kingsoftrain

said about:

Mannequin in the Nude, a poetry collection by Logan February, reviewed by Barton Smock

http://isacoustic.com/2019/03/28/ceremony-of-sand-poems-rodney-gomez/

http://isacoustic.com/2019/03/20/stay-poems-tanya-olson/

http://isacoustic.com/2019/02/13/lethal-theater-poems-susannah-nevison/

~

said to:

http://mysmallpresswritingday.blogspot.com/2019/02/barton-smock-my-small-press-writing-day.html

Interview with Barton Smock, Author of “Ghost Arson”

~

said some poems:

[safe musics]

the amnesia
of my jack-in-the-box
gave way
to boomerangs

and motion
was the capital
of grief

~

[who will love your doomed children]

a snake
designs itself
from memory
and does so
with the patience
of the bedridden
mother
whose unlit
cigarette

(whose puppet
hope

~

[lawn musics]

books on arson, grammar, vandalism…

god, multiple owners.

a typewriter
touched by father
at night.

the electric chair my brother imagined
& the hair
my sister…

adam (who’s never known the age of eve

~

[I am not a talker but do touch my face in a crowd]

a question for loneliness

(pain, slapstick, or the infant’s

love
for god

~

[the home life of victims]

some bloody eared stranger at the door is listening as if to a radio where being announced by name are the blow-up dolls gone missing from the home life of victims.

–

in the two accepted versions of the story you have a son your husband beats. in the third and final version your three equally tall sons lift you privately from a parade honoring your nude scene. this is theirs.

–

similar persons of colder weather gather elsewhere and disrobe.

all await
the dog of evening.

its blindfolded boy.

–

he spends a few good hours trying to pin the small shadows of overhead birds beneath his feet. his wakefulness is a gift handed down by a sister he had to stop making up.

–

I squeeze my infant son until he is young enough to remember impressionism’s grocery.

–

I skin my knee a total of three times. I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake. he demands nothing. he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference. he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long. my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become. I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother who smokes on the roof in her Sunday beast.

~

[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.

~