{port}

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my most recent full length self-published collection is {surprise for me a crow}, and is here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/surprise-for-me-a-crow/paperback/product-23034353.html

some poems from the work:

[god notes]

putting
in flashback

birth
on the map

~

[son notes]

not at the same time will I break every bone in your body. god can brush his know-nothing tree. satan run a bath for a hole.

your mother, she’ll eat you in shifts.

~

[devil notes]

/ horns make zero sense to the boy tossing horseshoes at a rain puddle

~

[cult notes]

to find
in the moments
after
the vision
that yes
you’ve eaten
everything
in sight, that a baby

yours
or not

is asleep
in a somersault, that you worshiped

prayer and fell

for hunger’s
childhood

~

[yen notes]

our mom
to alien
you need
some clothes

/ scoop roadkill, look

marionettes
in the mouth, read

to the healthy
from a pop-up
book

on birthmarks, yeah

we spit
in the dark
let god
fish

~

[brother notes]

says he been seeing things after they happen

/ aims to bury
for free
bomb squad
dogs / thinks hell

if a scarecrow
can miscarry
in kite
country…

~

[brother notes (ii)]

I think of the wind. how all it can do is ask for mercy. do you know my mom? my sister? my daughter has a pet that disappears when famous. sadness has no opposite.

~

[salvage notes]

boy finds
a plastic
fingernail
and suddenly
he’s a rat
surgeon
washing
hand puppets
for god
in the birthplace
of buzzard
fiction

~

[church notes]

yeah madness had a motorcycle
for every
drive-thru

~

[passage notes]

ask god how long it takes to decide on a language. remember the dead bear. the sleepy spoon. ask the soul about its weakness for image.

~

[passage notes (ii)]

it treats the paintball injuries of contagious dogs. dry-humps to the sobbing of saint visitation. its sister delivers her own snowball in the binoculars of a man with a limp and a finite supply of plastic lawnmowers. I learn about its town from a poster meant to attract what’s never left. this is where I go to look like I’m here.

~

[rain notes]

I go through a whole pack of candy cigarettes while listening to my father shower with his clothes on. the bedroom window is stuck and sister is on the roof. I can’t move. mom is my dream of suicide

skipping
a generation. thunder my gutted church.