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November 14, 2019 / barton smock

from ( diets of the resurrected )

Ohio sexuality:

A private pencil erasing nobodies from a blue past. A way for fish to keep passwords from God. A toy car from the world’s saddest drive thru and sirens in silent movies overlooked.

A pink light. How it cared for snow.

November 14, 2019 / barton smock

{ Meteorites – poems – S. Brook Corfman }

barton smock's avatarISACOUSTIC*

Meteorites
poems, S. Brook Corfman
Doublecross Press, 2018

~

Perhaps I feared they would vanish, the poems in S. Brook Corfman’s Meteorites.  Or that I would remember them incorrectly.  Or even maybe I feared that I would pretend to lose my memory so as to read them for the first time again, only to misplace the book and be left with my forgetting.  All of the above is also none.  As in, I fail to pinpoint.  As in, location is a failure of becoming.  Here is what I half-know:  reading these poems will stand you up, and rereading these poems will walk you to where they baptize gravity with birdthings.  As one who is so briefly present, and often late to insomnia, I am grateful for the alien commonalities of Corman’s verse as they survive earthly inquiry and require that one be either awake to humanness or be at…

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November 13, 2019 / barton smock

{ Nude Male with Echo – poems – Darren C Demaree }

barton smock's avatarISACOUSTIC*

Nude Male with Echo
poems, Darren C Demaree
8th House Publishing, 2019

~

When I am mirrored,
I touch the mirror; that is my problem. #55

These entries of retraceable paucity, as they exist in Darren C. Demaree’s Nude Male with Echo, are funny, critical, and curious and may add years to a past life that’s revised its timeline to longer crowd-surf the silent audience. Both a broken actuality and a puzzled baring, the work is a triumph of constant brevity and a sanctuary of purpose for any person who’s closed a circle while knowing their loneliness is up for renewal.

Could it be I am
an apple in the river
& I will never be
eaten? #181

Being naked is not something one can practice, not something one can perfect, but Demaree is a tenderly invisible journalist whose reportage records equally the shy swallowing in a museum…

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November 12, 2019 / barton smock

from ( diets of the resurrected )

Ohio children pine equally for ice and for cigarette. They have hated the holy spirit for dying and have loved it for tracking blood loss in those with longer shadows. I don’t think we’ll ever be young. Even the fires you set are shy.

November 12, 2019 / barton smock

{ Sea Above, Sun Below – George Salis }

barton smock's avatarISACOUSTIC*

Sea Above, Sun Below
George Salis
River Boat Books, 2019

~

In prose that avoids borrowing by way of returning, author George Salis summons verse from those revivals held by the plotless dead and places flowers on the shared grave of gimmick and novelty while shading the pallbearer’s hushed reverence for those beings who pray on land to those on earth. This work, however, is not niche nor is it pastiche, is not fragment nor is it patchwork, is not replacement nor is it erasure. Says our narrator and says his, to herself: If she is invisible, then none will know her only trick is to disappear. As such, whether allowing influence to create a trapdoor so that said trapdoor can be moved, or allowing beauty to jump rope in a dream might it forget itself as the encoder of sickness, this making of myth as Salis has it clayed…

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November 8, 2019 / barton smock

from ( diets of the resurrected )

As grief swallows those insects made of repetition and As god locks herself in the bathroom built for her father and As I mimic choking on the cord that wants to belong to the phone that reads your mind and As the beekeeper befriends for reasons known to homesickness the owner of a gun

that was used

November 8, 2019 / barton smock

{ publications by former contributors }

November 7, 2019 / barton smock

from ( diets of the resurrected )

When it gets cold, we tell each other it’s okay to use a photograph instead of soap. It is not common for language to keep its word. If you’re poor enough, snow takes the pulse of the moon. We don’t believe in the soul. But ate something to bring it back.

November 7, 2019 / barton smock

Heir and Sea: An Excerpt from Sea Above, Sun Below

The Collidescope's avatarThe Collidescope

Tessa swam as a fish among fish, a scaled and finned body. The sound of the churning water like an echo chamber. Then she was neither fish nor infant, but unborn baby. Fetus- formed, she backstroked in the russet sea of her mother’s womb. She continued to perceive the fish beside her, around her. What are you doing in my mother? she asked the group of fish. This is my home. The slimy creatures looked at her with omniscient eyes. This is our element, not yours, they said. Then she was an infantile human again, in the shivering river, as she always had been. She was translucent now, red and blue veins like tattoos beneath her jelly flesh, deeper still was the soft chalk of her skeleton. I’m not one of you, she said. They hovered closer, as if to whisper in her ears. No, you are not. Her eyes…

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November 6, 2019 / barton smock

from ( diets of the resurrected )

Ohio sexuality:

X mourns outdated baby monitor by scoring a commercial for rabbit mascara