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.”
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
~~~
For most of the dream you'll be hyping-up touch to angels turned on by pyramid schemes. Every now and then you'll be an alcoholic, or be called one by your brother-in-law. You'll get hungry and not eat and both will happen near persons with a life growing inside of them. It is in that life you'll hear yourself crying like a weird baby taking over your life and the weird baby taking over your life will think they've been replaced.
Huge congratulations to my son-in-law Nicky Gutierrez on winning the Trailblazer Contest for the poetic form Zuihitsu, for solo work and collab work. Please check it out, the poems are lovely. Click on the 2026 thumbnail for the issue PDF, and check out pages 5-6, 7-8
Etymology: A Zuihitsu (5-6)
INCANTATIO: recovered field notes from the Nature Realm, collab with Barbara Sabol & Dylan Stover (7-8)
This, from Etymology: A Zuihitsu
Cloque
The snow piles higher and higher and bread is scarce. The boy, speaking in cursive, is about to depart, but his mother wraps him in his father’s cape.
Drinking comes to me in my sleep
I carry my child’s body to hole-in-the wall restaurants and ask aloud what your last meal would be. I am consumed and I am the consumed navigating a surplus. God had to keep his son from assaulting a second angel.
IF NOT FOR YOU
Eliot Cardinaux
poems
The Bodily Press, 2026
~
I want to be alive while sounding alive. In reading the work of Eliot Cardinaux, in this case, the poems in If Not For You, I am made a reshaped student of musical unease. Politically and personally worried, this verse takes inventory of its surplus absence to interrogate the defeated answer of its inquiry. If one’s own sadness sells to sorrow the powders of a depressed mime, then one must coin asking as a debt forgiven its rehearsal. These poems are angry and in love and know that to catch the dead at their name-calling our eulogies for urgency must overstay the overleaving and that our saying must keep talking to silence.
God’s plan is to follow them out of the garden. It doesn’t work, and now hunger is on the table. Cry where you eat. Have a mother.
The infant overcome by the loss of its first loneliness.
The existence
of an infant
overcome.
For us, for God.
