shape is a future fashioned from god’s inability to reflect
–
(she thinks her hair came from an egg. she is not alone.)
–
there’s nothing in the food
was a clarity to being beaten. to arriving before clockwork. a clarity also in the poems of his abuser. psalm and caricature. snail and gasmask. I miss hand, he’d say. because it misses raft.
life is a shapelessness to which form describes its pilgrimage
dream a grave dreaming
of a cactus
for nothing’s
crow
the bridge
the broken arm
of god.
the ventriloquist, her immortal canary…
birth the jackpot
hit
by grief. a wiseman
mourning
her third
son.
night is the sound of my father’s adding machine. of mother narrating the life of a stone. lake is my brother’s action figure learning to swim on a full stomach. lake is a bird going from dream to dream as a mouse. hole is anything I bring home that isn’t my body. home from the city where sisters drink in silence to footnotes of future fictions.
Set to Music a Wildfire
poems by Ruth Awad
SIR Press, 2017
~
“Will you die for an idea?” – Ruth Awad, from Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion
When so much praise is reserved for the universal, for a thing that touches all things, here is Ruth Awad’s Set to Music a Wildfire– a work that feels pressed into the page. A work that picks up the pieces, not after, but during. A work that pauses in order to continue. A rewriting of the detail’s bible. I love this book for its spiritual reportage:
There was the broken teapot and two women, their clothes
torn open, and an infant. (Sabra and Shatila Massacre / Refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, 1982)
For the way its observant foresight lets image stand:
Tripoli rooftop.
…The sea lipped its insoluble gossip
to the shoreline.
The…
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Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly
Darren C. Demaree, poems
8th House Publishing, 2016
~
review by Barton Smock
~
‘Covered in the inscriptions of bizarre
timing…’ – from A Violent Sound in Almost Every Place #104
‘If today is the day
to walk towards
the sad, diverted
questions…’ – from All the Birds Are Leaving #35
Darren C. Demaree is a poet who carries in him a gentle tirelessness. He seems, by the worried exuberance of his verse, to want to know where he is that he might calm the distance in others. Audience is the loneliness he’s assigned himself. He recently signed a book of his for me and added: in Ohio in 2017. That book was, is, Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly. It is a book of both homage and future. A frantically pastoral book that moves as if each carousel horse could have…
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thru November 13th, Lulu is offering free mail shipping or 50% off ground shipping with coupon code of SHIPIT2017
15% off all print books at Lulu today with coupon code of LULU15
my latest, self-published, is there, here:
[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
~
some poems from {L A I T Y}:
[story]
on the shell of my brother’s first turtle
the inscription
campfire
at the end
of the world
~
[his body a small sorrow]
the proofreader
of grief
~
[annotations for son]
a small creature was shot
stumbled
and became
my handwriting.
two of my legs
need god.
~
[sculptural]
a moth attacking the ear of a white horse
[on a family farm
littered
with oar-beaten
scarecrows]
–
baby talk
in a suicide note
–
sign language, mosh pit, 1991
~
[high-dive. dusk.]
as if any father
could heal
a cigarette
or remove
for a grey-eyed
newborn
the stitches
from a dream
~
[cocoon has its own name…
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kingsoftrain 