September 12, 2024 / barton smock
A sickness moving through the angels. One theory: Two guns in a dream tried to make a hand. A second: God had sex while pregnant. For the third, stay beautiful. Death thinks you’re still here.
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From the crow’s book of wrists (self published August 2024):
GOD THE CANARY OF NOTHING
Light’s
egglike
silence
Rock
paper
infant
Infant
omen
hair
A CHILD FALLS OUT OF GOD
A scrape of my tongue
for an empty
anxious
dog
licking your wrist
in a room
painted trap
door blue
A CHILD FALLS OUT OF GOD
No aliens
after all.
Just us
seeing
if we've died.
My son's
laugh
might
be a seizure.
Some say the crow
some
say buzzard.
The exact
bomb
cannot matter.
BLACK MOUSE MACHINE
for Mark Lanegan
Snow grief
and star
grief
so rarely
die
during the removal
of thunder's
stomach
that I thought
twice
and killed
with no help
from god
a red
fly
on a blue
train
HOPE MACHINE
You liked
a song
and people
died.
Art doesn't exist.
The world's
not old.
LISTENING MACHINE
Water
with its broken blue bones.
The most
private
newborn.
Teeth whitener
and god.
The dryer's ribs.
LOST CHILD MACHINE
Lost
lost child
machine
PROGNOSIS MACHINE
Distance in its little house
longer
than expected
NOSTALGIA MACHINE
It’s over.
God
gets a message
from god.
WRONG AFTERLIFE MACHINE
I do a search for images of babies born without ribs and I don’t see what I want. An article scares me in 1983. Saying that thirst is hunger’s blue ghost is the same as wanting thunderstorm to be a strong password. I’m not on fire but my son is sick all the time. In my nightmare of plenty, sea creatures for the skinning of god pretend they’ve kept god young. A dead angel weighs more the more the news of its death is shared. Is this a love song? Sexting in the sex shop, no two phones can cry like me. Vexations pin the ghost spot where you cloned a sighing bee. Touch touches its exile and my stomach slurs like speech. Positionless you dial theft bereft of any thief. Yes and no. Yes and no. The angel is dead. Dead over here.
SPIDER MACHINE
I grew a spider
in a lightbulb
it came
all this way
to shrivel
in worship
before a picture
of my mother
at nineteen
thinking
of her sister
her sister
her sister
I had two dreams
two different
uncles
they both
drank
and cried
one wanted
me to see
his haircut
the other
wanted
his daughter
to stop
dying
anyway
the un
identified
body
is a body
so police
that
police it
until it kills
itself
on a budget
from 1981
I did
not eat
today
my poor
uncles
her sister
and
my
mom
SAD HAND MACHINE
fish
fishing
for grief
idk
I always
cried
near spiders
so made
to display
their hunger
BECAUSE IN HEAVEN A GHOST
would die
of ceaseless
immediacy
~~~~~
The Crow's Book of Wrists, 193 pages
August 2024
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From 57 letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god (self published August 2024):
Letter 061624 climate sameness
Dear Ethan Hawke
Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I kill a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I kill a rabbit. I’d never kill a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.
Letter 061724 when insomnia leaves listening to us
Dear Ethan Hawke
Last year, I was quiet for seven months. Movies came to me as bruises from the moon. My children hid and their hiding was a kindness. All sight was plain. I wore slippers and my heels set small fires. Pain sang to the stone that god gave a stomach a song so short that a butterfly became an angel’s erection. I wanted to laugh, but everything was funny. Many of the guns didn’t go off. I don’t think I will tell you about the guns. Our disappearance is occupied. And code for something else.
Letter 070324 the office of the lower body
Dear Ethan Hawke
We are this close to eating online a boneless god. It’s not hell, but there’s a neighbor boy who won’t stop putting wasps in his ear. Mothers can’t sleep if a shoe store is touching the earth and fathers strangle themselves long enough to win a fog machine. I buy a spider each morning from a child who tells me a spider is a button that a ghost can push. Death has a room nearby where blood doesn’t go everywhere. I put deer in front of most things now. Deer-hunger powers the angel’s flashlight. Deer-sorrow the boxcutter’s sex doll. Deer-deer the movies that remove nude scenes from other movies for not knowing the difference between the anorexic and the bulimic. Deer-mouth, deer-dream, etc. Remember our life.
Letter 070924 scene syndrome
Dear Ethan Hawke
In the dream I am scrubbing the floor of hell with donated blood. A phone is behind me somewhere playing footage of god two days ago eating a lightbulb but not faster than others. In the dream I ask you under my breath what it means. My mother and father make me sad. If you were them, where would you recover from a botched attempt to switch mouths? Would you both be in the same room? I have heard that angels throw their voices when they die and that they can die from seeing someone give signs in baseball. Ohio is gone for most of the dream.
