(fist)

[horseface]

you strike me as an invasive listener. I love your body. loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes. does this make me look alone? like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone? my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with. horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare. earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant. if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.

[extramural (iii)]

the fireplace is on drugs. get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

–

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold. jesus-on-a-stick. the crown of thorns, extra. I close my eyes. I dare the brain. the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

–

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful. I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams*

*dreams only

–

everything happened in 1985. words don’t mean. numbers mean. tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

–

the wind is asleep. it sleeps outside.

[notes to abuser]

I have had to tell time using only repetition. there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t. I can see what you see in me. none of my sounds echo. I have a son. I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own. he has three rooms upstairs and three down. when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

[themes for patience]

I am half
the survivor
I ate for.

I took my son to a bowling alley and gave him an egg.

my daughter’s sense of touch
was so delayed
she lost sleep
thinking

of all the things that had turned into her hands.

communion was god’s plan to leave heaven.

[ice fishers of men]

exit music for stop-motion departures.

a son
a dying breed
of circle.

can light
perfect
a shadow?

[nature shots for baby]

mother’s inhaler is what you called the mirror mother held to size her mouth. I was in her purse when she was taken. I don’t know how it is I know things. bones in the stomach of god.

[debut]

the mechanics of the beheading begin in isolation.

exiled from what it bumps into, a form
aches
for scarecrow.

my mother’s dream doesn’t burn.

[anterior]

three sisters
old enough to date
enter a house
their father
can’t find. a bit of my mother

is seen
in this woman
going out of her way
to give satan

directions. a drug dog

on its last legs
inspects a used
vacuum cleaner, the lawnmower

of lost
men.

[praise act]

you pull a reddish pup like a sled through a town that surrounds you.

I think you are my brother but more importantly you think I am yours.

you feel not like yourself but like a tooth you belong to.

up ahead, we work together.

I pop myself in the mouth with our father to achieve a crisis of no faith.

our father?

he is made mostly of the words that display my words.

[care] for Timothy

when you are
visibly
healthy

I will sit blindfolded
beneath a tin roof
and wait for rain

that I might know
what you hear
in your drifting
basket
about which
pluck
the lips
of those
fish

I thought
I had come
to feed

[there are those we could not evacuate]

father sees the doll in a striptease window.

mother touches the doll
with kid gloves
that fit.

brother hears the doll
brushing the teeth
of its newer
version.

the doll’s feet stick out
from under a hotel bed
marooned
in the ceiling’s
mirror.

thinking the doll has vomited
sister gags.

[honeymoon]

he emerges from the driver’s side of his stalled minivan as if you’ve been given too much information. he holds a hammer in the looseness of his stung left hand. for a moment it seems he’ll attack windows. instead, he cries. his shoulders give him away. not a car horn sounds. this is a kindness. someone has an egg timer. I locate the itch thrown off course by my lover’s legs and imagine her happy. across town a silent alarm is pressed by the anonymous smoker of wedding cigarettes. the bomb squad arrives before the bomb squad knows it and you join

this bomb squad.

[deceptively simple abominations (vii)]

the twinkle in your mother’s eyes alerts god. my thoughts are abused. our fathers live separately. will we live, also, alone? surely. to any inquiry, I am checking for survivors. it’s a premature periphery, but a baby just floated by in an incubator. the townspeople look like candles on the water. chase is a kind of following. the upper body of the minotaur lost everything.

~

all poems by barton smock, from different collections available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad