skin to skin in an unmarked life (infant cinema) shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (ghost arson)
poems, Barton Smock
© 2025
NOTES
Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio. Is the author of multiple self-published works, and of Wasp, gasp. (Incunabula, 2023)
Writes at kingsoftrain.com
~
Skin To Skin In An Unmarked Life was originally published by Trainwreck Press in March of 2021
Ghost Arson was originally published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in December of 2018
infant cinema was originally published by Dink Press in April of 2016
shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner was self published in June of 2016
~
SKIN TO SKIN IN AN UNMARKED LIFE
March 2021
MY SON FORGETS HIS SECRET IDENTITY BUT REMEMBERS WHO I’VE TOLD
Grief cuts itself from the movie it wants to make about wind. I design, sometimes, hats in a dream. I don’t mean every word. I thought loneliness would be taller, that’s all. Not this god who knows we exist.
SOME OF THESE CHURCHES AREN’T MINE
I don’t have anything poetic to say about names beyond that we killed the animals in the wrong order. I remember a rabbit disguised as milk as clearly as my dog does a dream of a whale moaning a verse from its lonely size into a bullet hole meant for something smaller. I’m not sure that wordplay tricks trauma out of its inheritance, though suppose it’s possible that incompletely by accident the fleeing angels of our absence return harm over and over without a scratch to a satellite touching itself in a photograph developed by god’s avoidance. In a town for homesick people who use sex as a lamp, there’s a first time for everything except recognition.
AS IF SNOW WAS TOLD TO FINISH SNOW
Loss gets older and befriends its childless parents without knowing which of them placed a glass of toy water beside mirror’s bed for the you in all those video games where I stopped moving
BONES FROM AN EXTRA MOON
father making book covers in the nude
his longhand moving in the veins of a giant
his name an ant sleeping in the center of a band-aid
what if the end stops coming
a crow is not a star
the eyes know nothing
but know it first
loss is the salt of now
NO GREAT TURTLE TO STRAIGHTEN THE DEAD
no great turtle
to straighten
the dead
no
not here
in Ohio
an Ohio
that eats
its weight
in spiders
an Ohio
of slow
obsessions
effortless
sorrows
a lifejacket
on fire
a pebble
named
after blood’s
ear
a thunderclap
the late
crawl
of a dizzy
child
A SLOW LAND
in the mother’s dream
a brother and a sister
watch a movie
without a name
a movie that between them
is called
This Is Not
A Dream
there’s no one
in the movie
water holds an animal
and sometimes
there are buildings
that buildings
describe
death gets to name every baby but its own
FAR NOTES
In my son’s eye an unnoticed lamb has forgotten which eye
gets a lamb
-
was there a moment I was wanted
past life and all, was there
a nest a whale, has this
been me
in a mothered
before)
(looking at a pill while picking a flower
time
temporary
BLOOD NOTES
there is no earlier dream
no slipping
from the past
of every beast we haven’t eaten
-
god has two sticks
dog
and echo
-
all snow was born in a cigarette
BLOOD NOTES
Loss isn’t the only child of death,
but is the most spoiled.
-
Disappearance has its limits.
-
Animals
don’t waste
their pain.
-
Sex remembers death as the skinner of sleep.
-
Touch invents a past it can fix.
SECOND NOTES
a birthmark the shape of a bird’s cough
inside of which a wound
is bidding
on a shadow…
I don’t know when sleep became the movie I put on to fall asleep.
children are the past.
FIRST NOTES
sleep became sleep when it missed its audition for death. what keeps a mouth in place? think loneliness, say dream.
-
what the ghost does over and over is bring suicide into the story of angel.
-
when you have no one, creation devours your discovered hungers.
eat fast, and let god believe.
THE CHILDREN DON’T LISTEN TO RUMORS OF THEIR HUNGER
The children they dig a hole and give the hole a name and a backache. They ask was I ever their age and slip a housefire-in-a-seashell under the pillow of an endless angel. It’s not what I say but in truth the older a thing gets, the younger its god.
COUNTRY SILENCE
has a father worshiping a balloon animal and a mother caring in her sleep for sleep. has a sick son relearning in church how long a past life lasts. has you writing this beside the ghost of a fish to a god whose thoughts on children have changed. has in it no maker who hasn’t already made field recordings for those who miss emergency rooms. has in it owls lost in the attention span of the gentle. owls born with all their teeth.
