{ syncope, current, misc }

RECENT AT {ISACOUSTIC*}:

poem by Kelli Allen:

person Kelli Allen, a poem for Daniel Deardorff

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poems by Danielle Hanson:

person Danielle Hanson, three poems

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reflection on Aria Aber’s Hard Damage:

{ Hard Damage – poems – Aria Aber }

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AVAILABLE, PRIVATELY SELF-PUBLISHED, WORK:

Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean, 114 pages, 10.00
poems, June 2019
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1

MOTHERLINGS, 52 pages, 4.00
poems, June 2019
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1

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on GHOST ARSON:

Glen Armstrong at Cruel Garters:

https://www.facebook.com/Cruel-Garters-162917133824108/

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UNFINISHED OR FINISHED ELSEWHERE:

( diets of the resurrected )

The baby has jumped. The baby is trying to find its place in the home of having done. The baby will land and maybe you can say something over it in that voice you do. In that voice your mother loves more than ruined gender-reveal balloons. Cold prom balloons. Than your father’s spit. Than a star. Horse’s forehead. Than a horse clapping for a lap-dancing horse.

The baby will be dead and bleed like a dream. For now, it licks without you the insides of a tree. Have you read its book? It wrote a book.

When an Ohio rabbit stops eating, every couple not married thinks they are. This is how baby, not how rabbit, happened. How babies not how rabbits. Ohio.

The baby was on a date and began to feel sick. Suddenly, the baby’s date was able to crawl. It crawled into the sea, or something nearby. Something nearby is always the sea. A neighbor girl in a pillowcase. All of her, the whole thing. And then the sea comes that thinks it’s the sea. She is saying we have bones because angels don’t know how to eat.

I love the baby. Apple’s footprint I love the baby. You love the baby and you lord often that you’ve a more alien emptiness. The baby can’t see mirrors. That’s not why it jumped.

Jesus wants to come back, but god isn’t old enough.

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I remember as a brother I fought with mine for the number of toothbrushes we could spot in a horror movie. I can still tell what’s caused a bruise by the baby it’s on.

Baby the thinking man’s miscarriage. Lung’s lookalike. Lung’s missing lookalike. Psalm the plural of palm.

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The baby slept on and off in a prop oven. In Ohio, holding your breath underwater is called insomnia. We wrote poems with lines like does anything look more abandoned than a table of contents? Titles like priest of snow, pipe tobacco w/ showerhead, and abuse was better as a sitcom.

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On tv, the baby guards a salt lick while wearing the crown of thorns as a belt. Outside the tv, a random sister pulls her thumbnail loose and a paper doll starts to breathe. The fish watches all of it through a hole in the fish.

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Its favorite movie is the wind. Its mother found its father waiting for a cat to die.

Is there no one to hold its mouth?

Even god is afraid of sex.

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Mom I am the third boy to finish my wolf. Mom the baby likes you when you’re eating. Mom the snow has picked the water clean. Mom Ohio. In the food you couldn’t help.

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Some history:

The baby had heard of a quiet glacier searching Ohio for the lost belly button of nothing and so left us in God, the capital of Death.

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Absence spares no one.

Birth
keeps a record
of who
birth skipped.

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Loss is just an absence that’s outlived its helplessness. I say this knowing there is a tree that my mother keeps two of her teeth in. I say this unsure of the shape my stomach makes when on the moon my siblings gather the bones of god.

Our skin is afraid of angels. Have the baby that makes your ghost cry.

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( AFTERNOTES )

i.

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of her son’s feeding tube, she says the shadow in her stomach has pulled off its ears

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distance is the god of those who don’t need rest

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would any one of you cut the baby

into thirds
to make

me a mother?

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is that circle dead?

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ii.

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about the baby,

has it forgotten how to smoke

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mom she rolled ache into our socks at a gas station

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there’s no one to tell
my eyes

I’m early

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to the quiet of egg sac

anthill

are ankles
lost

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iii.

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and here I tell my son, who’s never heard a cricket, how long I believed in god.

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