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December 7, 2022 / barton smock

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.
December 7, 2022 / barton smock

Barton Smock

wtf hey 2011

quantumpoetry's avatarquantum poetry magazine

Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with a wife who is her own and their four children whom are not property. He has recently self published, by both angel and demon, a book of poems ‘the paper dolls have been cutting your hair’.

signage

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs. my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened. soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I was startled. startled too that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad. I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of…

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December 5, 2022 / barton smock

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.         
December 2, 2022 / barton smock

needles and land

ocean I die in a wave as a thought in a horse

sleep is the itch 
death has 
for god

her bird
watcher skin
December 1, 2022 / barton smock

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

December 1, 2022 / barton smock

aparture 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
November 30, 2022 / barton smock

aparture 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.
November 30, 2022 / barton smock

and star

a fish named tooth decay

a spiderweb 
in a pill
bottle
November 30, 2022 / barton smock

untitled, aside

Dear you, I am at a word for loss. My brother is alive and shows me where the bullet

hit another
bullet. I am poor. They talk about me

like I’m here.
November 30, 2022 / barton smock

highs

The first fruit to be forbidden was made in a lab by two children who’d died in a treehouse from not knowing when to eat.

The angel
avoids
orphans.