Blue Bucolic
poems, Rebecca Kokitus
Thirty West Publishing House, 2019
~
In reading the poems of Rebecca Kokitus, I can often see the jigsaw puzzle no one saved from the fire. Can feel the pulse of a mother as taken by a rubber band. Can hear the blip of a sporadically working radar and can match it to the click that sounds itself out in the knee. Knee over which a walking cane was long ago broken within earshot of those familiar with brevity’s limp. If Blue Bucolic is here a return to tiny and frostbitten things, then it is there a reheated examination of anti-smallness. It leaves. It belongs.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here:
https://www.thirtywestph.com/shop/bluebucolic
my children haven’t gone a day without their stomachs. sometimes I lift my shirt and I think they mind. I want to tell them but won’t about the party we can’t throw for a dog whistle. fish are still building the sea.
the one about loneliness. about the quarter, the cigarette, and the egg. about the odds of three hungers having an ear-shaped dream. about the dog-haunted car of my youth and how to cool the body with bread. about pulling over for the ambulance we’re in. about the number of rocks a stone counts in the hawk-like after-weight of a baptized child. the one about losing track of what I’m eating before I eat and the language god hears in both. the two about god
cutting god in half.
i.
a mosquito
on the thigh
of god
losing
its mind
ii.
an old
idea
one had
of stars
iii.
waiting with an uncle
for any
colorblind
doll
to pass
the salt
iv.
child in a hospital asking does time have enough food
v.
is snow
the mother
of distance
four figures in the desert, by a rock, or a stone
the language
that they speak
only makes
sense
under the
water.
View original post 209 more words
from collection [Ghost Arson]
TUBE FEEDING
the boy who in the middle of performing a handstand finds god just as she’s creating the oceans after being overtaken by a herd of ghosts
*
HOW I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER MY SISTER
in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down
the ice cream truck
with her bible, or
as farewell
to nothing’s
church
of neither
*
from collection [MOTHERLINGS]
JAW NOTES
it is okay
(in the afterglow
of a mother’s
childhood
hiding place)
to live
as a dull
child (on bits of eggshell
from the angel’s mouth
*
BREVITIES
if told by your hands to set myself on fire, I would pray my father into a snake and death would cry in a whale for every bee that lost its voice.
*
from collection [Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean]
MATERIALS
ache as a hairstyle. teeth that pray for frostbitten squirrels. a shadow, a circle, their secret
limp
~~~~~
with my body as a thing that existed from the waist-up, I became to swimming what I’d been to lightning and told my brothers that to dream they had to fall asleep before god touched his food. loneliness left its skinny tree and followed my mother into an outhouse where once her sister had counted smoke-rings and where twice they’d sung for their mouths the one about zero the forgotten letter. my father looked at me and I at my son. time waiting to create the sick.
*
[as such]
MOTHERLINGS, 52 pages, 4.00
poems, June 2019
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1
(self-published)
/
Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean, 114 pages, 10.00
poems, June 2019
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1
(self-published)
/
Ghost Arson, 15.00
poems, full-length
Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018
orders for signed copies can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
or via Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
on amazon:
at barnes & noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ghost-arson-barton-smock/1129931893?ean=9781946642868
*
[some recent, elsewhere, work]
at The Collidescope:
https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/goodbyes-for-exodus/
so excited to have three poems up at The Collidescope, where George Salis and Nicole Melchionda are doing real work.
three poems, here:
https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/goodbyes-for-exodus/
the crow’s fear of inclusion. eve’s perfectly forgotten ribs. the nothing I mean to my dentist. the cemetery where all the un-boyed went to eat paper. the band-aid in the belly of a baptized child. yawn of kites.
upon waking, my son knows he’s been moved. beside him I am crooked until he bites my arm. he is as heavy as the stomach of the angel that nightly kisses mine. illness has the patience of a shadow but cannot teach my eyes to kneel. time is god’s tenure as the lost tooth of sleep.
I stand in a ruined field and preach longevity to a god that stares through me at the empty highchair of some freckled thing. my age is with me, there, and there to mean how far can I throw my food. if I close my eyes, I can see touch as a mirror that’s been used by my mother to describe sleep.
kingsoftrain 