God keeps the house small. My head in one room, scissors in the other. I’ve lost my sister but can hear now and then her cheering for an insect. I tell her that we had stairs until our last dog went up them. Gravity comes from the wrist of a paper doll.
This is just to say that my sons are not AI and did the covers of my two most recent poetry collections. Collections are pay what you want. untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages poems, Sept 2021 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock 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
Not so much what nightmares are made of, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Earwig is more a maker's portal into the pain-shaped minds of those terrified of having more dreams. Lost and beautiful, it employs identity as a loneliness that pinpoints the vague. Earthy, paranoid, violent. I don't know. Take a breath. You're the someone else you want to be and sometimes I think of all the bodies I came back to you in. ~~~~~ Beth de Araújo's Soft & Quiet is a doomscroll of hidden proximity that will tattoo insomnia on even the most thoughtfully awake. I'm not sure I can recommend it but know damn well it needs to be seen and looked away from in equal measure, and vice versa. Difficult and driven, it deserves all be present. Its one-take illusion puts its menace in so many real places that one feels followed, directly beside, winked at, and eye-level with peepholes marked for repair. As art and as document, it is too true to be based on anything, and is instead ripped into existence by an air breathed by characters who sleep beneath empty symbols and make nothing of vandalism save what's already been carved onto the surfaces of their untouched and wrongly examined lives. It's dark here, in the light, and we know these people. ~~~~~ Thomas M. Wright's The Stranger is a bewitchingly downbeat true crime thriller both anchored and spirited away by the eidolic performances of Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, each of which use a resigned urgency to centralize the haunted hinterland of retroactive pursuit. Edgerton eats worry in his sleep, and Harris sees friendship as starvation. Evil here grows older by being younger than time.
I only exist when you’re not thinking about me. If we don’t answer the phone, we’re not poor. Death is afraid of god. And god, of nostalgia. I faint in a gas station bathroom. You have that dream, that lake, a coin stuck in the ice. In the movie, an unnamed animal smells smoke. The movie can’t get past it. The children don’t get up.
people will say they'll say, but then won't. and I get it. time and finality and a thing done loses its unfinished allure. but I hold the following somewhere handless because it is that close. and I've said things about things and the people behind those things have kept silent. but this below keeps me above at times. Considering Ghost Arson as a collection, there are obsessions or at least repetitions: owls, milk, ghosts, etc. The pinnacle obsession being god in all forms and personalities (“you picture god as a toddler studying a map” or “the airway of a god with a tail”), the word itself repeated nearly to the point of semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits James, who also suggested that the phenomenon could be employed to ameliorate phobias. Consciously or not, perhaps Smock is attempting to exorcise a theophobia. Conversely, the recurrence could be a mantra reverberating across poems. – George Salis ~ some recent: RETURN CRY One hand broken, one hand dead. A ghost using a tooth as a bookmark. A bathtub owned by two dolls. I can’t keep coming back here to get younger. List, poem, paragraph. This whole year, neither bee nor jellyfish. I see my brothers. Rabbit miracles in the long past of god. RETURN ANIMAL Lightning paints nostalgia on a star. We say field in unison. Then grocery cart. Our fish-bitten father carries his fever into a photograph. We use language as movie extras too alone to be killed. The outhouse burns as a demon. Two sticks to its name. RETURN BONE Pregnancy puts a jump rope on the moon. You hold your baby over a dog until you don’t fall asleep. Paw five only works in the snow. RETURN BODY We are home when they turn off the water. Son slides a sock puppet down a naked window. Each of us becomes a sound afraid of a different footstep. The window falls asleep. The dying forget how to stare. RETURN ILLNESS My son doesn’t hear god but does a wall eating behind a wall. Book spines. Legless birds. We keep our guesses close to the stomach. A scarecrow turns to salt. Time exits pain to kill a fish. RETURN TOUCH Her poems about swimming are all in the same book. You look too long at the photo of a hand. The food is hot and it hurts to be naked.
Her poems about swimming are all in the same book. You look too long at the photo of a hand. The food is hot and it hurts to be naked.
My son doesn’t hear god but does a wall eating behind a wall. Book spines. Legless birds. We keep our guesses close to the stomach. A scarecrow turns to salt. Time exits pain to kill a fish.
We are home when they turn off the water. Son slides a sock puppet down a naked window. Each of us becomes a sound afraid of a different footstep. The window falls asleep. The dying forget how to stare.
Pregnancy puts a jump rope on the moon. You hold your baby over a dog until you don’t fall asleep. Paw five only works in the snow.
kingsoftrain 