I was your mother. on television, one could see what other televisions were watching. I tried to tell your father you wanted a bird stuck in a frog’s body. that a sleepy afternoon is the poor man’s insomnia. he hated that I wrote down your thoughts on thoughts. by the time you get them back, you’re someone else.
for Noah
I can’t tell my brother how his amnesia has given him a second chance at life. his kid is a real shit. so’s mine. still, there’s not enough here for it to have all been a dream.
the voided twin
created for duplication
trying to eat alone
our food
tastes
the same
its touching
backstory
still intact
to the rabbit
he can’t bring himself
to shoot
in the foot
the boy
with a sore thumb
whose mother
wrote the book
on book
burnings, whose father
baptized
a scarecrow
as scarce
crow
whispers
in hindsight
of course
the omens
are coming
a disabled
child
and the chance
to destroy
my body
my mother speaks
to those
I silence
in tongues. confesses
she is not
an animal
person. when drunk, she knows
to push
to the right
the stroke
ravaged
newborn. as a word
barren
is a man’s
word. as a thought
it’s a keeper. if one asks
where one
beats a dog
I answer
in front of children. it’s the question
leaves a mark
on the heart.
from Misreckon (poems, barton smock, Dec 2014)
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/misreckon/paperback/product-21954246.html
banshee
the baby’s appetite for its birth is jaw-dropping. in store for god, we have nothing in the house.
respite
history is a timeline of appetite. I have rubber bands at the ready for when my mother yawns. I cover my baby brother like a grenade. he was born without the potential for further muscle tone. father calls what I do context. I appear like a bruise into a delayed game of hot potato. my sister’s hands are an oven mitt’s dream. I know you’re a hitchhiker and your girlfriend a cannibal but here we suck our thumbs.
nature shots for baby
mother’s inhaler is what you called the mirror mother held to size her mouth. I was in her purse when she was taken. I don’t know how it is I know things. bones in the stomach of god.
readings
we came here
to create
the devil
the bogeyman
beat us
to.
despair.
despair is the wine
we age
imagery
with.
my boy
body
was at
the high
end
of the seesaw
when my brother
was shot.
as a date of death
might differ
from the date
pronounced
my mother
starred
in rumors.
hill hours
the clock in my brother’s room
has a visitor
in the form
of a tattoo
artist
who believes
sleep
is a brand
of insomnia.
my brother is here
because he swallowed
an ant
with his heart.
he wants a doctor
with snow
on her knees.
the words have left me. as for shaken baby
syndrome, you gave
that shit
to yourself.
wild goose, reappear
is what I would say
to the wild goose.
the last copy of mama’s
sacerdotal
memoir
the copy
that makes
sense.
The War On Unicorns
by Brian James Dawson
Words Dance Publishing, August 2015
here: http://wordsdance.com/the-war-on-unicorns-by-brian-james-dawson/
review by Barton Smock
Brian James Dawson is a poet I’ve admired for some time. I lucked into his work, years ago, on Myspace; days from which I can pull little save for some poets were there trying very hard to be seen being alone. Because so many writers stop, right? They kiss Jesus behind the ear and say I’m off and my sins are coming with me. Or they get some small job narrating death’s cameo. But there was this line, there, that I didn’t draw a line through, uttered by Dawson, that unfolded then and now like this: loving the dying is like tattooing the water. It made me smoke. It made me quit smoking. It made me want to give a backstory to something that didn’t exist yet. And here I have this work, this The War On Unicorns, with its parts 1 through 40, which from its opening lines- “The dog barks constantly. Shining men in / riot gear accept flowers.” – enters the conflicting imaginations of the local and the empyreal. The book itself is a halcyonian triumph. Lines, of course, abound. “A paper airplane flies towards a furnace”(2). “A remade red dress / hangs lugubriously on a wooden rack / in a closet left over from / the Mormon migration”(5). But I’ve said too much of what it merely says. It doesn’t build, it contains, it is house. Inside, there is map enough to distract the bombings. At one point, Dawson directs us to “Remember Tehran.” It is not jarring, it is just the end of a poem. Dawson is a student of history but teaches the sane myth.
how horrible it must be for god to know he can read.
we’ll take them all,
these animals of disabled children.
kingsoftrain 