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March 23, 2022 / barton smock

( if you’re poor enough, snow takes the pulse of the moon ( bits of the said and the placed

Ohio sexuality:

A private pencil erasing nobodies from a blue past. A way for fish to keep passwords from God. 

Far notes:

The bomb is never here long enough to know it’s found us. Son in bird years you’d be dead. A stomach holds on to its hand-shaped sleep.

~~~~~

BOOKS, self published:

rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages
poems, Dec 2020

untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages
poems, Sept 2021

PAY WHAT YOU WANT

can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1
or CashApp: $BartonSmock

pdfs at GUMROAD

~~~~~

excerpt at Anvil Tongue of 'rocks have the softest shadows'

some poetry at SangamHouse

interview, at neonpajamas

interview, at The Collidescope

March 23, 2022 / barton smock

country,

country 1

Death is the only absence that absence honors.

Not seeing creatures 
up close
is home

March 22, 2022 / barton smock

partials,

Until recently, touch believed in my eyesight's past life. Time needs loss and loss the jailer's missing nudes. A stone starts over.
March 18, 2022 / barton smock

poem at Obliterat Journal

Please check out Obliterat Journal (@obliterat_)

They disappear with purpose.

A poem of mine is gone today, there tomorrow:

https://twitter.com/obliterat_
March 16, 2022 / barton smock

magic or poverty

language ruins language

-

magic
or poverty

-

sleep is the bruise my blood won't eat
March 16, 2022 / barton smock

magic or poverty

magic
or poverty

a cicada
from a paper
cup

-

in each drive-thru
a delicate 
absence

-

eat I guess
like you'll 
go missing
March 15, 2022 / barton smock

alive in a salted mirror, rain

Alive in a salted mirror, rain remembers my grandmother pulling me from the ocean 

-

I live in a god that cannot touch a nerve
March 14, 2022 / barton smock

v. (response poems for Benjamin Niespodziany

Loss sees its mother in its mother. Not all of us die. 

-

In hell, one forgets

hell's naked 
birds

-

Empty says it has a twin. 
Far says nothing.
March 11, 2022 / barton smock

two poems about wingspan

afraid
of the world
then afraid
of the world
again
March 10, 2022 / barton smock

( ghostalgia ( entries at 16

I don't know how to tell you that god comes back for everything but the mouth or that sleep was the last breathing machine to break our first. 

Meaning
loses word.

Buzz rootless in the child's bee.

*

After all, I did not tell you that my son's body is a cloud, his pain

the duster
of his bones, his loneliness

that of a parent
with children 

*

In the doll's only dream, the child cuts god underwater

I wasn't ugly 
but you didn't 
see me

Return gives its hair to absence

An elevator is lost 
by an angel

*

A pup expires with a yip in a ransacked store. You say we are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot. You can have me from the waist up. In Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card but I am her brother researching the toy exile of lightning storms. Our domestic inquiries include the sex of the first person in hell, the number of animals giving birth in the field that burned emptiness, and if Adam was Eve's great lie. The more I think of time travel, the more it can do.

*

memory scares itself
twice
or once

you've a way

with squirrels
and pain

*

A train named after another train 
changes fields. 

Mirrors forget
that god
can't move.

*

God slips in and out of the bomb before it lands

Snow and rain
meet once
Not yet

*

A moon-owned payphone

The leaf of my pain

A pharmacy
trying to move
a tornado

Bad lighting, cigarettes, grass

It's not
personal

*

You are a certain way 
and look 
for love

Cricket
learns of sleep

Jesus wanting there to be a god

*

I can't tell if my stories start in the middle or if they're just without a beginning. The last time I heard my grandmother sing, I was at rest in a boy pretending to sleep. Footprint, footstep. The hands love both.

*

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 

*

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.

*

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 

*

My neighbor on one side has a pop-gun and my neighbor on the other a candy cigarette. Both are on me to get a pool as if we've seen the last of any mother's blue-headed angel. Like most houses our houses are made of a god listening for the toothpick that sings to a crack from inside a doll. Doll I am not surprised to be with you in the same bathtub where sleep stays to remind death of its failed audition. I don't tell you about my kids. 

*

Say poor and I'll say my arsonist son didn't sell a single flashlight. Touch is a debt touch owes itself. A warm boat left on the erasable sea.

*

By the time darkness touches every map, the baby is useless. God a mistake mistaken for a childhood's double life. If there is a horse, there is a horse

thinking only of itself yet also
on the kindness 
of a past 
horse. 

Sight cooks my eye in a voided spoon.