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.
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.
wtf hey 2011
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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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.
ocean I die in a wave as a thought in a horse sleep is the itch death has for god her bird watcher skin
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
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
kingsoftrain 