/ the past can’t do this anymore
/ the brainwashed narrator of my absence
he will not explain
fog
to snow
/ she will not sleep
with it
that says
word
for word
I am my mother’s
fear
of the male
body
to it that hawks the mirror’s television, eating is the oldest trick in the book.
the ghost of my clone
/ does death
get the message
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:
as a word, plot seems artificially unaware of its absence from a book of baby names.
online, abandonment needs a vacation.
/ GOD
comes home to a punching bag in a treehouse. to a breathing machine being fixed by a marsupial. to a son talking himself down from cooking-show fatigue. to a clockmaker’s lab rat
putting a spell
on a boat.
I am a boy because of the boy who killed my family. she wears a swimsuit designed by a hole. we eat together these fireworks in the mouth of a frog. our gargoyles worship food coloring. our father for a living disguises his mother’s roof. his mother speaks to the animal animals don’t.
most days it would try not to look at its clothes. there was the night it spent at a friend’s house where it puked in the bathroom and spoke to the glass door of a dryer. where it saw it swore a mousetrap catch only the pregnant mice. where it heard from a wall the names of those against making a swastika from a smashed spider.
year baby was the year the strippers fled tanks and were later shot safely from cannons. the year it suspected déjà vu of bringing food to the same stomach.
they will begin to think you’ve lost them. a mirror will go to prison for harboring the invisible cyclops that discovered how to miss the trace nakedness leaves. a rabbit’s foot will pray from inside a crushed hat. and the land will be flat because a hill stopped filming.
before violence can celebrate the sleep that got away,
dreams my dialect coach never had. birth and the boring outcomes of immediacy. oh grief, the first to mourn the fast learner. it’s your story, but you can’t name it resurrection, your spacecraft, without considering the mortality of your audience. I sleep crooked while watching ugliness. I love my brother like a leg but he brings to choir exit music for nomads. what does god think of the future? we carry the virus that killed our ghost.
