has hunger
an ear
do barbers
when lonely
jog
is there glass
in your belly button, is this
why you feed
the unfinished
babe
what has no home
and cannot grieve, oh
question-
by know we’d know
god lost
a father
we are playing
rock, paper, scissors
and arguing
about the birth
of leap frog
it is good, you say, absence
with faces
and what / from the fire / would you
breathing machine
or canary
who has
a canary
I have privately published a work of mine consisting of 60 poems that I am calling {mood piece for baby blur}, and am making it available to anyone making a 5.00 or more donation to my poetry journal {isacoustic*}
{mood piece for baby blur} will not be made available in any form but this one.
donation can be made, here:
https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
or it can be sent to (bartsmock@gmail.com)
be sure to provide a physical address, to include your name, for the send.
You 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/
share, or keep secret.
no windows, ghost bird.
lo a mirror that picks a side. lo in rock the bones of bee.
Chella Courington is a writer and teacher. With a Ph.D. in American and British Literature and an MFA in Poetry, she is the author of six poetry and three flash fiction chapbooks. Her poetry appears in numerous anthologies and journals including Non-Binary Review, Gargoyle, Pirene’s Fountain, and The Los Angeles Review. Originally from the Appalachian South, Courington lives in California with another writer and two cats. For more information: chellacourington.net
___
Jeopardy
My father built biceps working for US Steel
smelting iron in heat that humbled men.
Now I could break his arm
over my knee, brittle as kindling.
My father used to let me walk up his body
balancing my hands on his fingertips
till I flew from his shoulders. They began to sag
after my mother passed. Rising at night, no moon out,
she collapsed in the dark and never woke
as once my father fell when a…
View original post 151 more words
means
or maybe
it means
in Ohio
we are shown
how to die
of symbolism
recent {isacoustic*} contributors:
Rosemarie Dombrowski
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/07/person-rosemarie-dombrowski-six-poems/
Rebecca Ruth Gould
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/07/person-rebecca-ruth-gould-three-poems/
Margarita Serafimova
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/08/person-margarita-serafimova-seven-poems/
Nicole Melchionda
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/10/person-nicole-melchionda-four-poems/
Lauren Brazeal
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/14/person-lauren-brazeal-one-poem/
~
recent reflections at {isacoustic*}:
Unmark by Montreux Rotholtz:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/15/unmark-poems-montreux-rotholtz/
The People’s Elbow by Rax King:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/14/the-peoples-elbow-recitatives-rax-king/
What Bodies Have I Moved by Chelsea Dingman:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/11/what-bodies-have-i-moved-poems-chelsea-dingman/
Date Palms ~ Pointillism by Sophia Naz:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/05/04/date-palms-pointillism-poetry-sophia-naz/
Unmark
poems, Montreux Rotholtz
Burnside Review Press, 2017
~
help me I’m partial – {from} Psalm
I call ash the blindfold of scar. I get my strength from paper dolls. Hypnosis skipped my mother. These, feel true. They, are not. Rare the language that knows what to say. And rarer yet the speaker who can make of voice a bread that rises at the footfall of ghost. Unmark has such language, and Montreux Rotholtz, good lord, speaks. As if summoned from the nonexistent archival footage of recent warning signs, these poems, these disorienting anticipations, are very here. They turn one to echo. They reshape the form one takes when returning home. Not one of these verses is lost, and Rotholtz is in command of such a possessive leavetaking that the reader feels as one created to recognize whatever blessed trespass they’ve gone to remember.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
View original post 4 more words
RETURNING
~~~~~
god’s brain in a small hat
–
(rabbit)
–
from surgeries
and gardens
–
a crownless mouth
~~~~
my angel is a scarecrow in a sleeping bag. heaven a movie theater in spain. she walks that way because she is trying to step on her blood. the boy at the gate is lost and must choose either frankenstein’s childhood or a more diverse nostalgia. orphans on earth smell like bread.
