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February 1, 2022 / barton smock

first poem about sleep

an unreal child

its masterless jaw
& invisible fast
January 31, 2022 / barton smock

ghostalgia xiii

I am small asking if I can bring some snow with me into the bathtub & someone starts to say no but because we're outside nothing gets finished & later to my mom someone explains how frostbite has been using our handwriting for suicide notes & pain in its unfound egg is drawing its take on pain 
January 30, 2022 / barton smock

partials,

Grief is that sibling who's tired all the time but still moves a pill from friend to friend while believing that if you watch a movie before anyone else then the sex scenes are real. Our version of musical chairs has us adding 

a chair. I don't get hungry. No one 
wins the baby.
January 29, 2022 / barton smock

ghostalgia xii

In the dream that my brother calls his haircut dream, I have a tail I'm not allowed to touch. I tell him no haircut has ever taken this long. I tell him that god wanted more kids. I am trying to make him laugh, or pray. Far mice are eating the noise from your wrist.
January 27, 2022 / barton smock

iv. (response poems for Benjamin Niespodziany

Body language being kept alive in a ghost town.

Wind's missing child 
can't get sick.
January 27, 2022 / barton smock

( some further words on caregiving in the a.m. w/ odd but maybe not so odd appearance by Ethan Hawke

so up late/early with the hauntspeak of worry and general sense of appropriate doom but also appropriate play and how there is laughing and being silly and the reason no one tells you how lonely it all is beforehand is all in the words before & hand so here I am still in the mathafter of this dream where I was being chased by a demon and I had this oversized tote bag with all my stuff in it and I'm running in and out of closets and jumping turnstiles and the bag is just keeping me from being my fastest self and I end up in a hotel room hallway and out of a door on my left emerges Ethan Hawke and he takes the bag from me, empties it, and in the bag is a smaller bag...and he puts all my stuff in the smaller bag and says he could use the larger so I say it is his and then we are going down this spiral staircase and I hear the demon hissing and Mr. Hawke tells me to go back up and he'll go down, so I do, and at the top of the stairs I have this sudden stomach pain and look down and my insides are coming out and I fall down the stairs and when I stop falling I am on top of Ethan and I roll off of him and he starts taking all my insides and shoving them into his stomach which I see has a hole in it and then of course I am no longer asleep and think now that I am up and worried and alone and in one piece maybe I'll watch Adopt A Highway as it's the only Ethan Hawke movie that's come out recently that I haven't seen and maybe this will save my son this watching this not sleeping this having of my own insides
January 26, 2022 / barton smock

( recent words toward films ( Sundance

Was able to catch four films online at the recent Sundance Film Festival, so, said some things here and there.

~

Goran Stolevski's You Won't Be Alone is an awestruck and forged thing of first creatures and last acts that makes up both words and silence and puts them together to say body in a way that doesn't forget the teeth or how to pull them from the stories of the horribly bitten and damn if the lit work of Noomi Rapace, Alice Englert, Sara Klimoska, and Anamaria Marinca doesn't keep a lonely fire, hold the quiet, and give it air.

~

Misshapen and willful, Hatching is a vividly off-kilter horror movie of painted-on happiness and colored-in connections in which director Hanna Bergholm gives us both the double lives of the dead inside and the lonely ghosting of those unsurprised to be caught on camera.

~

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. 
January 24, 2022 / barton smock

.(some words on caregiving. where else

I keep shrugging. the children lose me or their mother or both. they are right beside us but we are weighing the weight of the sick with the lullaby that listens for our ribs to crack. this takes nothing from the lovely. subtraction wasn't born in a day. yesterday's builders 

didn't finish. it is not sleep it is watching paint sleep.
January 24, 2022 / barton smock

ghostalgia xi

the crawling, the baby, what if it was never me, what if it was my memory of being near the thing that's coming, and my kids can't sleep 

if a paint can
is open 

and you only talk to me when I'm dying 
January 23, 2022 / barton smock

two poems about longhand and one for Ohio’s nothingness

The rental history of that kid who killed himself who loved the soonest animals of my siblings whose girlfriend was named after a website who joked that his girlfriend was named after a website who got fired for watching porn but then had to wait because of the snow that kid whose note wasn't cruel to god whose note somehow made it to my mother and then to yours and then our mothers did not there pass but knew in secret the number of years that would between their dying