INTERIORITY
A mid-day animal on land dumbstruck by the holy effort it takes to forget god. The nocturnal grief of apples. Alien and angel having a quiet moment before abducting from the high-dive our least favorite swimmer. The naming of the star my cigarettes worship. A pawprint sleeping on a heartbroken whale.
BLISS NOTES
I live in the future with an animal known to predict nothing.
It runs out of food when I forget what it eats.
-
In my wrist, the heartbeat hidden from me
by my ears.
-
Eye:
The first fossil of my blankness
-
God only takes suicides.
SLOW MISSINGS
fog’s invisible feast, a flashlight
kissing the itch on the face
of god, the toy
baths our machines worship, the hunger
that returns my ear to my father’s
stomach, the soundless
fasting
of owls, the first camera
that knew what would happen
ATTENDANCES
A palm overtaken by the long audience of touch, a hand
left for god
by a spider, a child
packing snow into the dream of a mother’s knee,
a shadow
eaten by a rock, a rock
eating nothing
in a church, the angel
assigned
to a lost
microscope, the order
in which
we’re imagined
ABLEIST JOKES ABOUT THE MOON
Tracing his toes, my son breaks a bone in his finger.
It’s scary because things mean more in a simulation.
Somewhere in his body his body wonders
if it’s unguessed by god or by ghost.
Bath. Both.
Sabotage time not yet
LOCATION NOTES
It was sick for three minutes and lived for eight. I haven’t seen a picture in so long that I’m not sure you’d know me unless I was there. The dream is using us to remember god.
-
We weren’t alive long enough to stop pretending we’d lived. If you don’t have something in your hand, don’t get a dog. I open my mouth but am still saying star.
-
The interior life enters heaven here or there in a bitemark. No splinter leaves a painted church. Distance is one meal. Longing, a puzzle.
-
The deathplace. Our losskiss. The inventors of déjà vu dropping everything for touch. Touch with its borrowed memory and urgent past. No one mistaking noon for none.
LOCATION NOTES
Darkness never gets to every creature. I like that it tries. A cigarette taking sad thoughts from a ghost made of breathing. The ant-same memories of a toddler.
God doesn’t change, and knows it.
-
Do as nothingness has done
and cover
that scar
with god
-
There is a room
that knows
where you die
LOCATION NOTES
As quiet as a doll’s neck
a bell
dies
for the wrong
church
-
I watch it again and again
your goldfish
outlive
a bowl
that’s frightened
of sleep
-
No animals were created in the making of this harm
LOCATION NOTES
In one stopped car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. In another, my sister takes photos of her dog. I leave my own car to find the icicle that will become the mirror’s rifle, but I know I’m to be killed by the wind for a thing as big and as little as rattling a scarecrow’s keys under any table that ain’t been set. No story needs told yet here we are outing angels to a god best remembered for how it covered the noisemaker’s brevity. Does shape forget its poverty, or poverty its shape? I ask you on a train about the wheel you’re asleep at. If the food came early, we’d call it starved. Dying is a chew toy. Be as unmoved as your attackers.
-
Loss changes its name to loss and then back to loss. Time runs out of death. As a kid I wanted there to be a fish that was alive because it was the only fish. The gone, to themselves, will always be the last to have left. I don’t sleep and you don’t sleep and together our not sleeping is a blessing that disguises scarcity. But god has nothing and keeps even less.
SCARED OF MY SON’S BODY
there is in fact a time
exactly like
the present
AS ALONE
as aliens needing god
LAST NOTES
again we speak
(they are making
it now)
the forgetful
weapon
/////
INFANT CINEMA
April 2016
god save mantra. the baby. the unicorn tantrum. god save the ventriloquist. the museum of shrinking things. the things themselves. the angel working the knots from an extension cord. the exodus followed by the exodus of my father’s turtles. god save the condom. the flag of the scrotum. the handcuffed mother of sleepwalking illegals.
lordy that’s a lot of people
observes the refugee. what the dream tells us about the headache is worth repeating.
