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 \/\/\//\/\/\ excerpts FROM [rocks have the softest shadows] Lone high, Ohio: stars, I guess and a trapdoor for a certain kind of turtle and stars for sure ... Lying to the basilisk: You spoke to me through an egg for so long that the back of my neck changed moons. If I think hard enough, I can still see your mother putting in her mouth the glove her god treated like a baby’s hand. I cook a mirror. I cook for an orphan made of sleep. Will our breath always be the bone that didn’t make it into the wing of thirst? If it’s a boy, pick for an alien a flower. Dogs forget their human year. ... SWAN AND SWIM NAME EACH OTHER SWIM AND SWAN Sadness never gets around to introducing its young. Poverty hates magic. Unless they die, babies make movies longer. Angel is what I call my plan to catch a ghost. \/\/\//\/\/\ excerpts FROM [untouched in the capital of soon] DOES ILLNESS KNOW THE WHOLE TIME WHAT IT'S LOSING so obvious was paper cut’s love for scar night wouldn’t hurt a shadow ... NEXT NOTES Saturday I wait to care for my still sleeping brother as a tennis ball sighs its dog back and forth on a television screen. Who can sleep, with all this care? Patience is a midwestern agony. It doesn’t last, but death can’t watch. ... city 36 A running shower that prays impossibly on the body of our lowest sibling for the return of a bomb-maker's homesick drone city 46 A paper airplane on fire in a helpless mirror city 60 (how to starve a microscope in god's museum) /\/\/\\/\/\/
The babies came out silent Our talk was over It might still be meal two or three Meal one: the slow cry ing of having had a toothache on the moon
Why in Ohio is it still this thing you said A leaf is in pain A footprint isn't
toward the work of others - ~~~~~ through a small ghost poems, Chelsea Dingman The University of Georgia Press, 2020 Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you’ve entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from…
View original post 1,760 more words
the resurrected are most of the time asleep - sorry, city - sorry very city
The flat curiosity of our girlhood's insects. Age-appropriate infants with no self-esteem. The grey math of being clothed. The pink of being dressed - Again the wrong person forgetting my death
Each place I go is from Ohio. Mirror softens mirror. A leatherback sea turtle drops its angel. I don't think art is working.
Snow in the knee A normal church Pain dog and helicopter pain A timestamp there's nothing more god
I tell it what I tell my stomach. If I die, you die. There are limits to what the past can do. I had a kid, once. Insects were invisible. My mom was a face turning two from god. Never, worm, do I know where to start. Nightfall, and the number of hands I’ve collected hasn’t changed. Brother still kicks himself for the nine months he couldn’t film. The best thing he wrote down had in it a father, who’d never seen a wheelchair, setting a trap for a wheelchair. It is like me to wait.
No one in the elevator when it dies - By x-ray I mean many stars will find my son - I'd have bread were it not for this door too briefly awake
kingsoftrain 