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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
November 5, 2021 / barton smock

2016 untitled thing(s)

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.
November 1, 2021 / barton smock

saymost

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
October 28, 2021 / barton smock

endmost

Needles hiding from a blank swan. 
The plastic razors of a prop angel. 
No one to cry ghost. 
The fingernail as grief's only idea. 

forget, forget. In that order
October 26, 2021 / barton smock

voicemost

abused 
in dreams 
on outside 
birthdays

October 25, 2021 / barton smock

nowmost

We all work very hard to give god a future. You lucky you get as many a black eye as the number of times one of yours loses a baseball in the sun. Here is what I'll say about that boat: That boat never did get its silence back. My bet is you've forgotten more spiders than you've seen. Naming is the leading killer of the animal that's with you when you die. About sacrifice: Angels were the last to have hands and the first to tally every broken bird-like rule.
October 23, 2021 / barton smock

recentmost

We kiss because we don't know whose eyes got here first. I walk one hand until it limps and the other until it doesn't. Babies pray all the time. I move my son often and pretend the bath doesn't give him away. Each movie is longer than god.
 
October 17, 2021 / barton smock

(recent 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


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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)


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