In the mouth of one who opens a sentence with the word verbatim, there is a sorrow searching for the breast of a shadow. Overheard is not the name of an Ohio street. The baby is no cook but is the only knower of what my eyes will eat in the dark. No one in Ohio laughs when you say bornography to your sister who says orbituary. One can be pregnant and study the wrong children.
The color of my toothbrush. To miss god. Which bible stories still have nudity. Small things, new to the history of my forgetting…
Those creatures, that boat.
A smaller vessel with one of each.
You know that spotless child, dead from swallowing a question mark, who believed you could scratch a bullet with blood? She says we all have a second body sleeping in a hole that never comes.
am deeply thankful for the saying of this seeing by Glen Armstrong at Cruel Garters in regards to my collection Ghost Arson:
https://www.facebook.com/Cruel-Garters-162917133824108/
I’ve been reading “Boy Musics,” a prose poem in the book Ghost Arson by Barton Smock. The poem perfectly captures that rarely whispered vulnerability that comes with being a boy (being human.) The poem opens with the speaker and his companion “counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed sex shop in Ohio,” an apt setting to explore what is open, what might be okay to share. The speaker shares that his father is gay; the companion shares “three poems by [his] dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister.” These kids are doomed, as left to their Mid-American whatever as Ohio, as passed over as the lower middle class. It’s “too late for crow and all the deer have been hit.”
Still, there’s…
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‘Animal Masks On The Floor Of The Ocean’ and ‘MOTHERLINGS‘ (for 10$ and 4$, respectively)…privately self-published…can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1
The baby tells me in its own way that its mouth is sad and has been for longer than mine. I need proof, but the movers eat their moth then come for the dark.
Ohio:
Sounds from the childhood of god’s vocabulary. Animal hair in a father’s shoes. Lightning. Brothers reaching into scarecrows for ice.
This rabbit hole we use for the shadow’s mouth. These squirrels bowing in the priesthood of sleep. Do we have
briefly
what we want? Each of us a bad hand that drops a baseball? Is fasting
a weight class? A tadpole
is Ohio’s nightlight. Babies, when touched, belong to the same alarm clock.
The baby holds its breath beside a bag of blue flour. My stars I didn’t mean to die so plainly.
kingsoftrain 