{irenic}

15% off on all print books at Lulu today with coupon code of LULU15

my most recent self-published {paw five} is here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/paw-five/paperback/product-23198602.html

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some recent poems:

[contact]

mouth, scene one. a rocking horse drinks from a toilet. there is a ghost in the basement. a girl is circling the neighborhood in the car she was hit by. her skateboard misses one shoe more than the other. it seems to her that maybe far away a fetus is fixing its hair. she is not the focus.

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[some near thing]

it’s late. my kids laugh in a dirty kitchen. I am in the hallway having just killed a wasp for looking like hunger. the wasp is in my hand. I can’t move. the boy who touched all the eggs.

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[the poor don’t get amnesia]

snake was made
from the bones
of a circle

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[toys made in human silence]

the rock thrown by an only child. the wasp the seashell of a mother’s desert. the zookeeper’s raft.

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[atomy]

the white doghouse. the closed drive-in. the animal we shared to avoid miracle. our empty child

mostly
from books.

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[fish from scratch]

I wasn’t born and then I wasn’t born sad. old phones are the stuff of male nightmares.

~

[spectacle]

we pray to the being god meant to rob