I cross my legs in the soul’s bathroom and suck on the business end of a squirtgun. if I jerk enough, I can make the newspapered floor into a headline that reads season slows for Ohio toddlers. I can’t remember the last time a toddler ran past me or, for that matter, the last time a toddler ran. god save the translucent. the abused are never more alone than when their abusers get help.
my child. my diver who wets the bed. my worrier who rescues domestic scenes for animals accused of gaslighting. my swimmer. bather of grasshoppers. my lovely bird alone in an airplane.
two things to do on an empty stomach are:
hold a séance.
follow the spider’s trail of abandoned birthmarks.
in the video, the young woman is being force-fed cake by a man with a ruined tongue. my mother can’t eat and watch at the same time. your mother is holding me and wondering what happened to this thing. our fathers are veering into the realm of film criticism. where you are depends wholly on my sister’s makeup. god’s parents have no concept of time.
what was pain? was pain the spoiled dog of the blackmailed priest? was pain the story of the bear that triggered my father’s insomnia? before it began to go everywhere without him, was pain god? was it holding the note so long the cured forgot they’d been? or maybe it was entering the high corn disguised as my brother mid-seizure? was pain a rival church? as we ask, is death being made to account for its own disappearance?
I am on vacation and this dead body is kind of amazing. you remain my sweetest brother. brother, god is only the end of the dream. I dream the ocean is a doll that comes to my knees. suicide has a room all to itself. can narrate what I’m saying.
I smoke because I can no longer tape record my anxiety.
it became outgoing. buried fish by the bucket in the backyard. brushed my teeth while calling my mouth the secret of the washrag. boated darkness from stone to stone. chose to love. loved duration.
inside my father I can’t hear one tv over another. I have a body fit for radio. I picture my mother as a woman who can eat without moving her mouth. the people watching the fight want to be seen looking at it. I’m not the only one pretending to cheer. my first word was said to my first dog. that dog told dogs to give a fuck.
she is pregnant and he is not. at the same age of the boy before me, I am given by sister a blindfold to place on any woman looks like my mother. there are so many. I tell myself it’s my body and my body where every bone believes that god lost his eyesight to a vision man had of a moth bumping into a crow.
nightmare: her father prepares the pull-out bed to show her Jesus is gone.
I know you from Adam.
one of us is dreaming I’ve entered your body. brain injury or no, I feel I can do whatever the devil can do to the scream that wakes him. who was it found me with god’s help? I have some names. all middle.
one could create food with a mouth like that. one has no stomach for violence. one swallows like a gunman whose right hand knows you’re missing the back of your head. one is a chewing machine. one is quick to cook for the tortured. spoonfed, one is hunger. artifact of the longest meal.
your human life distracts god from the animal’s plot to kill him. those tagged as dog meat can eat their weight in nostalgia. in the end, your mother will confess that the absence she felt was an oversight. as for the world I took you from, you’re all it can think about.
insomnia sends to the attic the dog-walking angel. the dream’s cripple breaks its own thumb for losing a child’s nose. some melancholy kid explains to my son how there’s a fly in the body being sad about bones. my son nods his head as if sounding out the severity of his mother’s double vision. disability, like belief, has the patience of god’s ghost. has the time gone from nothing’s noise? god save the book of now. I don’t want to be seen as a person.
god does my mother’s work while father lands a night job as a yard sale cashier. my sister continues to believe her baby is a lightweight. my brother goes from motorcycle to breathing machine and back. dogs pace and cigarettes last. the postman’s darkness moves into a paper doll at which point he asks satan for an airplane. I was here when I got here.
satan worship expands to include birdwatching. the first thing a boy hears a father say is enough about me. such a boy finds his mother not only talking to a bird but telling it what to do.
she shakes the baby she thinks is fruit. she screams at my mother for covering my ears. at home, I am made to tell father the whole story which has somehow come to include a fork. it is not uncommon, he says, for an ugly person to hold a fork where others can see it. then: two things can light the cigarette in your brain, and one is masturbation. now: a good ghost story gets you into heaven.
grief. grief in that, beside any baby, I am the one person competing for my loneliness. grief in that my brother’s fasting secures a pair of scissors.
grief in that I glow in the light.
oh skeleton made in my image. oh you. oh you and your baby. cereal of ant bones. oh the hills of the uploaded hills. oh men men only. quoting the born. collected sorrows oh passing of the nest. church of the stalled car. oh as we attend.
