{co-}

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my most recent…is [pictures of god don’t sell]…December 2016…selections from previous collection ‘eating the animal back to life’, collections ‘depictions of reentry’ and ‘hick lore rabbit hole’ in full, and newer poems…link below:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/pictures-of-god-dont-sell/paperback/product-22977531.html

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recent and not so recent poems:

[toothache]

wrapped head-to-toe in toilet paper, he’d still ask for a cigarette. does this kid scream suicide to you? it’s not sexual. the name of my animal

is shape. remember the face we saw in the bruise?

~

[minutes with my son]

a harp
is the imaginary
secret
a spider
keeps
in the clockmaker’s
eighth
dream

~

[axiom]

I am the weakest person my brothers don’t know. I go with them under a blanket we won’t all come out of. hell of a word, hovercraft, but not a sucker for meaning. god torches the bathroom then speaks farmhouse to the father of the accident that never happened. I have a tooth or two knocked in by a footprint. a tick I call dust.

~

[mooning]

disappearance, firecracker
you never
get past it.

in the angel’s book on animal visitation

a deaf clown
bombs
a flower.

~

[test]

all things fish, I suspect, have forgotten to worship the devil.

/ riggers of cow-country staring contests. bread’s ruin.

~

[coeval]

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

~

[no wolf]

I was a doorstep baby and brother a treehouse.

moon of the injured. moon of the blind.

~

[forgets]

the nude’s failure to stay awake in a laundromat. the suicide of the copycat toddler. nine types of catfish. a worm’s tongue. god’s last name. the orphan’s timekiller.