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 a tenderness here. Poetry survives unlikely odds, as does sex. Smock confesses only what needs confessing. The poem and its companions in Ghost Arson never fail to surprise in their detail, and they never flinch as they stare down the big themes: “a vacuum runs below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.” These lines that conclude the poem give me shivers. This whole business is visceral. I love the book, but seeing the handwriting might break my heart.
-Glen Armstrong
Kelli Allen has served as Poetry Editor for The Lindenwood Review and she directs River Styx’s Hungry Young Poets Series. Allen teaches in the MFA program at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally
Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books (2012) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine Not Drowning (2017) was released by C&R Press, as was her latest, Banjo’s Inside Coyote (2018).
~*~
Myth talker, deer singer
-for Daniel Deardorff
It’s a descent, Danny. The archers only miss
before winter. You have gone into that within
so many times. And now that invincible core
steels the eyes from elk to guide the way
forward…
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A little
off the ears
my crucified
barber-
The more I sleep, the more there is of the future.
Absence spares no one.
Birth
keeps a record
of who
birth skipped.
Some history: The baby had heard of a quiet glacier searching Ohio for the lost belly button of nothing and so left us in God, the capital of Death.
Mom I am the third boy to finish my wolf. Mom the baby likes you when you’re eating. Mom the snow has picked the water clean. Mom Ohio. In the food you couldn’t help.
Its favorite movie is the wind. Its mother found its father waiting for a cat to die.
Is there no one to hold its mouth?
Even god is afraid of sex.
On tv, the baby guards a salt lick while wearing the crown of thorns as a belt. Outside the tv, a random sister pulls her thumbnail loose and a paper doll starts to breathe. The fish watches all of it through a hole in the fish.
kingsoftrain 