sickness paints the house of my mother’s conceptual therapist. the devil urinates in public as part of a retrospective honoring the films my dead brother didn’t make. as a ghost, I am given to haunting the confessional. I hear little more than how my mouth is a magnet for baby talk. the beauty of the father isn’t pain. pain can create the present it predicts.
open with
in the numb habitat
it calls home
where an example
is made
of clone
sadness…or,
if it learns to walk, it’ll never be the same.
the child asleep in the astronaut’s photographic memory. the child asleep in its father’s arms. the child asleep in worry. worry as an inquiry attended by the stairmaker’s angel. what do you resist? helplessness. as in arrest. as in christ.
if found unresponsive, know I am doing one thing well. if god was alone, why speak? torture is part of my country’s space program. ask any swimmer if the body ends in the body.
headaches that keep a mother from needing shoes.
nightmares
not about
dissecting
the piglet
but dissecting
the wrong.
dreams
of feeding
a snowball
to a scarecrow, of not feeding
the disabled.
/////
SHUTEYE IN THE LAND
OF THE SACRED
COMMONER
June 2016
poetry and god share the same quick death.
I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.
it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.
existence is the wrong inquiry.
I was destroyed by an angel
for having
taste buds.
/ a pinkness
went on
without me.
if touch is all it can manage
the hand is poor.
I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.
when lightning
has emptiness
to burn
feed
the fasting
doll.
I am old and nothing brings me joy.
I did
good things
but I
was asked.
drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.
my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able
to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.
and what
would forgiveness
do?
my kids were never born. yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.
when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.
I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip
when my stomach
hurts.
it puts me on my stomach
this grief
you have
for the switched
at death
–
god’s color has returned
–
the male
animals
in the grey
barn
knew
–
first
I want to say it is yes yes
puberty’s
painted
egg, the island
clock, the genitalia
of alarm…
I want to say it is orange
like bees
like
not all
the hymns
not all
condoms…
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.
he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.
he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet. he says mouth.
I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.
he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag
and your mother
is the outside
world.
the robot is a virgin.
the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.
–
I want your work to matter.
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit
facing
my father
he strokes
a large
bumblebee…
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me
a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss
of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound
of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s
hair
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god
–
had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia…
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a sex toy
having
a seizure.
I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was
(in a coloring
book
for cigarettes)
beaten
by a baby
a baby
could love
I go with dove to high
dives / I am on
the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine
months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s
hormonal
christ
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood
on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb
all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow
a hair
in the house
birth
built…
–
can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double
hell is a book.
she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.
attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.
nakedness,
give it time
to recover
into something from his childhood
a man
is born. never
far off
what crawls
her way.
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.
I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone
lightning
straightens.
church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.
me
praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.
for proof
of animal
suicide.
a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of piss? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?
/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.
/ year eight:
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.
the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.
the egg is dropped
and the owl
stoned.
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?
I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.
something touched
is something
mourned.
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.
praise headgear, worship eyewear.
adore nostalgia, forgive
memorial’s
constant
vigil.
say god
three times, then
say mirror.
this is what you mean, kiddo
what you mean
to a bomb
/ it doesn’t help god
that god
is awake
for what
does the torso
pray?
the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.
sister
she ain’t
been calm.
when grief
was password
and not
codename
when gift
horse
was horse
fly
when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-porn
(on who)
to remember
god
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood. inside
was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean. a boy whose mouth
was never
here. all those I’ve met
I’ve left
alone.
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.
I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark. I compose
at my lowest
a crucifixion
story
from the basements
my father
wired.
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool
we yawned
at the same
time / brief
painless
the unmothered
between
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…
we are the dead
we’re here
to return
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.
that, and when did you know.
/////
GHOST ARSON
December 2018
PERIAPT
I saw nothing fantastic.
an angel
freezing to death
in a somersault. a mirror
coming out of its skin. emptiness
the size of a pea
no pea
empty
VEIN
in the blue church of my father’s thirst
I wear it
(hunger)
like an eye-patch, and emerge
starless
from the uncooked blood
of my shadow
SCANSION
it feels wrong to pray in an ambulance
hear god / all the time
CLEANING THE BODY SMALL AND BOY
the brain a nude
in the remoteness of god
DYING BOY WHEN DID FATE BEGIN
there was a radio somewhere in the basement and we knew this because it would click on long enough for us to cover our feet and question our savior’s second go at amnesia. if I wasn’t there, I was probably trying out my father’s fastball with a grip he called the ribs of my neighbor’s dog. not long from this I was holding a baby and said what a vague hiatus. also in this order I may have said you look like a ghost and then not my finger but a finger does snap into place when I smoke.
