Sickness knows that sleep makes us human.
I die
then the day
changes
Huge thanks to all at Poetry at Sangam and especially to guest editor Sophia Naz for selecting six poems of mine for Volume VIII / Issue 5 (December 2020)
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Sophia Naz:
Barton Smock is the poet about whom Kazim Ali said that “All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.” Barton’s poems are diaphanous enigmas and the fact that they defy logic and can’t be neatly boxed into this or that category is precisely their beauty. God appears a lot in Smock’s poetry, but he is always a lower case god, disconcertingly intimate. The saints and Sufis of yore would recognize Barton Smock as one of their ilk.
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*The author photo is of me with my grandfather’s pipe…which means something to me for the right reasons. My last publication had a photo…
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Have put together a collection of work less present to present, self-published. Am not thrilled with Lulu’s new cover options as they are limited unless I want an ISBN and title page and no those aren’t really things I want. Am more toward font and unfollowable handprint but the guts of the thing still make the right shape.
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rocks have the softest shadows
poems
Barton Smock
237 pages
Dec 2020
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CONTENTS
pages 1 through 41, DIETS OF THE RESURRECTED
pages 43 through 80, from AN OLD IDEA ONE HAD OF STARS
pages 81 through 167, from ANIMAL MASKS ON THE FLOOR OF THE OCEAN
pages 169 through 208, from MOTHERLINGS
pages 209 through 212, AFTERNOTES
pages 213 through 235, New Poems
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13.00
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
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work from the work itself:
we talk of teeth and of how…
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My eyes when closed live forever in the knees of the awestruck.
–
Dear grandmother, grandfather, aunt-
All absence
loses shape.
–
By not killing us, god lost the power to die.
This water a math that measures the longing of the abrupt
This bar of soap a tooth preaching the failed bite of god
It is not easy
washing my son
(dog a dog drowning in a car made of blood
It’s not so much that death takes, but that death doesn’t take everything. Still here is the hole we made in our ears to record a decoy’s breathing. Still here are the toys we shook to soundproof grief. And here still are the bones, thunder-fled and broken. If I say god, I mean only that a stickman gathered itself in time to impress a scarecrow. If I say them, they trace with chalk the dreamless stone.
In my wrist, the heartbeat my ears hid from me.
–
Eye: The first
fossil of my
blankness.
–
God only takes suicides.
I live in the future with an animal known to predict nothing.
It runs out of food when I forget what it eats.
In my son’s eye an unnoticed lamb has forgotten which eye
gets a lamb