Letter 072124
Dear Ethan Hawke
This hasn’t been a success. Time is the sex life of distance. Snake said nothing, but we’d all hear our own way into sound near the tree of loneliness. You name things to forget who you are. I played with my kids, then didn’t. Shaved my head when there was nothing to eat. The miracle should have been shrapnel to snow. Graves ache nowhere into being. With movies, the bleeding is internal. I hear an owl because that’s what it knows to be. God dies at the speed of god.
~~~~~
57
Letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god
letters 1-57
August 2024
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From naked in dog years (self published April 2024):
AWAY
The poor, when poor, comfort god with horror films.
One misses
with others
with a single
letter
an entire
language.
Being is everywhere.
Angels erase death for having a memory.
Thinkers in the violet
capital
of atrocity
invent
thought.
God
is ok.
HUMAN EFFORT
I don’t know
what’s worse
god liked
me once
OUTSIDE OF THE DREAM WE SEE MOSES BREAK A SKATEBOARD OVER HIS KNEE
A black leaf is trying to make a fist
A baby
is scraping
by
I DRANK, IT DID NOT SNOW, AND WE CRIED AS ONE OVER THE THEFT OF THE WINDOW-SHOPPER’S HUNGER
Rain
writes
to god
mostly
about
skin
A mirror
traps a mirror
Our proof
is the same
THUNDER HEARS NOTHING AND THIS IS THE NUMBER OF DRINKS IT TAKES TO LIKE ME
I dream myself into a fact about god
How to heal
your sick
son: Wait
his whole life
to miss him
then don’t
In Ohio
we kill
our dead
POSSIBLY I WAS ONLY EVER A SHAPE BEING BENT INTO A BATH OF NAKED BLOOD
A bombed place is a place remembered every second by time.
Touch has three fathers
or a mother with double vision.
Was god told the mirror it could see.
GARDEN POEM
Adam had a gun and Eve said do something with your mouth. God asked the gun to make nakedness. The gun heard loneliness. The animals ate each other because there was no fruit.
FUNERAL POEM
With each
new dream
I’m dead
longer
to the same
people.
I learn their language
by knowing
what to say. Mine
by sleeping
naked
near a god
whose creator
is a changed
creature. I get
about as far
as a bullet
dragging
an angel. Sound
is a small
collector.
Sound
is a small
collector.
~~~~~
naked in dog years, 55 pages
April 2024
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From Wasp, gasp. (Incunabula Media Oct 2023):
birthplace 9
God learns about bones for three days in a treehouse that we pretend is on fire. Violence tells our bodies where we are. I can’t love our children more than once.
birthplace 15
Survival begins to mean don’t kill god. I am in the summer of my summer body. Nothing I touch actually turns into a spoon but I’m still careful and sad from the waist down. I keep my arms busy in front of people holding babies and fall asleep that way.
birthplace 19
My classmates are describing their perfect meal. Our teacher’s son has died recently in an odd but peaceful way. Three coats so far smell like cigarettes. Angels undress when I eat.
birthplace 24
Swimmer’s ear. The far bone. God dreams of ants and surgery. I name a wrist but nothing scrapes mother awake. You’ll lose two kids and a garden.
birthplace 62
A groundhog fills with blood beneath a stop sign. Everyone in the car is playing dead. I’m doing my best to make it look like I’m holding a gun. My hair is made of grief and my fingernails of sleep.
HICKGNOSIS
Field, woods, hill. Moon, milk, man. Reading month as mouth. Nine mouths until the babies live longer. A simple dog barking at a rolled car. Specifics. A brother born hoarse. Earrings in the stomach of a city deer. Me not wanting one of my hands. Intimacy on three, pronouns on two. A violinist, an electric chair, and a lost erection. Someone my age.
Sleep, death, leapfrog. Two infants swallowing a blip from the same radar. A few pianos made of frostbite. Reading moan as moon. Then moon as moan. A circle writing a poem for god. Hipbone, jawbone. Teeth brushed over a bowl that remembers nothing.
