from ‘Wasp, gasp’ (Incunabula Media Oct 2023)

From Wasp, gasp. (Incunabula Media Oct 2023):

birthplace 9

God learns about bones for three days in a treehouse that we pretend is on fire. Violence tells our bodies where we are. I can’t love our children more than once.

birthplace 15

Survival begins to mean don’t kill god. I am in the summer of my summer body. Nothing I touch actually turns into a spoon but I’m still careful and sad from the waist down. I keep my arms busy in front of people holding babies and fall asleep that way.

birthplace 19

My classmates are describing their perfect meal. Our teacher’s son has died recently in an odd but peaceful way. Three coats so far smell like cigarettes. Angels undress when I eat.

birthplace 24

Swimmer’s ear. The far bone. God dreams of ants and surgery. I name a wrist but nothing scrapes mother awake. You’ll lose two kids and a garden. 

birthplace 62

A groundhog fills with blood beneath a stop sign. Everyone in the car is playing dead. I’m doing my best to make it look like I’m holding a gun. My hair is made of grief and my fingernails of sleep.


HICKGNOSIS

Field, woods, hill. Moon, milk, man. Reading month as mouth. Nine mouths until the babies live longer. A simple dog barking at a rolled car. Specifics. A brother born hoarse. Earrings in the stomach of a city deer. Me not wanting one of my hands. Intimacy on three, pronouns on two. A violinist, an electric chair, and a lost erection. Someone my age.

Sleep, death, leapfrog. Two infants swallowing a blip from the same radar. A few pianos made of frostbite. Reading moan as moon. Then moon as moan. A circle writing a poem for god. Hipbone, jawbone. Teeth brushed over a bowl that remembers nothing. 


AGAINST ARTISTRY

I cannot enter the dream. Not with my toy stomach. This is how we don’t meet. How we don’t pass the age our children were when they died. Jesus rubs a scarecrow the wrong way, or better yet a burned boy presses a tick into his own head to silence the field of his father’s empty helicopter. Jokebook, bible, kingdom. I don’t know where we are. A bullet and a tooth are found outside of the sheep they touched in. The ocean is the ocean mistaking blood for god’s hair. Longing gaslights nostalgia. Underwater, Ohio looks like an ear. I give my son a television to throw at the television, but he forgets. Orphan, widow, elevator. Every time we go to hell, an animal gets its noise.

~~~~~

Wasp, gasp.
Barton Smock, poems
Incunabula Media, October 2023