A GUN GOES OFF IN A DREAM I DON’T HAVE ANYMORE
the root of the animal’s insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.
-
when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.
-
grief is the herd my sadness trails.
-
my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.
-
before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.
-
while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.
-
death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.
-
trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud that in your recollection are the horns of an empty beast.
-
as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today. above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having. we do our jigsaw of darkness. clone the ape that created god’s boredom.
-
I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.
ELEVATION SONGS
there’s no great detail to go into. her baby in a medicine cup, our small priest
making us feel poor in the bathroom we don’t use...
-
a face from the world’s flattest mirror
MOONHOOD
as if waiting
for you
to hallucinate
it is there
the sea
-
eating secrets in a dream
is the owl
with hands
-
I think we buried
darkness
wrong
STARLIT
after staring all day at a birthmark, father asks can he wear my glasses. done growing, sister breaks her nose. shadows mother from birdbeak to mudmask.
WRIST MUSICS
grief
is a red-haired jesus
whose barber
puts a dollhouse
mirror
on my mother’s
tongue
blood
is water’s
favorite
child
at the baptism
some agree
that my father
knows
his milk, others
that any creature
on four legs
has one
ghost
knows how
to swim
GAMESHOW FATALITIES
it is a midwestern vaccination to declare that eventually everyone you know will exist. I have been leaving clues. One model airplane per claustrophobe. sleep works but only if you picture god as a toddler studying a map. chickens don’t dream. tornado takes up for glacier.
-
dear grief, was it ever just us? you, the hesitant psychic of sorrow. and me. there to lower magic into the rabbit-death
of a cornered orphan.
-
on a normal day, there is a before and an after and a bit of mystery to the meal-obsessed. father says we’re fasting in
a world of spirits. my shyness is a chair sent from a distant church. my belly button is how the marksmen touch me. our house is chosen by strangers for its elbow room. the
baby is a ghost and will be until it starts teething. brother has a pencil and sister her longhand’s impossible loss. mother is checking the dogs for ticks by the light of a bulb from a hospital lamp. grief makes a cat because it’s what grief can do with its eyes closed. anything unplugged is able to remain a secret. every mouth is a nightmare nightmares notice.
-
narrative is dead. is not a boy with a long illness.
-
see my brother in some who are not. my son as my son. a tooth as the mirror of milk and milk as having hair god longs to comb.
see one of my children worrying less about suicide and more about where it should happen. see: tub. see: easier for a mother to clean.
HOUNDLINGS
–
as hunger’s sole worry is that revenge has no one, I do not reply when the boy gets an erection so painful that he says he can see me sleeping in his past. what does your stomach know of mine? to believe in beauty is to let blood do all the work.
–
it’s midnight and our mail carrier is trying to recall aloud a proverb in a language she doesn’t know. her hound, barefoot and dressmaker, has two names. she wants to smoke but can’t bring herself to imagine god’s forgotten thumb. her tv is on and I watch it as if dreaming was always a sin.
–
it skips our father like a language the meal she pulls from her tinfoil purse and god he stops at the roof of my mouth and brother short of beheading an egg…
(fluency
our only comet
–
as written, the word
why
looks a thing forgiven mid-bite. a chicken scratch left behind the ear of a boy by an angel erring on the side of pink. a puzzle piece blocking the airway of a god with a tail. a worm suspended in the grey afterlife of a swimmer
once the weigher of nothing’s limb.
–
grief the star of my overlong nostalgia
& owl the mouth I put on god
(in dream the embedded curfew
–
god is just a patient creature that swallowed a lonely. did you love him? as an infant blowing kisses to a bruise. a mother born to look seen.
a father has these dogs:
death, sound, & ageism.
UNTITLED
‘sister played outside with a broken arm
and the wind turned her into a constellation.’ – Allie Gilles
a piece of ice
in my mouth
I’m kissing
a screen door
in Ohio
eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate
and doll
the first
eating disorder
in space
RETURNING
my angel is a scarecrow in a sleeping bag. heaven a movie theater in spain. she walks that way because she is trying to step on her blood. the boy at the gate is lost and must choose either frankenstein’s childhood or a more diverse nostalgia. orphans on earth smell like bread.
