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September 10, 2024 / barton smock

from ‘blood to bathe us in its blue past’ (self published May 2022)


From blood to bathe us in its blue past (self published May 2022):


country 5

A bunch of insomniacs are making short films about nosebleeds. To them I am sometimes a sound effect. Handstand or handsand, I am too young to be watched. I don't have wrists and I can't take the bath your body took. Kiss loss. Kiss loss where


country 6

Lightning as it thirsts for a stray glacier's rib.

The unsought
quiet
of a surgeon's
body.

Things
after they happen

in the sun of my disgrief


country 10

100 poems about time travel:

The child young enough to be on my hip is waving to the nobody in the microwave. The dead have a past. But it's empty


country 12

We throw seashells into a cornfield.

There are children
we want back


country 18


We've the same
last thought
Death

makes nothing


GHOSTALGIA

A drop of blood lands in an eye-sized field.

Imagine
waking up
to cry.

Hide the hidden ant of your son’s loneliness.


GHOSTALGIA

In the dream that my brother calls his haircut dream, I have a tail I'm not allowed to touch. I tell him no haircut has ever taken this long. I tell him that god wanted more kids. I am trying to make him laugh, or pray. Far mice are eating the noise from your wrist.


PARTIALS

Sister's eggshell rabbits. The hand I don't use anymore. Brother's angel emptying its stomach for the ghost of an undiscovered fish. Thunderstorm's best invisible cemetery.


PARTIALS

Memory only eats in front of god. Mothers and daughters smoke together from tornado watch to warning trying to pick up on voice changes in a neighbor's fish and in doing so make of each cigarette a ghost kite that leaves me longing to miss a more specific balloon. There aren't enough of us. Every suicide surprises loss.


MAGIC OR POVERTY

raindrop
in bathwater, the desperate
brain

of a groundhog, the moth

corrections, the actual

age
of your weapon
when left
on a bus, is touch

nowhere's
oldest
witness, magic

-

or poverty


TWO POEMS ABOUT GOD

I keep seeing the same beautiful things

~~~~~

blood to bathe us in its blue past, 217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com

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