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February 23, 2023 / barton smock

against poems

I miss not thinking of my body. I miss young pain. Pain that didn't ache, didn't overstay, that welcomed god but did not invite. All this haunted eating. Age 47, and the writing should have gotten better. Far appetite, melancholy is a lonely loving.
February 17, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

Pain, born born, is a color that has no color. 

Thunder shakes three blue doors.

I call everything a field.

Angel learns from ghost how to put a cigarette 
out 
on a mouse

without hurting
the mouse.

To be abandoned
Eat
February 17, 2023 / barton smock

{ words toward film, Seth A. Smith’s ‘Tin Can’

With harshly deadpan imagery, Seth A. Smith's Tin Can is a distantly fed close-up of tiny starvations. Anna Hopkins gives her character both strength and weakness and is able to differentiate which moments are realization and which are revelation. If all stories are doomed, revenge seems to meet a different maker than love. Class, age, access, protection...I don't know. Kick against that loneliness, tip it over, and still humans are what separate us from being human.

February 16, 2023 / barton smock

No Farther Than the End of the Street – poems – Benjamin Niespodziany

No Farther Than the End of the Street
neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany
Okay Donkey Press, 2022

~

How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness.

~

reflection by Barton Smock

~

book is HERE

February 14, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.

Cutting the hair of the crucified.

Stars
and jobs
and stars.
February 13, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.
February 10, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

Nude I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.
February 7, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

The sleepwalker and the insomniac asking god to switch their hidden pregnancies.
A vaccine for object permanence.
The fly my ghost calls rain.
February 5, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

This church doesn't have a bell. 
This angel

has no bee.

Pain resets god.
February 2, 2023 / barton smock

small poems against dying

People leave the room to talk about god.

I become someone else
in my sleep.