The children are crying right now and people want to talk about time. I thought we could buy local and avoid empire. I'm sick again. We thought we could unplug. Drink ourselves to life.
Writing is mostly where I dream of writing. The uneaten moment in the music of its swallowing.
Touch is an eye that can hurt the light.
We’re sick again. We know the bomb as the least long lord of our pills. There is a shadow in my mother that the angels can’t wait to wrap around a thing gone limp. Angels repeat the future and call it doom, but it’s all afterlife.
God’s never done dying.
The angel of suicide can only read cursive
The brain is a thorn pulled like a fingerprint
from the rib of a star.
It’s usually
here
the baby
makes it.
Death will forget to create god.
I said something perfect.
Your father loved you.
Please join us on Sunday 9/8 at 3pm EST for the 13th installment of the I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here reading series. Featured readers will be Kristyn Garza and Clara Burghelea.
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom info and to sign up for the open mic.
Clara Burghelea published two poetry collections: The Flavor of the Other (Dos Madres Press 2020) and Praise the Unburied (Chaffinch Press 2021). Her poems and translations have been published in Goalf Coast, Delos, The Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. She is the Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation and a third-year PhD student in Literature at University of Texas at Dallas.
Kristyn Garza, a chicana from the U.S./Mexico border, moved from her hometown of McAllen, Texas to Austin to earn her bachelor's degree in English Literature at St. Edward’s University, later earning her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame. She was longlisted for Palette Poetry's 2022 Sappho Prize and her work has been published or is forthcoming in AGNI, Poets.org, Tupelo Quarterly, Cream City Review, The McNeese Review, RHINO, Pembroke Magazine, and others. Most recently, she was awarded the 2023 Academy of American Poets Billy Maich Award. Her chapbook, Dictionary of Bodies, won Gasher Press' 2024 Spring Poetry Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in winter 2024. Kristyn currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is in her second year of her PhD in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.
Please join us on Saturday 9/7 at 4pm EST for the 12th installment of the I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here reading series. Featured reader will be Medha Singh.
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom info and to sign up for the open mic.
Medha Singh is a poet, translator, and editor. She is editor of Berfrois, London. Medha is the winner of the New Writers Award 2023 (Scottish Book Trust). She has published a work of translation, a collection of love letters that she translated from the French, penned by Indian modernist painter Sayed Haider Raza during his time in France, I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters by S.H. Raza (Vadehra Art Gallery, 2020). Her work has appeared in Irish Pages, Bad Lillies, the Robert Graves Review, Interpret, Almost Island, Hotel, 3:AM, Indian Quarterly, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Poetry at Sangam, The Charles River Journal among others. