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November 16, 2021 / barton smock

time differences

Today for a good seven minutes I couldn't remember the name of my son's disorder.

In dollhouse hell

an eye
used a clock.

I left myself a stone with feathers.
November 16, 2021 / barton smock

westmost

I started to care about form.

Sleep 
could not sleep.

One brother turned more blue than the other.

I drank myself into three gods
but didn't 
ask.

It was late and then it was now.
November 15, 2021 / barton smock

self-published, etc


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)


/\/\/\\/\/\/
November 11, 2021 / barton smock

haltmost

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
November 10, 2021 / barton smock

blankmost

Why in Ohio
is it still
this thing
you said

A leaf is in pain
A footprint isn't 

November 10, 2021 / barton smock

(recent: placed, said, offered

barton smock's avatarkingsoftrain

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

November 10, 2021 / barton smock

lossless

the resurrected are most of the time asleep

-

sorry, city

-

sorry
very
city
November 9, 2021 / barton smock

wantmost

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

November 6, 2021 / barton smock

withermost

Each place I go is from Ohio. Mirror softens mirror. A leatherback sea turtle drops its angel. I don't think art is working.
November 5, 2021 / barton smock

blissmost

Snow in the knee

A normal church

Pain
dog and helicopter
pain

A timestamp
there's nothing 

more god