it learned to read by being called every name in the book and it wrote eulogies for the children of getaway drivers and it knew nail as the light bulb of a dream journal and it did not know which palm print went with which birthmark on its mother’s vision board and it had its hair pulled out in a cornfield by a boy / god was too / young to have
as a stick figure on a forgotten gurney dreams of one day washing a flower or of drying a wet bird, I run the bath to put the tub to sleep then use my body to bury the water.
when your son finally speaks, he’ll say the kids in his very first dream were all sick
/ kiss only those
who blame
god
place a wet diaper on a skateboard and send the skateboard across a non-busy street. we call this summer. the older kids arrange on a stretcher the pieces of a woman’s bathing suit. the older kids come for the skateboard. our tortured turtle is bad with names. the tractor has yet to reach the deer. this is also summer. the orphan keeps two diaries.
a one-legged boy
and a lame
bird
in a roller
skate
I have a privately self-published chapbook {BASILISK} that I am making available for free from now through the end of March by request only. if interested, one can provide me with a physical mailing address via message here or to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
as my brothers tie me to the world, the mailing of the chapbook will also include a short work by one NC Smock, one of said brothers. it is here:
~
Also, I have in hand 10 copies of the same chapbook that are signed, as well as 4 copies of my Dink Press chapbook [infant*cinema], also signed, that can also be requested in the above manner.
~
the entirety of the BASILISK chapbook is below:
KEENING
(i)
a week ago, sister bled to death on a rocking horse. today is the short memory of our pig farming father and the suicide of the knife-thrower’s surgeon.
(ii)
notes…
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mom is talking to her wounds. dear baby I don’t have to carry. dear purse I don’t have to fill. her dolls draw blood and her animals say goodbye. there’s no substitute for loneliness. memory knows more than what happened. dad is an oil slick seducing a satellite. his dolls eat pillows.
am giving the balloon a head of hair and my brother his skateboard a set of teeth. are we teasing the same creatures, yes, with mom’s eardrum. all our birds have one father and the father foreign concepts of farewell. sister is urging us to hug but we know from stick that river had a nightmare.
your hair looks like a missing wig. dream is comb in a glacier. sleep an ape’s thumbnail.
a rake
the scarecrow’s
broom.
ugly makes you easy to find.
kingsoftrain 