kingsoftrain

through December 28th, 15% off all print books at Lulu with coupon code of BOOKCALSAVE

my most recent self-published {everything I touch remembers being my hand} is there, here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/everything-i-touch-remembers-being-my-hand/paperback/product-23456834.html

~

some recent poems:

[asking]

can I miss
my body
with yours
our blood
the loneliest
bone

~

[rarefactions] for Kazim Ali

pain has no spirit, I am never

so sad
that I can’t
scrape
the neighbor’s
car, probably

you won’t
survive, babies

are all
the same, I recite

what sounds
pretty, it seems

less happens
in the winter, to animals

and bread

~

[periapt]

I saw nothing fantastic.

an angel
freezing to death
in a somersault. a mirror

coming out of its skin. emptiness

the size of a pea
no pea

empty

~

[vein]

in the blue church of my father’s thirst

I wear it

(hunger)

like an eye-patch, and emerge

starless

from the uncooked blood
of my shadow

~

[waker]

mouth pain / in a clean / house

–

the weight
of sister

–

the passwords of worried creatures

a stroller’s
body
of work

–

treeless (quiet)

~

[from a letter to my body]

when there are no mothers, I will crawl toward the one sitting with what her legs couldn’t burn and I will ask my blood to be the same fish

~

[1995]

and poem looked to me like the eyesight that stayed behind. claw and wing were the oars of my father’s blank craft. every boy in Ohio was a girl in a bookstore caring for the latest creature of a flat god. sadness hadn’t yet moved on from its stick figures and mothers were still blowing into perfectly round balloons. pale dog drank from a paint can. color could see, and see only, the future. a pinkness left my brother for the wrong kind of milk. sister had been hugging those angels

couldn’t bend their arms. zero

(that wizard
of the non
event)

was buying up land.

~

[standing over the first deer]

god
a souvenir
of man’s
absence, brain

a sick
star, my blood

covered
blood

~

[scansion]

it feels wrong to pray in an ambulance

hear god / all the time

~

[elevation songs]

there’s no great detail to go into. her baby in a medicine cup, our small priest

making us feel poor in the bathroom we don’t use…

–

a face from the world’s flattest mirror

~

[moonhood]

as if waiting
for you
to hallucinate

it is there

the sea

–

eating secrets in a dream

is the owl
with hands

–

I think we buried
darkness
wrong