Skip to content
October 4, 2022 / barton smock

aparture

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.
October 3, 2022 / barton smock

poems for termini

My sons keep the microwave quiet. 
Their handprints

do nothing.
October 3, 2022 / barton smock

( some words toward Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, and then two others to see instead if you need to misremember

Blonde is wholesale maddening. Director Andrew Dominik loses the thread early, but seems to know it? And I'm not sure that's any better. It's an odd movie that would steal scenes from itself, but, here we are. While Ana de Armas almost takes the child out of childish enough to keep beauty, and Julianne Nicholson is a heat that leads bottles to lightning, nothing leaves a mark. Aside from the first 20 minutes, and one scene with Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, this movie is so much tell that the show is secondary, and no amount of body horror or spiritual indictment can survive on image alone with writing this obvious and unquiet. It might have been the point, but the experience isn't strange enough, and the relief is always in sight, no matter how much is left onscreen. Too much sabotage, not enough self.

-

While keeping confession pinned beneath the unholy ripple of Tim Roth's flickering muscle of a performance, Resurrection, as guided and committedly freed by director Andrew Semans, is a film of secret chaos and bodily left turns that lovingly loses its permission to a possessed and wholly overtaken showing from Rebecca Hall. While surely mad and caringly unpredictable, it wouldn't be able to talk its tongues without the work that Grace Kaufman does as a child who moves the happening from under the accident with a waiting lonely enough to cradle the hurting young and uncarried old.

-

Elegantly untouched by director Nikyatu Jusu, who knows that stories are owed their belongings, Nanny is a delayed stunner of a film that never feels behind or slow but instead, and in line with the spiritual and physical fluidity of Anna Diop's fictile performance, stops and starts in a depth that feels both timeworn and newly doomed. 
October 3, 2022 / barton smock

installment six of Lou Poster’s ‘The Kindness of Strangers’ (at Schuylkill Valley Journal

Installment 6 of Lou Poster's 'The Kindness of Strangers' is up at SVJLIT.COM
October 2, 2022 / barton smock

softspot, last

the movie is still in pain
I can't read
tell everyone
October 2, 2022 / barton smock

softspot

hunger pains
or the match
scrubbed across
my wrist
do you have
other sounds
a softspot
perhaps
as egg
for snake's
neck
as any 
angel
for angels
drowning
at a puppet
show
I still
choke
in the unstopped
car
September 30, 2022 / barton smock

softspot

has stork for any news of god's weight gain

headache for the avoided faith 
touch traps 

in the thumbs of unkissed extras

icicle 
for the wasted 
bone
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

waysides

It is not healthy to write about god. 
Childish to die alone. There is 

some happiness. 

Loss finds a way out. Few 
of the pill's 

bones break. 
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

rekeepings

I undream my mouth with soap and tape. 

There is not 
always 
a rifle. The invisible 

they can't 
sleep
I am so 
ugly
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

( misc. cities from ‘untouched in the capital of soon’

city 70 or 71

The short past of my body in the small
of yours

A baby chewing on its hand in pile of leaves

-

city 72 and 73

The boy has one mouse

All named
Cigarette

-

city 74

In its shadow grief the window

in the open
Mirror

-
city 102

Angels buy footsteps with pictures of the poor

-

city 103

Your mother enters god in the ghost you painted for death

~~~~~

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

*include address in notes section