and when the creatures came back they were all the same size and my son was still sick and I put my ear to my mother’s and asked for the maker of god-painted sound and my son was a hole and I was grief in a gravedigger’s dream and we ate I think apples there
Kristin Garth is a Pushcart & Best of the nominated poet from Pensacola and a sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked magazines like Five: 2: One, Yes, Glass, Anti-Heroin Chic, Occulum, Drunk Monkeys, Luna Luna, TERSE. Journal and many more. Her chapbook Pink Plastic House is available from Maverick Duck Press, and she has another Pensacola Girls from Bone & Ink Press. She has two forthcoming: Shakespeare for Sociopaths (The Hedgehog Poetry Press Jan 2019) and Puritan U (Rhythm & Bones Press March 2019) from She also has a full length upcoming Candy Cigarette from Hedgehog Poetry in April. Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie), her weekly poetry column The Sonnetarium and her website (kristingarth.com).
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Silence
is seamless, Victorian nightgown, roof
reproof, no fingers or electric sounds
when it’s affixed, lightless chandeliers, proof
of fealty, microscopic tears. Hound
haunts fears, your plate glass tabletop front lawn,
barks at shadows, windows…
View original post 156 more words
Wale Ayinla writes from the ancient city of Abeokuta in Nigeria . He is a Best of the Net Award nominee, and his recent works appear on Palette Poetry, FLAPPERHOUSE, Connotations Press, The Temz Review, SOBER., and elsewhere. He is @Wale_Ayinla on Twitter. He is the founding editor of Dwarts Magazine.
~*~
a library of misfits
to be honest, this poem isn’t about me / and it is
the apple froth gulped through my lungs / and it is
disorientating how i draw the horse with its chariot /
when i own a story, i consume consent / the air wilts
in between my teeth / and there are dead bodies
as cymbals in the oxygen / i still insist on making
youthfulness a decade earlier / maybe i’d have become
a river inching away from the shoreline / a plenty
of water is death / i pleaded…
View original post 420 more words
Ghost Arson is my first full-length collection of poetry (62 pages) and is set for release December 2018 via Kung Fu Treachery Press.
book is 15.00
/ pre-orders can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
**free shipping on pre-orders
***all copies will be signed
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
~
if interested in reviewing, please inquire at ghostarson@gmail.com
facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/ghostarson/
a question for loneliness
(pain, slapstick, or the infant’s
love
for god
separations for unlikeness
~~~~~
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 but am allowed to be. I so miss birds.
(the ghost fame of each tadpole
~~~~~
a shadow’s private gravity (a fly on a grieving radar
~~~~~
the boy whose clothes have been taken will swim for hours and for hours know why the soul hides death from god
~~~~~
do they not
look
finished
ear to ear, the toddlers…
their tornado
still theirs, and today’s
sermon
still in the mind
of their mother’s
exterminator
boyfriend
who is having a thought
as rare
as his past, of a god
spotting
from a cobweb
a carcass
and deciding
~~~~~
apparition, or mom
at her most forgetful.
mouth, a shapeshifter’s
chew toy
godless
as a belly button
and babied
by grief.
face, face.
~~~~~
tell me again
how it is
that dream
stops
tooth decay
in angels / why it is
that I can hear
in the darkroom
post-god
the ghost
muscle
of weeping
/ when it was they found the suckling
and not the bones
of a wave
~~~~~
not uncommon in a household of grief
for one
to be bad
with names.
(the radio
an animal
that misses
its bones
~~~~~
I would ask that you name
your dog
loss
is not
a teacher (then love a longer kitten
(like an angel
might
an ashtray, more
even
like your mother
a thing on its way
to being
bird
(or shaped
~~~~~
I eat more in your absence than you do in mine. our animals never meet. I’ve a painting and you’ve a picture of eve reaching for an aspirin. an angel is a ghost on fire.
~~~~~
pushed a lawnmower. jumped on a trampoline. ate with symbolism the freer meals. painted for death what death could sell to a mirror. accused my hair of arson.
~~~~~
before an astronaut can miss a tooth
I see my mother
her face
in a cobweb
~~~~~
pushes
every smoker
a grocery cart
for a six-
fingered ghost
not
true
all children come from god
(the theatrical
parent
~~~~~
there are ways to be happy. you can say priestess and watch your father’s cigarette slip in and out of sleep. you can crush a pill for the dog that’s begun to move like the rabbit it died chasing. you can lick the spoon the mirror’s
(map
~~~~~
father likes to say that touch has lost its mind. mother
be like hunger
and forget
nothing.
(the boy is the boy who teaches death
to read
and I am sad
for death
for years
(in the toy aisle, in a circus
restroom, at the roll
of my son’s
spotless
eye, and at the gate
of the all
girl
cemetery
(also shyly
in the more traditional
babies
of god
(their hesitant
Fatigue
~~~~~
in those moments when non-fiction scares only the grey brainchild of poverty
(that fucking angel disrobing a stone with fog…
please read
to feel
nothing
~~~~~
to envy
the mouth
its nothing
I speak
in a language
that hides
its tail
(above the flower it takes for god
to imagine
my father
bent
the few words you know
body, child, root
in places
that are strange
a footprint, a pair of scissors
god
(unmarried
for bruise
the clock
of the salted
fly
every other fifth paw
has
to her
a soft spot
for gasmask, that tooth
shaped
sigh
our infants
lose
to the sleep
god created
for bear
kingsoftrain 