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February 4, 2022 / barton smock

partings

in a movie untouched by movies a mother not known for any child is visited by a doll on leave from its scarecrow-loving scarecrow no longer held by figure as a gift from the department of shape 
February 3, 2022 / barton smock

2017 unfixed

MAGIC PILLS

a doll taped to a skateboard. you get the idea. mirror for doghouse, nest for traffic light.

/

ANIMALS OF DECEMBER

I know a kid of mine won’t walk the impossible dog. I know it deep down. arsonist first, birdwatcher second. drone to stork and stork to mermaid. I feel your pain.    

/

CODA

thunderstorms
reported missing
by some
verbose
orphan

/

SLEEP

as proof of shyness.  as death 

rounded down

/

BRING SPOON

kid says
they eat
hypnosis
the extras

of silent 
film

/

BRING ROACH

how long might satellites mourn? sickness took the lord. a scarecrow the pulse of a cricket.  

not every image was worth the effort.

/

AGONAL

the wolf in stork’s nightmare
speaks dolphin

what do I miss

my blood
your collection
of pea-sized

pillows

/

IN NO LANGUAGE

does echo
have a word
for dream

/

MODEL

the ugliness 
of horse
corrected
by deer
February 3, 2022 / barton smock

puzzles one can keep from god

A shadow puts its hand through a tent

Ice
hides Ohio
from hell
February 2, 2022 / barton smock

first poem about design

Unheard window

Infant's doorbell
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