kingsoftrain

July 17, 2018 / barton smock

nymph

yesterday I sent to my mother grief as an attachment

–

it continues to matter
the spell
your god
is under

–

(what began as nostalgia is now

July 17, 2018 / barton smock

so wanted to take a moment in the deeper bone to thank readers and writers and crossers and dwellers. since going live mid-November 2017, {isacoustic*} has published 307 poems by 130 contributors. this is not a staying place, but am glad to reside for a moment in a created space. if I am, if we are, selfless in the wrong dream, this at least has kept a recurrent blood.

{isacoustic*} has so far released four volumes of work and has also released Heather Minette’s second book of poetry, Half Light.

holy fuck, said Barton.

some direction:

volume first, January 2018, is available here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/isacoustic-volume-first/paperback/product-23483920.html

from volume first:

Kelli Allen

Galloping toward the harbor, crown in our pocket

When roots are horses, nothing seeds to fruition.
It is this way with us, too. We pass tasting booths
in Madrid and on the way down, pocket notes
meant for after curtains blunt…

View original post 1,132 more words

July 17, 2018 / barton smock

{SECONDLY}

SOME RECENT, SOME REJECTIONS

[palimpsest]

illness
as diary
we

are underwater
where eating
was discovered

(this is our
joke
that on land
god is waiting
to cut
a birthday cake
for the non
born
the non
below…

our grief comes in pairs
to the animal
it looks
most like

~

[moved, he]

I was copycat
to your
baby machine

game shows were the work of grief

I was the fat kid, jumping rope

had the bug brain
of a palm reading
scarecrow, quick

to imagine
the past-

who was it
told adam
he had something
on his face, moved

he
like the ghost
itch
of deeper
gods

~

[stopping to pray]

how angelic
the nervousness
of insects
offering acne
to god

/ to glacier, crow is not
yet a thing

~

[reading]

inside
an apple
by the light
of a tooth

where nothing
has belonged
to god

~

[starlit]

after staring all day at a birthmark, father asks can he wear my glasses. done growing, sister breaks her nose. shadows mother from birdbeak to mudmask.

~

[on seasickness]

my father saw his first ghost and his first UFO on the same day

–

canoe

of heartbreak

a wound

is

–

a fish
occurring
to fish

~

[tooth musics]

I patch my son’s nightmare with the shadow of a fish

–

Cain
had a sister

he wouldn’t
kill

–

raise mosquito
the lost earring
of christ

~

[existential passivity]

sister
a loneliness
for which
I was framed

~

AND

thru July 19th, Lulu is offering 20% off all print books with coupon code of TWENTY18

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

publications, readings, etc.

eating the animal back to life
10.00
315 pages
published July 2015
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html

reading from the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5eL2HQQr2c

~

the boy who touched all the eggs
11.00
258 pages
published June 2017
-this is a combined publication of three previous works (surprise for me a crow / name calling / paw five) as well as some newer poems

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-boy-who-touched-all-the-eggs/paperback/product-23224033.html

reading from the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sapnBxOjtU

~

L A I T Y
8.00
116 pages
published August 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/l-a-i-t-y/paperback/product-23291654.html

reading from the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oald2N2NvNM

~

everything I touch remembers being my hand
9.00
172 pages
published November 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/everything-i-touch-remembers-being-my-hand/paperback/product-23423003.html

reading from the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV3jEfKFDfg

~

mood piece for baby blur, 60 poems, privately published June 2018
available to anyone donating 5.00 or more to {isacoustic*}

donation can be made, here:
https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
or it can be sent to (bartsmock@gmail.com)

reading from the work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5oShcu6eHA&feature=youtu.be

one can check out {isacoustic*}, here:

site: https://isacoustic.com/
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Isacoustic-192435501303710/
twitter: https://twitter.com/isacousticVOL
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isacousticvol/

July 17, 2018 / barton smock

person Donna Vorreyer, two poems

ISACOUSTIC*

Donna Vorreyer is the author of the collections Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2017).

/

Crossing State Lines

Insects collect on the windshield, ping as they explode,
death masks splatted in random rows.

Heat lightning blurs the humid air, the glare
of headlights fluttering with their ghosts.

I should sing them all a requiem, herky-jerk
a hallelujah, but I have miles to go. You know.

My own issues. Fever daughter, crater dweller,
creature of the great black hole.

I struggle to name the ache that godzillas its way
through the bright cities of my bones.

