still have two privately self-published chapbooks {BASILISK; the accepted field} available in hard copy and free to anyone making said request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
~
most recent full-length collections:
{name calling}
9.00, 110 pages, published March 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/name-calling/paperback/product-23117082.html
~
{paw five}
9.00, 130 pages, published May 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/paw-five/paperback/product-23198602.html
~
a poem from {name calling}:
[the boy-sleep of his hands]
/ a pair of scissors in one room or a gun in two. a thumb war’s lame spider. four rootless prayers drawn on an echo. four awestruck sisters caressing with their ears the undeveloped skull of an infant. melancholy’s condoms. flowers for the arm-wrestler’s inoculated phantom.
~
two poems from {paw five}:
[ballerina]
dog whistle, nothing’s church-bell:
my mother, handcuffed
still worships
wasp
~
[mothers, acoustic]
we are maybe
inside
an Ohio
factory
childless and ready
for a refresher
on orphan
etiquette-
word is
there came
a cow
View original post 12 more words
the grotesque cloud
of birth
the treehouse beatings…
for what
on earth
did I make
these faces
it won’t occur to me
how clean
is hell
(the eyes) (have arms) (but not) (hands)
the ghosts of my son
they get
along
mouth a souvenir from the exodus of shapes-
her mom
ate something
blue
someone’s been using my toothbrush. the neighbor’s baby is all stomach. dad is burying the leash of a balloon animal. the church has come out as being against my mom’s spacesuit. brother bows to loneliness like a rhino before a scarecrow. my toothbrush is blue. tell god we’re away.
for Brian Dawson
I learn early on in the poem
that god can hear an insect
cry. how terrible.
there’s more-
we lose electric and fumble on all fours for the hand of a sockless toddler. bible of the dream-free spider.
it is heard underwater that there have been recent innovations in childlessness
the chain-smoker’s
projected
backstroke
kingsoftrain 