UNKILLABLE ANGEL GOES TO THE CINEMA
poems, Barton Smock
185 pages (hardcover)
September 2026
back cover image by Aidan Smock
in-book illustrations and photographs by
Noah Michael Smock
Jude Smock
Mary Ann Gutierrez
Aidan 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 is HERE
Some words toward it by the holy poet and person Mick Parsons are HERE
6 broken bones, a short film inspired by my collection (57 Letters to Ethan Hawke)
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
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.”
The sound of god vomiting
I don’t care about stars
In the beginning the angels all gave birth at the same time to babies that knew how to fight and Eden was the biggest place they could think of. You are the only record of your non-existence. Curate your alienations. Angels give each other haircuts that don’t burn.
take this image home with you
before I see it
My children
longer and longer
look
the same
never see
says ghost
shadow die
recently,
a snake collector obsessed with surgical scars
took three photos of god
and three
photos
from. Online
goes online
remember
Heating a baby’s tooth in a spoonful of blood
don’t know
what god eats
how long
it should last
The meal
Only after Eve loses the child
does Adam
find God
Unclench
Marylyn Tan
The Glass Chapbook Series 2026
Time can’t find its way out. Marylyn Tan is a poet whose verse wounds longing as a thing untaught in pop-up anatomy classes. If Tan’s previous work Gaze Back found that the abyss never changes its password, then Unclench digs a hole for the glass eye’s ghosted vision. Appetite is a spell the stomach learns might it unteach the body. Desire is a creature that switches gardens to improvise god. Normalization a food that tricks the child into an upbringing made of wax. Tan knows that the interior stretches its own imprecise radar over skins touch will only hear of. Listening, here, can throw its voice.
I play my son’s cough
for my son
Two of his eyes
miss entering
god’s dot
of a home
I make it up
where I can
his loneliness
But the rest
The holy person and poet Mick Parsons said some words toward 'unkillable angel goes to the cinema' HERE
Am stunned, thankful, unworded.
UNKILLABLE ANGEL GOES TO THE CINEMA
185 pages
September 2026
hardcover, with in-book illustrations and photographs
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
~
~ some work from the work:
SON, SHAPEN
in the poem
I leave
the poem
to situate
his body
I DESCRIBED YOU TO MY FRIENDS AND THEY ALL CALLED THEIR MOMS
I know your son is dying but is your son dying in the next room. Touch is touch because we’re born asleep. I’m out of details. I thought I could drink myself into you caring about the poor. Invent time and god will say it already happened. I have everything once. I work on my vocabulary in a poem about snow. Fucking fucking snow. My brothers aren’t awake. That’s not loss.
BODY
I am so unhealthy and so ugly that I go online to find images of the bugs that brush her hair. You could be dying, and I’d be impressed by an angel. I don’t know what I am to autofiction nor what autofiction is to a mother who puts her child underwater to keep it from the rain. I dare you to be godless enough to convince god there are gods aplenty. My shadow buys a tattoo with a watermark. None of my children own a gun. I think there were two tombs. A world where that’s more funny than sad. Blood, bread, beast. The cow’s communion of ghost milk. If I drink it’s to the cigarette that mutes my strangulation’s alarm. So late was blue to being a color, ah. Everything gets away.
GENIUS
I put a dog in a goddamn poem and a poet wrote me saying that dogs don’t do that. It wasn’t every dog. Let me drink. Let me be brotherless in Ohio cutting my hair with my wrists in a prisoner’s dream. Beauty and body sound the same to the dead. Don’t love me. Here is a story: I put a dog in the backseat of a bloodless car sneaking snow into heaven that once wouldn’t start so we pushed it past a sheep so still you said fuck that sheep picturing itself as a mother in the mirror of an assaulted angel. Probably. Write, say. There are beasts that like nothing.
THE TONGUE ROLLS TIME INTO THE CIGARETTE OF A PUZZLED GHOST
for Franz Wright
Life is indeed vague and inaccurate. All my days, I've not remembered seven straight. Don't touch my mom and dad.
OUR MOTHERS POKE HOLES IN THINGS THAT DON’T BREATHE
I break my nose in front of a deer beneath a star made of ticks
My sister’s hand bleeds inside of a puppet
A naked person I don’t know loads a small gun behind the head of a grey haired child
I know the kid
Move kid
~~~
