0
One True Loves
Christmas is Canceled


~~~~~

Words toward:

Sharp Corner
2024 
Directed by Jason Buxton

I WROTE THIS POEM THAT YOU MIGHT READ THE TITLE AND WANT TO WATCH BEN FOSTER IN SHARP CORNER

I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister
who said god
is a cigarette
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry foreskin forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that
All that having
to separate
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time

~

Baby Invasion
2024 
Directed by Harmony Korine

A machine in the ghosted and are these yes the agreed upon animals. Error prone infant, my mistake is gone forever. My favorite action movie is classism and ours is a silent one about god forgetting to save her progress. I thought it would be the eating that would be hard to devour. Obsession is a border. Sometimes when I babysit apocalypse you die behind death's back.

~

Nostalgia
1983 
Ностальгия
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

(con)text message to the brothers after watching:

probably shouldn't watch Andrei Tarkovsky and Harmony Korine films back-to-back but it's been a sec since I went off and I wish I had been not only a kind person but also a good person when we were all together on the farm that burned our childhood into a tattooed star and/or roadkill bc I am a good person now but no one knows also I think a man needs god in order to think about a man and that's about all god is good for ANYWAY Friday was super hot here and I was taking off my button-up shirt while walking out of the workplace and I got stuck in it and scared my new boss which made me sorta happy

~

Vulcanizadora
2024 
Directed by Joel Potrykus

My brother can’t get that dog injured by fireworks to leave the church. He has me try different names on the dog but I don’t think it likes being called. The dog isn’t ours, of course. Hard to know if that goes for the whole dog. I dream I write a book that can track sadness. God has been the same since eating plastic.

~

Stalker
1979 
Сталкер
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

It takes three ghosts to end the present. Outside it smells like not touching you. I don’t go anywhere without my bomb. There’s no place on earth on earth. I don’t take photographs I can look at. My body has never been a body to your quieter mother. I drink myself into walking. Three ghosts eat the mouth of an angel from the back of the very spider that called god with a handprint into hand’s only dream. There a tooth, and trainsets. Inside the movie there are two rules. We’re alone. You can’t miss it. Don’t look at photographs that answer to image.

~

Perfect Days
2023 
Directed by Wim Wenders

You cannot count people whose fingers are worried. Eternity eats a clock in paradise. Touch can’t write. Bliss is a trap. Imagine having the perfect day. Perfect forgetting. I really wanted to like that book. Some rice, some wristcutting. My son disappears but only when I think about him. I sang in church and spelled words correctly. Jesus got close to passing out but in the end had to fake it. I held small jobs in the basements of movie blood warehouses. When not dying I felt odd setting in a hospital an alarm that would trigger no meaning. Wim Wenders is a no notes name. God isn’t much. Silence in the bomb’s empty stomach.

~

War of the Worlds
2025 
Directed by Rich Lee

How desolate. Tempting those experiencing homelessness with an Amazon gift card to risk their lives...yikes. There is low and then there is hell. And then there is this.

~

Bang Bang
2024 
Directed by Vincent Grashaw

Vincent Grashaw's 'Bang Bang' pretends to take a second to get going, but then convinces everyone in it and everyone on the outs that they've been there from the beginning. Stay with it. Nelson beats himself to two different punches, and Corrigan sings sadness to its better doom. The mirrors here are made of aftermath. The cracks are there to let other cracks be. If there's a gift, it's given to those who've carried the eating.

~

A Grand Mockery
2024 
Directed by Adam C. Briggs, Sam Dixon

Dearest deep panic machine, god isn’t for the detail-oriented. The first loneliness is the most fun. We say melancholy while smoking in a cemetery because no one actually died here. Dies. I flapped my arms while painting and saw the angel of animatronic suicide. Death and trash. The far loneliness of being present. Of unchecked repetitions. In a poem about my arm a star became jealous of a cigarette burn.
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January 3, 2026 / barton smock

the scaffold top 50 micro writings of 2025

Made the Scaffold list of the top 50 micro writings of 2025. Super grateful to Steve Gergley for selecting Ethel Cain Letter 1 and angelry. Check out the list!
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0
January 3, 2026 / barton smock

design, grief, tailspin

God didn’t think
he would live.

I came here to be mean to you.

Most of what is seen is the porn of the clothed.

I lift my head and a puppet performs surgery on a weak baby.

Try, love, 
with a cigarette
to perfect
fatigue.

A deer is a crow raised by a headlight.

No one
died
the bomb
is miracle’s 
little
hiccup.

The only reason I can write about a bomb is because I have a subscription to Amazon.

For your mother
I miss
my mom.

When you’re a good person

pay attention
to your kids.

I don’t know what the body means. Terrifying. There is stuff in my stomach right now 
and your parents won’t publish an imperfect line about nostalgia.

An angel eats paper three times and a doll sets 
fake fire
fake fire to…
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January 1, 2026 / barton smock

tailspin, grief, design

An angel, when you’re sad, is an angel.

Mother means
your mom
was here.

It’s not everyday
I want
to die.

A star is a cigarette blinking inside of an unnoticed tree.

Pain disproves god. We could go

on forever.
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0
December 30, 2025 / barton smock

the beginning

Frog of my stomach, mouse of her brain. Aw, sis, we could never let the same animals go. The creatures good at hiding were god’s. A tooth tells a bitemark about the quiet inside of your mouth. I become in dreams food that in the morning my children can eat.
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0
December 28, 2025 / barton smock

words within a grand mockery


Dearest deep panic machine, god isn’t for the detail-oriented. The first loneliness is the most fun. We say melancholy while smoking in a cemetery because no one actually died here. Dies. I flapped my arms while painting and saw the angel of animatronic suicide. Death and trash. The far loneliness of being present. Of unchecked repetitions. In a poem about my arm a star became jealous of a cigarette burn.
Filed under Uncategorized
0
December 27, 2025 / barton smock

winter audio for negative self-talk


I tell my children 
for years 
no one 
remembers me 

In Ohio we choose the car
based on the deer 
it was made for 

I tell you what an angel 
tells god 

We are too drunk 
to write
this poem
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