the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?
I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.
something touched
is something
mourned.
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.
the egg is dropped
and the owl
stoned.
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.
the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of piss? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?
/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.
/ year eight:
goodreads review for ‘earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from’:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1606922645?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
and, books:
[eating the animal back to life], 315 pages, published July 2015
for purchase: http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html
for hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5eL2HQQr2c
of which Kazim Ali says:
Speaking of being captivated, when I was in Cleveland’s most exciting new independent bookstore, Guide to Kulchur, I picked up on a whim a few small volumes that appeared to have been published by the author using Lulu. I was so entranced by the seemingly simple but endlessly complex, prickly lyrics that I wrote to the author, Barton Smock, through his blog, kingsoftrain.wordpress.com. He’s been sending me books now and then and his latest, Eating the Animal Back to Life, is just knocking me out. These poems are desperate, tender, wry, alarmed, god-obsessed, and musically driven. Smock is not published by others, he does it all himself and so the only place you can get his books is [here]. All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.
(from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/pm-reading-list-november-2015/)
~
[Drone & Chickenhouse], 84 pages, published October 2015
for purchase: http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html
for hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPk-g6KKio8
~
[earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from], 98 pages, published December 2015
for hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3LQBepO1rw
~
[MOON tattoo], 114 pages, published March 2016
for purchase: http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/moon-tattoo/paperback/product-22621263.html
for hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5VYqmD79w
(-)
church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.
(-)
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.
(-)
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.
me
praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.
for proof
of animal
suicide.
a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.
(-)
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.
got this in the mail today. my chapbook, Infant Cinema. available within the week via Dink Press. (http://www.dinkpress.com/) huge and sincere thanks to Kristopher D. Taylor
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.
I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone
lightning
straightens.
into something from his childhood
a man
is born. never
far off
what crawls
her way.
kingsoftrain 