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November 26, 2024 / barton smock

consumptions

I wanted to smoke and look at water. I turned left at a tipped over gas can and walked until I heard fireworks. A small tv was showing god the hole it needed help making. A dryer with a baby in it was won by two mothers. They tried to scream. I made a sound and the sound stayed that way for good. I recognized my kids for years.  
November 26, 2024 / barton smock

the body lives as our last unknown location

Design 
a late
animal.

God is everywhere.
Obsessed
with birthplace.
November 21, 2024 / barton smock

sex notes taken by a serial resurrector whose father can buy sadness

Some animals have had success dying behind god’s back.

I squeezed in an airplane
your hand until it broke.

(that toy
car
from our blue
mom)

Storks
can’t lose
blood.
November 19, 2024 / barton smock

lists and lost(s)

LIST OF MOST RECENT:

untouched in the capital of soon
187 pages
poems, Sept 2021

blood to bathe us in its blue past
217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022

APARTURES
125 pages
poems, January 2023

deer as permission to die in ohio
43 poems
chapbook, April 2023

naked in dog years
55 pages
April 2024

57 Letters to Ethan Hawke,
or I wanted to stop saying god

letters 1-57
August 2024

The Crow's Book of Wrists
193 pages
August 2024

~~
These self-published works, hard copy, are pay what you want and can be purchased via

paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
November 19, 2024 / barton smock

responsoria

My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.   
November 18, 2024 / barton smock

goodbye I’m here

A white sock
cannot pray
for the rabbit’s
stomach.

Look at stuff and die.
November 16, 2024 / barton smock

words toward Kristyn Garza’s ‘Dictionary of Bodies’ (Gasher Press, 2024)

Dictionary Of Bodies
Kristyn Garza
Gasher Press, 2024

Wreath, wraith. Define an identified body. Plot knows how I got here. Here is a place that houses the danced around thing. That languages lostness into being lifted from a touchless tongue. Here is Kristyn Garza’s Dictionary Of Bodies. Nuance of trauma, ghosted latticework. Somehow is, somehow was. Time is a time machine. Garza is a poet of the invitingly unexplained. Ask and answer kneel on the same knee. Prose assigns its invisible birthmark and invents independence. Saying and speaking have a long distance relationship with brief evocations. What work. Have surface, save face, and share a firefly.

~

reflection by Barton Smock

November 16, 2024 / barton smock

I’ve always had to write quickly

is my son
alone

ask
November 15, 2024 / barton smock

my son in the calmest nightmare has seen a balloon

The disconnected god of blood 

The wasp of loss

I don’t have your headache, kid

A cigarette looks for its teeth
Sleep
for the older
wrist

of proximity’s
nearby
ghost
November 14, 2024 / barton smock

I can’t be sad and sad at the same time

Movies
lengthen god

Write high