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 my 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.” —Barton Smock
A little later than promised, but my new and selected work blood to bathe us in its blue past is available now. Love the covers that Aidan C Smock and Noah M Smock have done, and the animations that Noah M Smock has done. blood to bathe us in its blue past May 2022 poems new and selected 217 pages PAY WHAT YOU WANT can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1 or CashApp: $BartonSmock Copies for review are available upon request made to bartonsmock@yahoo.com Animations are here, here, and here Covers 1 (Noah), 2 (Noah), and 3 (Aidan), below:
country 17 a ghost with a nosebleed left by god to milk away
country 1 Death is the only absence that absence honors. Not seeing creatures up close is home . country 2 No one prayed here nor left here to pray. Hurry, math. The small gods they lower the footprint . country 3 Blue from making thin air, we could almost see the snowball in your mother's stomach . country 4 A tooth taken by a tooth. The night on one knee. A child as friendless as a wrist . country 5 A bunch of insomniacs are making short films about nosebleeds. To them I am sometimes a sound effect. Handstand or handsand, I am too young to be watched. I don't have wrists and I can't take the bath your body took. Kiss loss. Kiss loss where . country 6 Lightning as it thirsts for a stray glacier's rib. The unsought quiet of a surgeon's body. Things after they happen in the sun of my disgrief . country 7 Two mirrors praying over the glass in our food. Death continuing to believe I know where god is. The pill that remembers your one thought. The choir of alas . country 8 I made a list, once, of all the weapons I wanted you to try and then, while barefoot, I was told that god would never walk and that my birthmark was a hole I'd never see. Here are two poems about nostalgia: regret regrets not using its alias this is the wrong tadpole's past . country 9 Two poems about his gun: You can like your body but only if we can see it all at once. Sleep is the new sleep . country 10 100 poems about time travel: The child young enough to be on my hip is waving to the nobody in the microwave. The dead have a past. But it's empty . country 11 We argue agonology in the exploded ghostgrief of god. Repair is winter's last machine . country 12 We throw seashells into a cornfield. There are children we want back . country 13 A glove passed from baby to baby or a light switch left for nearby angels. A hand in the middle of being a hand . country 14 An orange baseball gives up in a white field. Birth and death no longer miss each other. A broken branch from my dog's sleep is a big deal and the saddest thing . country 15 We put the baby in the house and went outside. I wish I could be more specific. The baby was alone. It wasn't a house you could see from another baby. From the road I mean . country 16 Again the hands know which is newer. A flame yawns your hairbrush still. The toothache on the top of my head wants its own toothache. For hours the child Soft, like an exit .
* I don't know how to tell you that god comes back for everything but the mouth or that sleep was the last breathing machine to break our first. Meaning loses word. Buzz rootless in the child's bee. * After all, I did not tell you that my son's body is a cloud, his pain the duster of his bones, his loneliness that of a parent with children * In the doll's only dream, the child cuts god underwater I wasn't ugly but you didn't see me Return gives its hair to absence An elevator is lost by an angel * A pup expires with a yip in a ransacked store. You say we are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot. You can have me from the waist up. In Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card but I am her brother researching the toy exile of lightning storms. Our domestic inquiries include the sex of the first person in hell, the number of animals giving birth in the field that burned emptiness, and if Adam was Eve's great lie. The more I think of time travel, the more it can do. * memory scares itself twice or once you've a way with squirrels and pain * A train named after another train changes fields. Mirrors forget that god can't move. * God slips in and out of the bomb before it lands Snow and rain meet once Not yet * A moon-owned payphone The leaf of my pain A pharmacy trying to move a tornado Bad lighting, cigarettes, grass It's not personal * You are a certain way and look for love Cricket learns of sleep Jesus wanting there to be a god * I can't tell if my stories start in the middle or if they're just without a beginning. The last time I heard my grandmother sing, I was at rest in a boy pretending to sleep. Footprint, footstep. The hands love both. * the crawling, the baby, what if it was never me, what if it was my memory of being near the thing that's coming, and my kids can't sleep if a paint can is open and you only talk to me when I'm dying * In the dream that my brother calls his haircut dream, I have a tail I'm not allowed to touch. I tell him no haircut has ever taken this long. I tell him that god wanted more kids. I am trying to make him laugh, or pray. Far mice are eating the noise from your wrist. * I am small asking if I can bring some snow with me into the bathtub & someone starts to say no but because we're outside nothing gets finished & later to my mom someone explains how frostbite has been using our handwriting for suicide notes & pain in its unfound egg is drawing its take on pain * My neighbor on one side has a pop-gun and my neighbor on the other a candy cigarette. Both are on me to get a pool as if we've seen the last of any mother's blue-headed angel. Like most houses our houses are made of a god listening for the toothpick that sings to a crack from inside a doll. Doll I am not surprised to be with you in the same bathtub where sleep stays to remind death of its failed audition. I don't tell you about my kids. * Say poor and I'll say my arsonist son didn't sell a single flashlight. Touch is a debt touch owes itself. A warm boat left on the erasable sea. * By the time darkness touches every map, the baby is useless. God a mistake mistaken for a childhood's double life. If there is a horse, there is a horse thinking only of itself yet also on the kindness of a past horse. Sight cooks my eye in a voided spoon. * eyesight in the dream is a small cloth on a decent doll but the dress code isn't clear * I will miss your hair with mine. We don't need to talk. Someone remind longing to mourn. * I've never been in a dream like this where I can see all my kids at once. It could mean nothing. A thumbtack I've had longer than a paperclip. The sleep-getting guard of god's two amnesias. Dying. I'm not sure what you want. The animals I name in no time. * I don't remember the whole poem. Sister announcing in the shower how she's taking a thunderstorm. Another sister asking is silence a fruit. Me saying no. The dark a tiny whale fooled by emptiness. * The headless doctor whose memory of every birth is the same. The child whose skin fools god but not water. Fire in fire’s preferred shape. * The hour-long crow. The birds living bird to bird. Death, here and there, in the later stages of its disappearance. An almost father weeping on a movie set left to him by god. Weeping perhaps a poverty too far, ah. They don’t go away. Hungers that report to no one. *
The hour-long crow. The birds living bird to bird. Death, here and there, in the later stages of its disappearance. An almost father weeping on a movie set left to him by god. Weeping perhaps a poverty too far, ah. They don’t go away. Hungers that report to no one.
The headless doctor whose memory of every birth is the same. The child whose skin fools god but not water. Fire in fire’s preferred shape.
country 16 Again the hands know which is newer. A flame yawns your hairbrush still. The toothache on the top of my head wants its own toothache. For hours the child Soft, like an exit
I don't remember the whole poem. Sister announcing in the shower how she's taking a thunderstorm. Another sister asking is silence a fruit. Me saying no. The dark a tiny whale fooled by emptiness.
country 15 We put the baby in the house and went outside. I wish I could be more specific. The baby was alone. It wasn't a house you could see from another baby. From the road I mean
kingsoftrain 