Distance makes touch in the skull of an angel
Beheads god in front of a star
Poetry didn’t save us
And we weren’t smart
Emptiness uses the unfed to see time.
The angel of dearth
Is the dead
Twin.
A comma is in a bird.
Thunder forgets
its god.
Television, our widowed star.
I’m in all of my dreams.
Driving home from my mother’s shattered arm and mirage-eaten back, I convince myself I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ve only been on this earth twice. My body doesn’t look different in the dark. I could be living in a man who’s lost his loved ones. Behold I see the deer deformed in the same spot that it was last week and know I can twist my shadow toward those deer in the nowhere I’d be.
There is always a mosquito on my wrist
I learned
so early
that belief
became a cat
checking
my pulse
I thought of something
the other day
mom
I don’t know if it happened
A little girl
got sick
swallowing
band-aids
That’s a weird way
for the body
to get out
of communion
I made that joke where
ever
one with
the nostalgia
of goldfish
was everyone
left
That girl was on tv
getting tickled
by a man who wanted
to still
be in Eden
Mom I saw the car
No person
it said
plainly
is here
Some boy
next
if not
for time
angel tantrum
poems, Barton Smock
171 pages
April 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.
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~
A couple short poems from the collection to convince one of nothing:
A CIGARETTE IS A STAR DE-AGED BY GOD
Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to kill us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.
ANGELS WANT BODIES THEY CAN LEAVE
There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.
I don't sleep anymore.
I can almost see
god seeing
a child.
My stomach remembers every olive.
I have two phones
but no favorite.
An arm cast
in a long
heaven
raises
not from birth
a hand
100 bodies
learn to count
The mirror remains an unfaithful marker
of those Ohioans
presently addicted
to the speedy
sameness
of decay
Re-hungered
a needle
boils
its nearness
to the doll's
backbone
A cornfield made of rain
A ruined ghost
showing the palms
of my mother's
hands
to infants
ecstatic
with eyesight
The low miracle's most vanished
pleasure carried to its invisible end
My unreachable
mother, new
and unreachable.
All the bodies I’m sent into are in pain.
A caterpillar bellies across an hour that’s been touched
by the last
butterfly’s
moment…
I know that’s easy. I’m not here
for the writing.