~~~~
there are pictures of me sleeping that are responsible for my brother cheating on his diet. apples the shape of going home. sex addicts fighting to direct a musical about the number of people disappearing
to let death
mourn. there is a chair in an open field. a throbbing in the palm of sound’s publisher. a kid under a blanket asking god
when did she know
what perfection
was. a mouth that was a bomb
/ before I had teeth
~~~~
with sound
the second language
of absence, with
mother, bible, bee
(I am trying to memorize missing you
~~~~
god as a girl reading her father’s fanfiction
fixing her mother’s
ghost town
water fountain, then god as a boy
tired, in a dream
~~~~
you think we are the same.
your unlearn, my re-know.
our place wants the person I’m from.
church
of the removed
stitch. what I would bite
to have your mouth.
~~~~
in the history of newborns
not one is named
shelter, and we’ve called
only two
attraction…
my dream priest
dies
in the desert
after making
with death
a movie, no…
the blood’s
search
for brain
~~~~
they took
the body
lamb
stayed with star
~~~~
you can train
a bird
but not
a fish
to care
for a thumb…
fire is the skin of god
~~~~
a father
at peace
with how many times
his hair
has died
is standing
in a museum
before the shell
of a giant
turtle
his infant’s mouth
has gone home
to lose
its shape
he is alone
like any
grocery cart
some
cribs
~~~~
all information
new
your abuser
could’ve joined
the circus
his chewing gum
the age
of your mouth
~~~~
when drinking, I think maybe in a past life I also drank.
sorry, poem. absent
your suicide
hypotheticals
we all
speak silence
~~~~
I never heard my father cough
I must
to say so
be dying
insect is a thing
cannot be
surrounded
the rich have their ghosts and the angels
their seaweed
~~~~
I exist / too / often
(it’s okay)
his father
had a beekeeper’s
wave
the recurring dream of my blood
is loss. dear ma,
your book
how to appear
edible
to a thoughtless
creature…
I don’t know. birth is whose
burned
hand
~~~~
death in its dream home
had a psalmic
memory
to rival
odd-numbered
women. hell was empty
and we wrote
what words
believed
~~~~
is it written or is it said that the word tells you its language?
I built my house around a crying baby.
–
Q: sister spotlight has a brother
A: whose blood is a stop sign
~~~~
long gone are the insects
you forgave
this storm, the whale
of oblivion’s
white feast, this moon
the word
moon
~~~~
childish nicknames for the messiah
these desperate meditations
on the ghost
of a sober
twin
I am not death but enter
like it
the church
of so many
canceled
spelling bees
to ask
whose punishment
for being born
am I
~~~~
father is sitting in that snowplow like he’s seen every baby and mother is mock burying herself as if daring the holy spirit to make a fist
and sister wants to weep
for an eyelid or hear
a helicopter
and the heart has too many ghosts
~~~~
I go places
in my ghost
that are children
when I arrive. they call me
high grass, lord
of the wind’s
blood. most of them
have lost
babies
with dog
names
to birth
or touch, our brief
attractions
to déjà vu
~~~~
the father is a shepherd in a hall of mirrors. the son a man on all fours salvaging a puzzle mothers use to predict snowfall. we have goats but they act like goats that deep down know they’ve been imagined. the daughter is a hallucination color prays to.
the goldfish a marble from the psalm of dry lamb.
~~~~
in this dream, the father stops halfway up the ladder and blows on his hands. starvation is a drowsy snake. the dream has time to think and figures existence needs a distraction. when my son bites himself, it is because his teeth are feeling lost. I offer him to the dream but he is not godless enough to throw his voice. are you sick in a language that has a word for what you have? skin is the longest dream.
~~~~~
he takes baths instead of showers
the boy
who believes
in ghosts
~~~~~
to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain. no cricket you hear is alone. in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong. his first sad poem is about an oven. his second calls dust the blood of a seashell. his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon. my friends they are made of grief and brilliance. they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft. I sleep and my sister paints my nails. kisses my head. she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.
