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.”
I am as lonely
as a clue
as a kitten
coughing
near a suicide
note
Our son’s name is mispronounced
by god
We shorten
everything
Death weighs
itself
in an app
genitalia 16
A boneless deer in the dream resistant stomach of an angel
The mouth
model
for the loneliest
mouth
award
The single-use hand of god the boy
Shape’s collection of entry
forms
I am looking
in this photo
for the grave
of my eye
Barren is the doll of my drinking
A star
learns
the names
of flowers
In pen I write
youngly
on my sneakers
dialogues
for my abusers
Mousetrap, megachurch
Babies hear themselves born
genitalia 15
A cricket listening for god
The longing
of the ocean
to lie
down
The plain search history of our saddest child
Father’s
job
younger
younger
God the next
cricket
time
can't stop
a movie
I pressed
my body
for answers
no
for no
reason
I sometimes touch a very blue nowhere
Not with myself
Mom
I take it back
The loneliness
genitalia 14
Noon, moon, none. Time loses itself in the drone company’s rabbit hole of plainness. Touch reaches an age. Love no one.
JOHN’S TABLE
Lesle Lewis, poems
Piżama Press (2026)
Again the world is much worse than I remember. Who can I talk to, walk toward, now that my room’s been taken from me and given to a door? In this inner, in that, the poet Lesle Lewis is still the author of John’s Table. Each place I leave becomes a church. I leave early because there is something inside of my hand that has never been held. I’ve read John’s Table just this morning and am convinced some not all ghosts got together to straighten their story of paradise might the angels let them be. What I mean is that there is a surplus of theater goers secretly abandoned by those called to build homes for extras. Lewis writes ‘this is but this is too’. I have been trying to write all morning in this order: sadness, body, yesterday. Someone here is in the hospital and they are doing the third math of loss and they feel small but are even smaller in the accident footage sent to them secondhand. Lewis is a poet of the unguessed whose verse presses for calm and for the missed vein. Whose voice records itself twice being comforted by the eldritch curiosities of its normalcy. What comes first, sure, if you can predict without knowing what comes next. If you can find it within another to do so, get this book. Lewis wrote the whole thing.
Here is your life.
There's no
magic.
Love your kids.
kingsoftrain 