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October 5, 2025 / barton smock

I could hear the dog the snow was deep

Teeth for people who kill an animal for its sound. Teeth for two boys fighting over the color red. Teeth for my piano playing sister agonizing over the childhood of my last life. Teeth for my mother and teeth in the cigarette box of an unshaken priest. Teeth in the bread, teeth in the blood. In the meal that keeps me on earth. Teeth. A tooth. A baby. Oldest thing that we hold.
October 3, 2025 / barton smock

I can hear the dog the snow is deep

A spider was given a way of crying for its broken time machine

Pain
moves god
around

You can say Palestine now

to a doll
of a doll
that is crushed
October 3, 2025 / barton smock

mastery

A white plate washed in heaven. Mirror with a broken heart. Nothing's ghost freezing inside of a star. Pray away the shyness, y'all. That chicken there dreamed its head off.
October 1, 2025 / barton smock

touch has two hands and god is sleeping on this poem

The cops are beating a guy who says mom mom mom and the cops in their motherlessness get more mad. Artistic, faithful, wtf. Some plastic in us that makes us want heaven. My brothers smoke cigarettes or faint doing math. Time is a sick angel but not the sickest. What this means to snow is Franz I don’t have the details. I think my love is real.
September 28, 2025 / barton smock

we’ve never met and I don’t know how much I miss you

Eating fast food syncs nostalgia to the heart of grief. You can’t hit a deer that doesn’t get out of the way. I thought at first I’d lost my grandparents, my aunt, my my. But then they lost me. Dear afterlife, here is the moon. I order online both suicide and longing then wait for a song about drinking in a haunted house to end. We’ve never met and I don’t know how much I miss you. Everything god touches god didn’t make. There are bird bones unbroken in the breadmaker’s mouth. If it’s a bathroom machine and not just a bathroom, you can stand in there handing out slow cigarettes to people who can’t look at you. Angels knew there’d be children, sure. Detailed children betray us all. Stop loving my son. Take a miracle away from a photograph. Had those two left the garden with everyone else, imagine. What we wouldn’t need. Pain tells time by what god hurts.
September 26, 2025 / barton smock

I only believe in animals that look like they’ve been left outside also what if they did that to someone you thought initially was your mom

I get sad and write on myself. 
Watch hunger like it’s a tattoo god is practicing.
Is this the life to say goodbye from?
We have to give these guns to someone.
September 24, 2025 / barton smock

violences before eggshell

designed the tornado designed a still child's stomach for the painter of tornadoes

designed the healthy designed a tongue scraping by on nudes reading from god's fingertips

designed the sick designed the sick getting sick outside

designed vigil designed a prayer-chain drinking game

designed the baby designed a baby okay with dying

designed intimacy designed a son speaking near his father's mouth

designed a fingernail designed a method of tracing a haircut inside of a circle the moon met online

write to your mother and live
September 24, 2025 / barton smock

violences during resurrection

Stop using canaries. Small motherless bombmakers give birth on the moon. Their crying is real but they have healthcare. No one asks god what the body can do. Hope used to be devastating. I recognize this place again and again. A sick son's brain is the dog of time. Jesus died, came back, and named his ghosts Cain and Abel. We fill a microwave with cigarettes and the television calls it a birdfeeder. A school is the church of school shootings.
September 20, 2025 / barton smock

son poems

a cigarette loses time in a church for anorexics

babies jealous of our sadness die happy

I am trying to say the next thing before you have a mother

what if not hurting your children is abuse

my last words depend on the password I remember

choose any parent to make my brothers cry

belief a skull faith a stone

toothache a worm worried about a star

no one likes me I love your poems

can worms worry
September 19, 2025 / barton smock

fragment

Memory stops eating in the afterlife of the past. 
A cigarette can sometimes be a search party that finds nothing.
Angels change their sex based on the owl that hears them.
In church I break my fingers trying to open a baseball full of rice.
The breaking happens so silently we are noticed, say my fingers, by god.
Will my children see my body