WRIST MUSICS
this crow
with its black
worm
knows your father
feels loss
in the neck
STOPPING TO PRAY
how angelic
the nervousness
of insects
offering acne
to god
/ to glacier, crow is not
yet a thing
GESTURAL TRANSPORTATION
in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.
-
I am quiet but nobody listens.
I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.
-
after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed in full view of the elderly.
-
while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank, the moon is the bottom of a prop tree. there are egg shells on the floor of heaven.
-
the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his home in a delirium brought on by a toothache. also, Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.
-
god goes from wall to wall unaware he is god disguised as a graffiti artist.
renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.
-
in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not. forgiveness works alone.
-
I have never seen an attractive god.
CONCERN
I pass my son in the hallway
instar
and throe
our unpracticed sleep
our elbows
he learns this way
of my mother, her father, the nothing
time does
NYMPH
yesterday I sent to my mother grief as an attachment
-
it continues to matter
the spell
your god
is under
-
(what began as nostalgia is now
BEE PAIN
all of your mother’s paintings have two names. father with cigarette or jesus
meet ghost.
-
four pounds / of my birth / were missing
SNOW
say even god / would leave / this church
to step on the bones of a star
RARE DISORDERS IN THE VERY YOUNG
in a nightmare
(praying over
his father
to highlight
the size
of the first
computer)
he disproves
god
(son) who breathes
for a snake
made of milk
BOY MUSICS
we’re counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed sex shop in Ohio when I tell you my father is gay. it’s too late for crow and all the deer have been hit. you have just read me three poems by your dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister. a vacuum is running below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.
TUBE FEEDING
the boy who in the middle of performing a handstand finds god just as she’s creating the oceans after being overtaken by a herd of ghosts
THORN
the dream
bread
of insect, horn
of dust
REMOVAL MUSICS
flicking cigarettes from the highest car of a stopped ferris wheel, we sing at how sex is the centaur’s trap door. you
are telling rain
not to look. there are jobs
no one gets. abacus / mascara / there are words
responsible
for your mother’s
face. it is more pregnant
to bury
a footprint.
MUSCLE MUSICS
a tadpole
in my mouth
I pin
with my knees
my smallest
brother
our first
kiss
on the cross
of the startled
mime
DUST MUSICS
the treehouse oven, the breadlit
moon- so what
he don’t remember
right or left
which hand
shot
his brother, how many
fish
per nightmare
CORE MUSICS
i.
a long-legged owl
its blood
gone to heaven
her shadow
drops everything
ii.
I don’t eat where I eat
iii.
ear-shaped mirrors. junkyard deer
THE UPPER BODY OF THE MINOTAUR LOST EVERYTHING
mother prays for odd things. like passwords. and that there be one day a mirror she can warn.
-
my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left. he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.
-
my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down. before I can play doctor, he remembers he has a story he wants me to write. in the opening scene a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.
-
your sister is the only person on record to have been born without a gift. I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal the size of which escapes me.
-
excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to fuck to get fucked around here. at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet and later to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.
-
I know it’s early but I need you to make sure there are no bugs on your father before he goes to work.
I STILL BRING SNOW
I think mom’s new dog must have the bones of a kite. I have a lover, now. a he, a beekeeper. a she if she saddens in the nearness. a nothing, a dowry. ghost china. spacesuits for stillborns. under this blanket, a puppet reads to a doll about light. under that, the shape of what goes blind in a poem. I miss you. plural. I don’t wash my forehead. I still bring snow.
HOW I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER MY SISTER
in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down
the ice cream truck
with her bible, or
as farewell
to nothing’s
church
of neither
BEING ALONE WENT BY SO FAST
we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,
inventory, very motherly.
this one-man radio show about a father looking for his mouth. this tornado.
my first owl was a bee-loving tick. my first
milk
was jigsaw
milk. being alone went by so fast.
RABBIT HORNS
a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.
-
I saw my youngest brother born. I saw his mouth. I thought he’d ripped.
-
the dark, the ocean. I have two reasons to believe god has not stopped creating. my anger has gone the way of the milkman. his doomed child with her piece of chalk.
-
it is childish how much time she thinks I have to touch everything in the store. I am slapped so hard I am sure the mirror’s memory is for show.
