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.”
I write things on an unmoved mouse in the bathroom of a dark church. You give your weeping for a year of dead internet. Forest fire for food recall in Eden. God gives too many people time to react. A crow is the egg of a shadow. My mother and father knew they were kind.
My son’s memory is always on his mind
His sickness is two sisters not murdering each other
Their surgeons
rub
a tortured
stone
Adam says back pain
Eve
baby pills
Birdbrain, god egg, blood test. Birth travels no great distance. In the dream, I tell you it's a dream. Our moms are dead. I talk about yours and you talk about yours. A mirror goes to the window to be wounded. The secret almost reaches god.
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
I look at you all day
Touch is a painting trapped in god
None of us are great
with goodbye
An entire angel
set aside
for death
If you cut a bird open, you can hear angels lying to god
Any bird
cut the hair of rain with god’s sleep
be sad with me for a mother’s hour
eat in front of our father for a year
keep time for a light switch scraping its bored magic across the stomach of an unclicked angel
find a mask
want a stomach
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
kingsoftrain 