TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE
poems, Barton Smock
125 pages
October 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
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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.”
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.
It’s morning and I’m cutting my fingers off in front of an apple
My daughter
makes a noise
so small
her hair
can be heard
A mirror
for its things
has come back
From which hand
Where morning
In a pop-up museum for handprints
my abuser’s
sleep
is eaten
by spiders
oh ghost
of waiting
what
does it mean
The child
has me
to remember
I could no longer write about my father,
my mother, my-
A stone made its meal in the dark
I walk into three churches with the same bomb. When I am shown the video, my dog starts to choke. My dog the same dog that once ate all the snow in our neighbor’s yard. My sons got death threats that my daughter did not. No one dies from loneliness. Ask them. I was invented like you by the person who saw me invented. Sickness is heaven’s shy witness. In the gods that I learn about, I am very sad. My father’s hand lives on darkness and on the two stones it threw. I wasn’t my father for so long. I was dying but I was not my aunt. Faster, nakedness. Teeth tell my bones the time.
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 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 11
I am only
made
kingsoftrain 