-
my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower. at home, my mother puts a clean shirt on the bed and jumps from her death.
-
I am secretly happy that you’ve taken an egg for each day of your life to a doll so doll can sleep. as your mother, I often follow a black ball of yarn into the lake of how you remember.
-
a male mime bites into a bar of soap…
-
her father is just as she imagines-
a man not making siren sounds pulled over by the man who is.
-
you will know the hoof of satan’s chosen deer by the way it glows when any female announces from the seat of a stilled tractor that she is pregnant. you will be the age of your mother’s baby bump, older than your father’s knife, and lit by the grape in god’s mouth.
-
I am in the saddest grocery waiting with my mother for the happiest bike repair to open.
-
dodgeball, no one sad.
SAILBOAT
his sister, three years away from leaving social media, has a boyfriend whose depression is a feminist. darkness lands again the role of weather. on paper, his cough is somewhere between cricket and cross.
PRAYERS FOR SMALL
that I be baptized by a vandal whose frostbitten hands…
that I could touch you with what I’m seeing and that a thing be worth
no words.
BY HORSE I MEAN
dropped from a hand-shaped dream
were three fish the length of my beating…
-
your ghost town anthills
this blank
taxi
seeable
porn
-
by horse I mean
thing without a ghost / that we followed with our hair
MOTIVE
I threw
a couple sticks
and waited
to be kissed
on the arm
while my brother
licked
from his leg
the first insect
to have
amnesia
pretty soon
after that
our sister
bought a car
that had hit
a puppy
the puppy
lived
and god
was hooked
OHIO MUSICS
a call-in radio show
the listeners
of which
are asked
to describe
loneliness
in their own
words
(sexual
farness)
to a coal worker
or a clown
ON PEACELESSNESS
no jump
scare
this losing
of child
to sheepish
math
HAVING A DISABLED CHILD
means
it is enough
this morn
that the weak
kneed
angel
of small
hands
dreams
from the disposal
the rabbit’s
foot
RESPONSE MUSICS
I thought girlhood the boyhood of grief
childcare, handprints, the failed hearts
of octopi
toy / on a stair / left there / by doll
god (memory)
making its way
through the useless
infant
myself
an impressionist
(because all
my mothers
faint
A PRAYER FOR THE TALL MOTHER WHOSE CIGARETTES VOID BREVITY
piano that disappeared
milk
that didn’t…
feather in the stomach
of my angel’s ghost
GHOST ARSON
i.
so happens
that his first
circus
reminds him
of the circus
ii.
any creature
smaller
than a dog
should get back
in the dog
iii.
I lost my hair
or began
to lose
my hair in a cornfield
PREDICTIVE TEXT
he knows three languages
but hurts me
in one
-
our baby hasn’t spoken in years
-
we were left two insomniacs
they are slowly
picking teams
-
satan has no memory of passing through deer
MOOON
moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly? my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail. father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be shot
by many hands.
ASKING
can I miss
my body
with yours
our blood
the loneliest
bone
RAREFACTIONS for Kazim Ali
pain has no spirit, I am never
so sad
that I can’t
scrape
the neighbor’s
car, probably
you won’t
survive, babies
are all
the same, I recite
what sounds
pretty, it seems
less happens
in the winter, to animals
and bread
WAKER
mouth pain / in a clean / house
-
the weight
of sister
-
the passwords of worried creatures
a stroller’s
body
of work
-
treeless (quiet)
MATERIALS
mothers
while jumping
rope
reminisce
on those
crucifixions
not postponed
by thunder
MATERIALS
eating for the child lost by ghost, you are the second of three people who know god’s middle name. oh how I’ve written to avoid reading. to impress death.
a babysitter’s tattoo. the bird-sleep of ache.
MATERIALS
she is cooking with the father of an ex-lover a meal for someone who’s just had surgery. god is there but might as well be listening for thunder. she hopes the dream is not a big deal.
INSOMNIACS FOR THE HEALTH OF YOUR GHOST
in one dream, a carousel horse. in another, a stomach.
-
dream is a shortcut
SUPPLY
mother and father
pass
back and forth
a bruise
they call
wristwatch
how long
was I drunk
learning curve
of cocoon
KITE
even
longing
loses
me
/////
kingsoftrain 
Leave a comment