AGAINST ARTISTRY
I cannot enter the dream. Not with my toy stomach. This is how we don’t meet. How we don’t pass the age our children were when they died. Jesus rubs a scarecrow the wrong way, or better yet a burned boy presses a tick into his own head to silence the field of his father’s empty helicopter. Jokebook, bible, kingdom. I don’t know where we are. A bullet and a tooth are found outside of the sheep they touched in. The ocean is the ocean mistaking blood for god’s hair. Longing gaslights nostalgia. Underwater, Ohio looks like an ear. I give my son a television to throw at the television, but he forgets. Orphan, widow, elevator. Every time we go to hell, an animal gets its noise.
~~~~~
Wasp, gasp.
Barton Smock, poems
Incunabula Media, October 2023
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From apartures (self published January 2023):
maker 6
the boy intent on crushing his privates with a seesaw is the same boy who sees you next week to put stars in your belly. There is still a boy you aren’t
when you’re sick
of stars
WALK, NO
Silence leaves to quiet another gunshot for its garden. I am here to sleep with you on the the wasp-carried touch that's become god's mind.
Birth isn't the only way to reach our children.
I PRETEND THAT MY TEETH ARE THE TEETH OF THOSE WHO’VE SEEN MY TEETH
only god would fake sleep in an empty house
house 1
we are slow with our loneliness
so slow that god
thinks in twos
the snow comes for other snow
a spoon
prays
to a mirror
no one can watch
and the snow
gets away
house 3
whose childhood
was the longest
there is always
one friend
with a nosebleed
IT IS DARK IN A BRIGHT LANGUAGE
Cornfield, christ, a clueless star. An orange toad setting fires in your father's younger stomach.
I love not writing. There is a spot
you have
spaces
~~~~~
apartures, 125 pages
poems, January 2023
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From deer as permission to die in Ohio (self published April 2023):
AGAINST INTERIORITY
The astronaut called to recut porn and the caterpillar to soften the palms of the crucified. The pill living in the pill you take. Toy noise from a phoneless hell. Blue doll, erasable wrist.
THE BULLET GOES THROUGH MORE PEOPLE THAN BEFORE
Cannibal on the
moon, ghost at the piano.
The rain gone missing.
BREATHING MACHINES MADE IN OHIO
Unending angel
of a terrified stomach.
Tadpole, eye’s daydream.
SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING
The sleepwalker and the insomniac asking god to switch their hidden pregnancies.
A vaccine for object permanence.
The fly
my ghost
calls rain.
SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING
Nude I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.
SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING
Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.
Cutting the hair of the crucified.
Stars
and jobs
and stars.
AGAINST POEMS
Flashlight tag in a church. I sat in a back pew and kicked touchingly at a form I was sure belonged to my brother. Brother stayed quiet and put. I kicked him twice more, harder, trying to find a rib. Nothing. Came that little moon. Came that egg from paper fog. Time was ending. Our youth counselor limped out of somewhere, rubbing her elbows, testing an eye. Brother said where his body was. I felt left.
AGAINST POEMS
God forgets things before they happen. In third or fourth grade, I was pulled out of a bathroom stall by a boy who’d been nice to my mother and I was told what should or should not be in my stomach. There was another boy with him. A city named Empty and a city named Goldfish took turns burning. I missed the future. The past, more.
~~~~~
deer as permission to die in ohio, 43 poems
chapbook, April 2023
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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September 10, 2024 / barton smock
From blood to bathe us in its blue past (self published May 2022):
country 5
A bunch of insomniacs are making short films about nosebleeds. To them I am sometimes a sound effect. Handstand or handsand, I am too young to be watched. I don't have wrists and I can't take the bath your body took. Kiss loss. Kiss loss where
country 6
Lightning as it thirsts for a stray glacier's rib.
The unsought
quiet
of a surgeon's
body.
Things
after they happen
in the sun of my disgrief
country 10
100 poems about time travel:
The child young enough to be on my hip is waving to the nobody in the microwave. The dead have a past. But it's empty
country 12
We throw seashells into a cornfield.
There are children
we want back
country 18
We've the same
last thought
Death
makes nothing
GHOSTALGIA
A drop of blood lands in an eye-sized field.
Imagine
waking up
to cry.
Hide the hidden ant of your son’s loneliness.
GHOSTALGIA
In the dream that my brother calls his haircut dream, I have a tail I'm not allowed to touch. I tell him no haircut has ever taken this long. I tell him that god wanted more kids. I am trying to make him laugh, or pray. Far mice are eating the noise from your wrist.
PARTIALS
Sister's eggshell rabbits. The hand I don't use anymore. Brother's angel emptying its stomach for the ghost of an undiscovered fish. Thunderstorm's best invisible cemetery.
PARTIALS
Memory only eats in front of god. Mothers and daughters smoke together from tornado watch to warning trying to pick up on voice changes in a neighbor's fish and in doing so make of each cigarette a ghost kite that leaves me longing to miss a more specific balloon. There aren't enough of us. Every suicide surprises loss.
