I can hear Timmy talking and singing himself to sleep. Just an ongoing noise from the gentle machine of his awakened communiques. So, not to sleep, then. What a year, I guess. A blur of sudden absences, a proximity of quarantines each with their own acutely distant devastations. All the new death, to go with the old. The loss of traditions and the inability to go at it anew. Ah kids. I'm older, slower, up at night. I miss the age I was when I was with my brothers when, well, you know when. Small towns and enough space to keep a sound. Coffee and the cold and the sockless footfalls of the first awake. Losing the thread, but. I think of my mother and how her parents are gone, her sister too, and. I think of my father and how his parents are gone, a brother too, and. And how I haven't gone anywhere, really, for a few years. And how if I wanted to go, now, my arrival would be its own departure. The houses of my childhood, all three, gone or changed. Less is the paint of loss. Loss, up late, trying to remember its early work. Of which there is none. Anyway. Gen, Mary Ann, Noah, Aidan, Timmy - we have today. And the late work of love.
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.
God and death have each a picture of a rabbit taken by the same camera. Our mothers trade black eyes and go to eat in snow-covered cars. Sober, you fill balloons with a wasp in your mouth. I think on the rabbit. You, the camera. I lose once a year a poem about sound.
i Yesterday, distance destroyed its early work. Fog machines fell asleep. I let my son bite me and believed for three hours that it was today. You told me underwater about the fog machines. God looked like death. Death saw. ii I can be in the wrong room for days and not see my sons. I heard recently that the child of god and death wasn't here soon enough to live forever. Fuck. Write in pencil, like a ghost. iii Two misidentified boys in a field of handstands are having a funeral for a bicycle. Their fathers aren’t dead but bring the same car horn to every town. How about that field. I am not crushed when sleep forgets how to hold me. iv Birth and time travel weigh the same. I can tell my brothers when, but not what, our home stopped eating. In hell we are sad three times: sleep, sheep, spider's knee. I want to be touched. Put absence in a bird that can swim. v Brother yanks my ear each time god's fingernail has a dream. We are using a handprint as an ashtray. I keep my baby teeth. They're older than snow. vi I am late to knowing that if I write about sleep and teeth, I am in fact writing about sleep and teeth. Yesterday I described a knife going in and out of consciousness. Tomorrow an animal finds its own body beneath stars still growing the bones of god. When I tell my brothers, tell them there is nothing in the whale to read by. vii We were dogless. Animals gave us names but would call us nothing in front of god. A fire started a fire. I said it was me and I was believed. I was given the shyest room by those who wanted me to eat. I ate the room. Sex took it the hardest. A local church displayed the parts of the room it could remember. We heard the sizes were all wrong, and they were. The microscope was close, but was missing the band-aid we’d scarred across the eyepiece. I wanted it to snow but so did the invisible and their sad collection of ghosts. We’re never home when strangers kill the dog. viii Daughters with a couple words unlearned go into the blue to wonder if a father’s mouth pain means he hasn’t been lossing. The arm in my arm needs an arm to miss. There will be no paintings of this dog, she says. I am not always the hole my body needs. Here is one way to get nothing on the newbone baby. ix Two birds with one deer. Touch is touch teaching touch the backstroke. The nude think snow can die. x Time gives itself a childhood. Alien, animal, beast, breast. God loves a beginning. Painkilllers don’t age. xi God is at every funeral disguised as god the ghost death couldn’t keep xii Ghost and angel keeping between them their inside joke about bare feet. Glass brainstorming itself into a mirror. The tooth fairy losing a paper cut to god’s last baby. The job, home from nothing. xiii I read to god in my sleep. One sadness is longer than another. Touch talks the past into choosing the place. A mouse works to erase a boat. Not from the water. xiv Our television has been switched on in front of a shared lover. Last year, our sons were fingerprinted by members of the same dissolved swim club. We’re not friends. I do know that your dog lived one summer in the back of my brother’s broken ambulance. Two summers, maybe? Lost its voice afterward. They say a knob fell off a door and became Ohio. It’s not a joke I tell my son. He hears it anyway. Ohio is a sound. The bomb squad here showed me pictures of sleeping positions, then left. Say a word. xv Time will never know how long it took for god to ruin the image. Ask me about distance. I was asleep and my kids were alive. In every city, his gun says the same thing. In Ohio they found bits of rock candy in the infant’s stomach. Angels go through eyelids like water. xvi We buy mirrors instead of art. The wasps scrape and gather here then drag themselves to a higher emptiness when I hold the baby. Men lose first a button second a broom then love a dog. Everyone outside is sick. A paper cut sets fire to a ghost. xvii In the shower, I hold a plastic sword. The ways I am here are few. A neighbor kid says that god hates twins and it’s going to stick. We are years away from our daughter. After church a woman hops softly out of her shoes and walks into the high corn. To her, her shoes are missing. Silence has an extra stomach. The bird can scream if you hear it. xviii Pain is the movie our pain can’t make. We put water in a cup where it passes out. I wanted to be when young a stickman. Walk on your brother. He swallowed a nail. xix Sound is echo’s silent alarm. I close my mouth underwater and yours opens in Ohio. God overthinks a deer. I want my children to be alive all the time. xx For three years, the baby doesn’t cry. We hold two funerals for the same dog and throw a birthday party for a nosebleed. We each lose a car on the ice. We buy fish food for friends who don't have fish and it makes them miss each other. We eat in front of the baby. I don’t think we can stop. Our friends ask the year. God hears nothing but us. xxi for Damien Jurado The year-long field The eye’s blank acre A stretcher Snow’s most random skull The baby that crawls into its own stomach beneath an icicle A sleep that aches from dissolving god ~~~~~ aparture, last The forgetful shadow of Ohio roadkill The footprint’s lost scene from the snowed-in movie of your mother’s life The crushed swimmer at the red typewriter
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.
kingsoftrain 