Voice tongue-stuck and swollen. Joints locked
in a genuflect. Arriving, I lean against a fender

and stretch, my shadow cast ahead of me
on unfamiliar streets, elongated, erasing the bulk

of…

View original post 154 more words

July 17, 2018 / barton smock

sailboat

his sister, three years away from leaving social media, has a boyfriend whose depression is a feminist. darkness lands again the role of weather. on paper, his cough is somewhere between cricket and cross.

July 16, 2018 / barton smock

One Poem By Eleanor Gray

The Rising Phoenix Review

ambush of evening, solstice spilled on stone
without animal blood but other: our true names written
where river runs her blue arms through a velvet meadow

pale one, bending to waters, with a language of seeing &
silent woods, I am obscured by every beauty

you have never belonged

fleshed with the ordinary work of death,
irreducible in otherness

black violets, marsh-lily, open as many mouths in the
open chest of diligence

the day is feasting on the innocent, reeds of sun
bound in their song

familiar world, I do not know you

what does my mad heart dream of? my fingers,
stained with the tithe of violets

a dark sea spread with voyages, shy animals,
a garden where all love is,

far from me

with only dreams to feed the soul on, I go,
through the dark wood, wings waxen

time has no name for you, the words of…

View original post 202 more words

July 16, 2018 / barton smock

{willed}

SOME RECENT:

[vacancy musics]

how priest-like
my father is, the biter
of his own
breast, in the church
of my sister’s

bluer
moon

~

[home musics]

short
on symbolism
the anxious
sleep
to disguise
their fatigue

/ they are not
all here
my bread-shaped
birds

~

[dust musics]

the treehouse oven, the breadlit

moon- so what

he don’t remember
right or left
which hand
shot
his brother, how many

fish
per nightmare

~

[predictive text]

he knows three languages
but hurts me
in one

–

our baby hasn’t spoken in years

–

we were left two insomniacs

they are slowly
picking teams

–

satan has no memory of passing through deer

~

[spider bites]

I lose
at times
the names
of the boys
I hid from…

not an angel, I am allowed
to love
the baby

~

[I still bring snow]

I think mom’s new dog must have the bones of a kite. I have a lover, now. a he, a beekeeper. a she if she saddens in the nearness. a nothing, a dowry. ghost china. spacesuits for stillborns. under this blanket, a puppet reads to a doll about light. under that, the shape of what goes blind in a poem. I miss you. plural. I don’t wash my forehead. I still bring snow.

~

[house musics]

no star foreign, brother kisses a spiderless ceiling.

the diver
dead
our father
loved

~

[untitled]

a sick child can be in two stories at once. anthill. calvary. tell neither. I feel like maybe I am talking my way up the dollmaker’s ladder. eat? I won’t the black duckling. god

won’t the owl. angels

just birds
that faint.

~

[response musics (iii)]

…weigh god in photos. free a crow from the gospel of the negative. (we) revisit the medicines. call you dead and call you hawk gone to curl in the lap of a cyclops. ask (we ask) for what landbound thing did your body carry time? your past, every year, the same spot. thing never shows.

~

AND:

thru July 16th, Lulu is offering free mail shipping or 50% off ground with coupon code of SHIPIT2018

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

~

private publications are available via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock, as such:

chapbook, [BASILISK], 64 pages $5.00
(Feb 2017)
chapbook, [the accepted field], 84 pages $5.00
(May 2017)
chapbook, [in this life another is you], 64 pages $3.00
(Oct 2017)

~
my privately published work {mood piece for baby blur} is available to anyone donating 5.00 or more to my poetry journal {isacoustic*}

donation can be made, here:
https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
or it can be sent to (bartsmock@gmail.com)

One can check out {isacoustic*}, here:

site: https://isacoustic.com/
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Isacoustic-192435501303710/
twitter: https://twitter.com/isacousticVOL
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isacousticvol/

July 16, 2018 / barton smock

dying boy when did fate begin

there was a radio somewhere in the basement and we knew this because it would click on long enough for us to cover our feet and question our savior’s second go at amnesia. if I wasn’t there, I was probably trying out my father’s fastball with a grip he called the ribs of my neighbor’s dog. not long from this I was holding a baby and said what a vague hiatus. also in this order I may have said you look like a ghost and then not my finger but a finger does snap into place when I smoke.

July 16, 2018 / barton smock