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August 26, 2026 / barton smock

6 broken bones, and letters to Ethan Hawke (a short film by Aidan Smock)


Short film for my collection (57 Letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god)

Filmed, selected, and edited by my son Aidan Smock.
Selected by and starring my son Noah Michael Smock.

Selected works from the book:

Letter 071224

Dear Ethan Hawke

In Ohio there is a black frog with a star on its back that no one has ever seen. Men trip each other to death.

Letter 062224

Dear Ethan Hawke

I deleted this letter. This is the new one.

Letter 072324 someone smuggled a bone into heaven


Dear Ethan Hawke

Someone smuggled a bone into heaven.

Letter 062824 voiceovers

Dear Ethan Hawke

Nothing creation makes is as ghostless as a baby. If a being needs rest, then a being can get sick, get better, be killed. Pain keeps the body in the past. I drink in the present.

Letter 071724

Dear Ethan Hawke

I feel I’ve been in the room where I’ll die. My little nod to a flower is god at this hour.

Letter 072524

Dear Ethan Hawke

I am sitting on a diving board with a rabbit in my lap. Most of the rabbit is dead. I try with my shadow to moan through the water. A stillness stretches god.

~

Book info HERE
Rate the film on letterboxd HERE

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
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.”

August 31, 2026 / barton smock

rejoice

I wish for you
that you can die
thinking
on your death

The movies

got away
some
went first
The writing

suffered
so what
I stayed

as sober
as a spider
in an appetite
not long
for god
and the writing

had a silent
mother
or went
in a mother

silent
oh most
thorough
of autofictions
oh doom
scrolling
son of my son's
suicide
have you a part

for the speaking
father
I'm not

here to be sad
I'm there
and my brothers

bike
up a hill
that can feel
an ant
die
August 30, 2026 / barton smock

does your baby crawl or does it scream

You're the churchbell
of your dream
August 29, 2026 / barton smock

reflection toward Triin Paja’s ‘Rivers, rivers, rivers’ (Sarabande Books, 2026)

Rivers, rivers, rivers
poems, Triin Paja
Sarabande Books, 2026
Winner of the Sarabande Books chapbook prize

Salt, crow, let us be recognized by the warnings that turn us to symbol. Triin Paja is a poet of hermetic intimacies whose verse braids us into the miracle sickness of a world so unmoved that it matures early might its lateness give us fields of mothers and fathers looking for parentage. Paja’s chapbook Rivers, rivers, rivers is a heralding of the anti-hereditary that answers answer with the outside tending of death as a hair grown to be studied on an earth of outside losses. Its violent inquiry houses a peace that names the natural after the animal indigenous to occurrence. Left inside of the work, one will not be abandoned.
August 25, 2026 / barton smock

time is death’s boring orphan

A rock goes through a frog in Ohio and the non-addicts hear a churchbell. My son is sick and my son is sick online. To be a thing born is to know that god has never seen a face.
August 21, 2026 / barton smock

paranoia & spider pain

high in front of my family

sharing
with a doll
a thunderstorm,

the hair in my stomach turns white.

A bee fills with blood

can’t
find its mom

August 21, 2026 / barton smock

food how angels enter death

Prayer a tender spoon lost in its care for the shy mouth

Food how angels enter death

Of all
the suicidal
people to be

what made
you think

August 20, 2026 / barton smock

god

I hope none of it changed your life

August 19, 2026 / barton smock

( ‘the beginning’ entries from upcoming collection

THE BEGINNING

snow
on nothing’s
cricket



THE BEGINNING

unslept
in exhausted
stillness

do we know
god
where stuff
is


THE BEGINNING

a bomb
in time
a hole
in a child
the childhood
of that
hole


THE BEGINNING

the lost
ghost
hidden

by Eve

forever
a sickness
falling
ill


THE BEGINNING

raccoon light

loneliness
your mouth
no mouth
has

autofiction is isolating
or god
doesn’t write
about women

raccoon light

cancer in the skinned person’s empty hospital takes my cock’s confession

the beginning

grief, ashtray, arson

I talk my horror angel into never again using an oven

eggs
in microwaves
miss
my missed

& secretly

ate
teeth


THE BEGINNING

I thought they said call off the dolls. God is the different word for god. I rolled my brother’s eye under a door and into a room the color of his eye. Grief is the last cigarette of kingdom. Are you watched like god or watched like a baby? (how to tell if you’re a baby) How lonely: I dream of doing the job I have. What does a mouth do but reach for a mouth? Fall asleep waiting for an angel to eat your teeth. The child I’m selling comes with a gun.


THE BEGINNING

Dog died of old age in a motel room in Ohio

Idk seems wrong, seems like autofiction
taught time
nakedness

I’m not photogenic
being sad
for mom

I am ugly in a mirror that cares for my teeth
I washed another’s body
longer
than you

At least in hell you can think about hell

hunger
in Ohio
is quiet
for two

Each beast tires differently of god

suicide, or clothes



THE BEGINNING

Reading in code about disease-erased sadness, I left in a cornfield an epileptic no one liked. Deer and dog forgave Ohio its obsession with god’s manufactured patience. The horse that screamed scrame and my math teacher heard a glass of milk praying for my sister’s rib to break. We loved little. Doubled over orphans and weapons weapons made.


