kingsoftrain

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

~~~

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)
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