{boy(s)}

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I recently self-published a work there called {the boy who touched all the eggs} which includes three previous full-length collections as well as some newer poems. book preview on site is book entire. if you’d like a free PDF, or a free hard copy if reviewing, please send a request to me as such at bartonsmock@yahoo.com

book is available here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-boy-who-touched-all-the-eggs/paperback/product-23225174.html

some poems, from it, below:

[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?

~

[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.

~

[bring roach]

how long might satellites mourn? sickness took the lord. a scarecrow the pulse of a cricket.

not every image was worth the effort.

~

[agonal]

the wolf in stork’s nightmare
speaks dolphin

what do I miss

my blood
your collection
of pea-sized

pillows

~

[untitled]

why does uncle
love baseball
and throw
so hard

what’s a city

kid I come before you
knowing full well
I won’t remember
my answers

the left hand is for pawing
at the broken
rabbits, these buildings

think god
will jump

who does memory
impress, who

can it warn

/ I left you for nobody else

~

[keening (xviii)]

I am the least, no

I am

–

look what they’ve done
to the lightning, dad

to your scarecrows, mom

–

all the toilets were in the trees
the trees were taller
a flat

bird
how
the fuck, roadkill

was on
the moon

~

[keening (xix)]

a chicken with two heads. a burning bush. a cane only a dog could love. a barber whose hair, nevermind. an arm cast bearing the hangman’s faded autograph. invisible milk

and the nothing you bring to my godless poems.

~

[flights]

i.

a brother
on the roof
with his raft

and the white mouse
his baby
takes
like a bottle

ii.

the coming
of radar’s
crow, the lights

of illegible
ambulance

~

[entries for pedestrians]

the future sees itself as a man unable to be forgiven in an Ohio of pawn shops and nakedness

~

[entries for children]

remember, it is dark and memory is god painting with the blood of those he would create

~

[annihilatives]

as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue

dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine

go on, birth
take silence
from a baby

~

[cattle]

father won’t say sea. there’s land
and there’s land
underwater. troll

eats architect. in a field.

~

[goat season]

brother kicks a turtle
down track
and trains
take only
deer

~

[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.