city 4 Not laughing at god How long can the infant go * city 5 A short rain touching its shadow in a god just as real as a bird-hating seahorse * city 6 No plastic in hell
Monster thanks to DC Wojciech and Anvil Tongue Books for running this excerpt from my privately self published book rocks have the softest shadows. It is always the eyes that surprise my sight. * book info is here: rocks have the softest shadows poems Barton Smock 237 pages Dec 2020 ~ CONTENTS pages 1 through 41, DIETS OF THE RESURRECTED pages 43 through 80, from AN OLD IDEA ONE HAD OF STARS pages 81 through 167, from ANIMAL MASKS ON THE FLOOR OF THE OCEAN pages 169 through 208, from MOTHERLINGS pages 209 through 212, AFTERNOTES pages 213 through 235, New Poems ~ 13.00 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1 or CashApp: $BartonSmock email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for PDF copy
city 1 A darkness that studies late into the last thought of a white mouse * city 2 A snow that reminds mirrors to breathe * city 3 A creature too naked to lose track of time
Huge thanks to Trainwreck Press and to John C. Goodman for holding space that I might do some small above ground work with my new chapbook called SKIN TO SKIN IN AN UNMARKED LIFE. Would mean the world to me were you to purchase it and subsequently open it long enough to give it some closure. title is 6.00, and can be purchased
HERELet me know when you do what you think or what you unthought. ///// from the page: Format:Chapbook Size: 5 ½ x 8 ½ Pages: 28 Skin to Skin in an Unmarked Life by Barton Smock Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and four children. He is the author of the chapbook infant*cinema (Dink Press 2016) and of the full length Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press 2018). His other work is privately self published and available upon request. He writes often at kingsoftrain.com ***** SOME OF THESE CHURCHES AREN’T MINE I don’t have anything poetic to say about names beyond that we killed the animals in the wrong order. I remember a rabbit disguised as milk as clearly as my dog does a dream of a whale moaning a verse from its lonely size into a bullet hole meant for something smaller. I’m not sure that wordplay tricks trauma out of its inheritance, though suppose it’s possible that incompletely by accident the fleeing angels of our absence return harm over and over without a scratch to a satellite touching itself in a photograph developed by god’s avoidance. In a town for homesick people who use sex as a lamp, there’s a first time for everything except recognition.
Oh school of fish, this way to shadow's wedding. Oh heartless deer, hornless train. Oh son Who entered too early the long illness of the world Whose dreams could burn a spotlight We are this close always if not to god's bones then to the missile that holds them. All play as boys freeze tag to sadden birds.
( note ) People will steal absence before conceding that what is there is for everyone. If we were vacant, previously, what does that hold for the future of nothing left? * UNTITLED I have my pipe and you your cigarette each our bone with a raindrop in it our grandfathers are dead are still dead and we’re near a water a water that is really a circle afraid of stick figures some of which I still draw their invisible zeroes kissing in a thunderstorm that god can’t remember * AFTERNOTES / age three inside of my arm there is a dark cloud that longs to live in a fingertip. age seven I am told there is a cloud but darkness belongs to my arm. age eight I forget which arm and ask no one. age now god uses a mother’s grief to eat the tail of a ghost. age then the angel of insect discipline has more newborns than teacups and blows on the bird-rolled dice. whole bodies fall asleep playing dead. // Worm got itself worm hearing sound beg god for a shadow. Hold tight I guess what glows with desertion. They never ran did they them trains I was pretty on? (I miss you telling me who to miss) /// it had to happen your birth for us to know how much of our breathing was changed by a mask stay small, leaf dying is death’s way of asking to be buried does it hurt that we visit your dog * THE YEAR OUR SON THOUGHT WE LOVED HIM lasted longer than most dogs but there was this one stray we saw often it had one abandoned healthy eye inside of which our belongings were small enough to have * THE YEAR OUR SON SPOTTED DEER ON THE MOON it made some sense then to cut our past in half *
In my dream jaw my dreamboat’s jawbone In my flood a sober seesaw In crows a kind of waiting meant to receive the balloons of the strangled In a film ghosting a film, In the church of rolling our own In mannequins where small things kneel that are living In jigsaws of the crucifixion and in the ideas my veins give to lightning In Ohio in my left hand what is elsewhere lost in a broken rabbit In the city the building thinks god will jump In the nothing nothing leaves
So that god would get to hear music, they made god. - My hair leaves me in a cornfield. - Every angel came from a sleep that tried to reach a star.
to hold my weightless creator
The velvet crows seeming to swim in the river as it's filmed. The missed meal eaten in half by presence. The skeleton dragged from anatomy class by the recent angel of your mother's broken arm. And touch, of course. Still hurt that taste was first.
kingsoftrain 