THE BEGINNING

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


THE BEGINNING

I don’t know how to be here. On the moon I was with my nephew and I taught him the best form to use when running away from snow. My knees gave out and not all of my brothers stopped breathing. I searched my father online. Mom sent me pics I needed to be there to see. My sons died in this order: daughter, deer ghost, ex-angel. My stomach took suicide as a noise stuck in a falling rabbit. It’s not hard being sad. Take steps. If your son is sick, say a prayer that he is sick long enough to sleep through AI songs about Charlie Kirk. Call your dreams deer dreams then don’t. Fuck them deer. Ohio is a hole in Bethlehem.


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 my children can eat.


THE BEGINNING

Shape has come to mean my body turns out the lights. There are no angels in the ocean. You can’t pay for my most medically alive son. Also I’ve never seen blood but bro I think there’s alot of it. I scream inside of my mother at a stone. Inside of my father’s ankle at my father. For a second I come to in the sexless bodies of my motherfull cousins and the doubled orphan christ writes to me in prose some advice on how to ruin a psalm. Oh long song of wrongdoing. Tattoo shop in a raindrop machine. Eat after me. The heart saves nothing. God even less.


THE BEGINNING

A rabbit with a bloody nose nudges in a weak world a cross to surrender its math to the slack call of collapse. My brothers paint my body in a dream where a coat’s amnesia is a crime that snow blames on an Ohio addict whose mirrors belong, belong, belong. Oh golden fetus your undug eye. Your sightseeing as surgery on the predictably sick. What would you become if it were the last creature running that your parents would see in a field at the same time? Existence reached us. Then stopped.


THE BEGINNING

I tried to write this yesterday.
My son’s hands
were almost
asleep.
A noiseless
dog
had fainted.
A pencil went dark
and I drank
to that.
August 18, 2026 / barton smock

( genitalia entries from upcoming collection

genitalia 1

In the garden
the tree
of hair

Later,
god up
at night


genitalia 2

In the dream
they shove an egg
down my pants
and start
punching

Later,
I keep my jeans on
Swim

to the lake’s
middle


genitalia 3

A man can be seen sitting on the roof of his mother’s house. He has a gun, or a stick, and some say they can hear a baby crying. I am the man’s most quiet brother. A cop talks to my brother from below and is pointing at my brother’s dog and is telling my brother that we are all going to count to three and the dog will die. My brother screams it isn’t his dog. The dog looks hurt. I think by this.


genitalia 4


In my brother
a child
asks
for a child
hoodless
boy

Later,
there is no
future
in being
the surgeon
of an angel

Lately I touch
with yours
my subscription
to pain, I love

my children too much
to be a good father

This doesn’t even go here

Imagine finishing a poem about debt

God’s


genitalia 5

In this grunting spectacle
of machines
that go
nowhere
I cannot

put my mouth
on the animal that’s having my memories

Later,
God with death’s
perfect baby


genitalia 6

thoughtless
star
unmoved
by the newborn’s
lifetime
of regret

genitalia 7

a grey
lightbulb
for a lost
moth


genitalia 8

In the castration
dreams
of bewildered
angels

or in the surveillance
dreams
of the unaroused
might one

pick up smoking
yes
to empty

the wrist of god


genitalia 9

The boy
Litmus
dies
and is briefly
dead
A dog
in the dark
mourns
the turned off
snowball
of the human
heart
Loneliness
isn’t
perfect
perfect


genitalia 10

Touch has one parent
who can draw
up to three
body types

Every parent after that uses their hands to find the thing they’ve hit you with

Let us edit our nudes in the place machine


genitalia 11

I am only
made

.
genitalia 12

Imagine being stabbed.
Now, imagine being stabbed.
I am the body my tenderness haunts.
I am the mouth
my mouth
is on. To sob, enter god. Close
the god
behind you. In and out
of seeing
yours
these are
my eyes.
A person is gone.


genitalia 13

A man screams that he remembers being a child. His last mother weighs herself inside of a piano playing a song later named something nearer to

the permanence of a crow in the snow. We play word games as a family because we think that kid is dead not living

and burned. I hide my eating at the inn and my food in the church’s basement. No one is first to the body. No one is second. The future makes what it can of faster longing. It’s not much but it’s much.


genitalia 14

Noon, moon, none. Time loses itself in the drone company’s rabbit hole of plainness. Touch reaches an age. Love no one.


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



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



genitalia 17

All has been seen by the same image. My singing is a ripped bird sent to a scarecrow. When are you going to stop writing about god asks god. My mother texts me dream’s grocery list of suspended women. Male I touch in a male way. Kill water watching my son boil. Peephole, feeding tube. Ghostless babies weigh the guilt of escaping heaven.



genitalia 18

Salt is a word you can't find in your past. Killing occurred to god but not before having a brother. No one drinks more than a fast learner turned on by nostalgia. Sometimes when we love a mom an angel cuts its throat in a noise machine. I got this tattoo in my sleep.



genitalia 19

the mouth that flew into my mouth has begun to open in yours

mouth of god, mouth of god

how do I close the mouth of god

maybe we kissed
it didn’t
fly

no image for that

two people, Eden, a spoonful of snow




last genitalia

A cigarette fills with the distance it cannot eat while a drunk man in a treehouse writes his son toward a smaller death

So what if in the future I’m thinking on the death I left for god

A lifetime of stomach pain for Abel’s imaginary friend

Dream that expected someone else