MAGIC OR POVERTY
raindrop
in bathwater, the desperate
brain
of a groundhog, the moth
corrections, the actual
age
of your weapon
when left
on a bus, is touch
nowhere's
oldest
witness, magic
-
or poverty
TWO POEMS ABOUT GOD
I keep seeing the same beautiful things
~~~~~
blood to bathe us in its blue past, 217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
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September 9, 2024 / barton smock
From untouched in the capital of soon (self published September 2021):
city 68
I thought reading would make me attractive to god.
I ate slowly, you know?
Like blood like time and their ableist
Newborns.
I wanted the thing that was not the thing.
Poems
in quiet
animals
An exodus
of unmoved
pairings
The corpse
of a cricket
My cricket
mind
city 69
Crow, with seashell
city 70 or 71
The short past of my body in the small
of yours
A baby chewing on its hand in pile of leaves
city 72 and 73
The boy has one mouse
All named
Cigarette
city 74
In its shadow grief the window
in the open
Mirror
SCARED OF MY SON’S BODY
there is in fact a time
exactly like
the present
ANIMAL NOISES FOR THE LAST PERSON TO BE ALONE
The stone has one thought before it dies
and that thought
turns it
to stone
(The trick is to lose every child
Or is it
each
LOCATION NOTES
It was sick for three minutes and lived for eight. I haven’t seen a picture in so long that I’m not sure you’d know me unless I was there. The dream is using us to remember god.
AS IF SNOW WAS TOLD TO FINISH SNOW
Loss gets older and befriends its childless parents without knowing which of them placed a glass of toy water beside mirror’s bed for the you in all those video games where I stopped moving
NOSTALGIA, BRUTALLY
a trapdoor meant for a circle, a body
from a puzzled
lake, god
falling ill
in a dream, back
to back
cures
for skin
~~~~~
untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages
poems, Sept 2021
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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September 9, 2024 / barton smock
DIETS OF THE RESURRECTED
This rabbit hole we use for the shadow’s mouth. These squirrels bowing in the priesthood of sleep. Do we have briefly what we want? Each of us a bad hand that drops a baseball? Is fasting a weight class?
A tadpole is Ohio’s nightlight. Babies, when touched, belong to the same alarm clock.
~
I think of my mother in her block of ice summoning a curling iron and of my father sending a robot to prison. Of a leafblower named mercy hugged by my brother for outing my sister’s electric chair. Of nakedness, poor nakedness, always playing itself in the story of had we not been invented we would’ve had to exist. Of how daughter she highlights an entry on hair loss in the cannibal’s diary. Of how one holds the owl and one pours the paint and how both, knowing how to dream, choose this
and how they are both a boy in a bottomless mirror asking if death is still known for its one mistake.
~
Poverty created the moon as a place for loss to process God.
It helps to have no one.
~
Ohio alibis:
Two sisters learn from the same angel how to use an insect bite as a fingerprint
~
Ohio solastalgia:
In hell I am passing a cemetery when during a housefire she makes a memorial to the last time you won a staring contest
~
Moods for dying wildlife:
Missing pacifier spotted in fishbowl. Barbershops on fire in the childhood of your puking shadow. Abusers who rename their dogs.
~
How we end up in Ohio is
I saw in hell a star
that in heaven
I did not
CORRECT ACHE
an angel leaves heaven to touch paper as a circle from my childhood rolls toward an empty jack-in-the-box. I am old enough to be sad and too old to separate deer facts from church facts. my children fall asleep before their hands fall asleep.
ELDER ACHE
show me
the fireflies
of yours
that get
sad
around human
stomachs
(there is
a table
rain
will set
BURNINGS
Tattoo
the spider in my left eye
is also
on the kitchen
floor
of a house
that’s gone
Frogsong
depression
decorates
a bird
Miscarry
perhaps a deer
had stepped
on my wrist
MATERIALS
eating before surgery, the child is like a dream cut short by a violence that promotes longing
FILM ACHE
at a certain height, nudity loses meaning
-
if bunk beds collapse in a museum made for emptiness, does Ohio
roll
from a crystal
ball
-
no hawk
is a wasp, but every
wasp…
-
I remember also when you called a tattoo
postage
for the afterlife
-
I see a tornado
and my teeth
turn yellow
THE CRUCIFIXION
I’m in water up to my chin. No one looks at my body.
~~~~~
rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages
poems, Dec 2020
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
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kingsoftrain 