{WE BROUGHT HOME THE WRONG DYING BABY}
I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some organ donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.
~~~
father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.
and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.
~~~
mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth. I say dog for both dog and puppy. pray for things I know will happen. a rooster through a windshield. a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.
~~~
mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.
~~~
I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.
god will die with his ear on my stomach.
~~~
the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.
seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.
~~~
for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son
in scenario’s territory.
~~~
atavism
(god is someone’s calendar
–
valley
(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose
–
pulpit
(rooster ghosted by elevator
–
subculture
(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down
–
alpenglow
(the scalp will baby its grief
~~~
on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost
and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.
~~~
the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.
~~~
because her son can see the future, she is not yet born. god matters to the discovered.
~~~
overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car
of a minor
toymaker.
radar is getting possessive.
~~~
for the gone and for the nearly, brother has the same stick.
I call belly
what he calls
eye
what answers
to limb
~~~
to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.
comes with everything. cries like me.
~~~
she says
three times
the word
brain
to her stomach’s
blue
mirror
and scores
sight’s wardrobe
of rags
in earworm’s
dream
~~~
there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish
coming to
in a beheaded
angel
SOME OLDER PLACES
~
[animal masks on the floor of the ocean]
mouse, teacup of the missing stork-
owl, lamb of night-
this was god. he was sad and everyone noticed.
~
[lost priest]
I come from a place where a school bus hits a dog and the bus driver barks and all her kids play dead
~
[annihilatives]
as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue
dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine
go on, birth
take silence
from a baby
~
[holding the baby]
a deleted voicemail of a boy asking his mom how to prepare a past meal. my handwriting an insect I want the best for. dream and the moth it won’t finish.
~
[god is silent in every language]
mom is driving. mom is washing the spider that closed her mouth. sister has a stick of gum but says she doesn’t. dad is half-asleep and cutting the fingernails of the babies he dropped. there’s a scab on my arm that looks like my brother’s nose. we pass church after church. sound horn for buried bees.
~
Margaret Siu is majoring in Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas, has a certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the National Taiwan Normal University (國立臺灣師範大學) and a business certificate from Harvard Business School’s HBX program. Siu is the founder and Editor in Chief for international, multimedia publication Apricity Magazine; in addition, she is the recipient of the James F. Parker Poetry Prize. Siu is an avid fan of Naomi Shihab Nye, Mong-Lan, and Lin Manuel Miranda–those who endeavor to narrate their cultures through verse.
~*~
Chariot-tearing (车裂) [1]
hair– brittle
bones—whittled
by a blade named time, awaiting
a sudden notch
tied tethered taught
by five horse-drawn
coils of cold desires
at the neck and limbs
threatening the curls
of my ribcage, cavities
quake and swallow
the weight of
a long gasp
a breath—so violent and quiet
[1] An ancient Chinese torture method, present during the Warring States…
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SEPARATIONS FOR UNLIKENESS / entries 1 thru 23
~~~~~
god bless the hypnotist who takes up smoking when it goes uncured (my transformative stutter…
god bless the breathing machine, the fog…
the donkey so beaten it recalls itself as a whale’s untouchable nose…
and god bless god for my short life as a father, for my son who says, meaning eyelash (cyclops…
~~~~~
it’s not my imagination that I’m the only foreigner my body recalls, but is that god can change with my stomach the shape of his tears
~~~~~
waiting for her cigarettes to dry, mother starts a bath and says above them that it’s not like any of you are becoming a rib. death, short a person, continues to eat the language god hasn’t. trauma makes a compass of time and place
and brother is not yet the sitting creature of a thoughtless life. I am not there…
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reviews for Ghost Arson:
review by Dd. Spungin
Experiencing Barton Smock’s poetry is similar to living in a foreign country long enough to begin to understand the language.
Smock’s language is always intriguing, often foreign, more often brilliant in its ability to put images and concepts in the reader’s unsuspecting mind.
Certain poems/passages all but announce their meanings, as this from Gameshow Fatalities:
“see one of my children worrying less about suicide
and more about where it should happen. see: tub. see: easier
for a mother to clean.”
And some slide an idea into your consciousness such as this from Untitled:
“eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate
and doll
the first
eating disorder
in space”
Smock can shock, as well. Here, from Gestural Transportation, this standout stanza:
“the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a
starving boy with a lost voice…
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Emily Hockaday is a Queens-based poet and editor. Her newest chapbook, Beach Vocabulary, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chaps. She is author of Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide (Zoo Cake Press), What We Love & Will Not Give Up (Dancing Girl Press), and Starting a Life (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, most recently Newtown Literary, The Maine Review, and Salt Hill. She is associate editor of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and she can be found on web at http://www.emilyhockaday.com and @E_Hockaday.
~~~~~
Ghazal
Easter has passed, and in Brooklyn the Cherry Blossom
Festival approaches. Trees in Forest Park unfurl tiny blossoms.
The season is deceptively mild. On the kitchen table, the arm of sunny
forsythia distracts me from the awkward silence that’s blossomed
after we verbalize my brother’s suicide attempt. It had
to be brought up. Petals from…
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Dianne Olsen is a freelance writer, poet and garden consultant living in Massachusetts. She wrote the weekly “Valley Gardener” column for the Poughkeepsie (NY) Journal for four years in the mid-2000s. Now retired from a career as a horticulture and environmental educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Putnam County, NY, she volunteers at a teen center, food pantry garden and summer camp. She has an MA in Environmental Studies from SUNY Empire State College. Her freelance work has been published by Taste of Home; her poetry in Writer’s Resist, Colloquial Poetry, Mojave River Press and Review, and Postcard Poems and Prose.
*
Night
I am happy when I wake at night,
hear your deep breathing,
see your face turned to me.
I place my hand under the covers,
not to wake you, you know,
but to feel the warmth of you,
feel your
sturdy ribs,
just where I…
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Rachel Norman currently lives and studies in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has been published in the Falling Star Magazine.
/
my corner of the world in a round planet
I shouldn’t grieve over this speck of geometry
When a planet awaits-
Yet not waiting, but moving on, clinging to me;
Trapped in the pull of the earth-
Quite an unwanted embrace.
But if even man is made of dust
What denies me the right to mourn my plot of it?
More like ashes- the fire suffocated,
So no hope of a phoenix there.
The smell of smoke and dust and lung cancer-
My red thread was tied to the streetlamp,
Now blown away by winds of change.
Boreas thinks he knows best
But my spare kite was torn before he took the string.
He thought it would give me closure-
If ashes are all that is left,
Would they be…
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I lost my voice believing in ghosts and before that
spoonfed my brother until he tied me to a chair. this was the beginning of wanting my kids to play dead in front of the nothing my eyes could do. one sockless and one sick. not forever.
kingsoftrain 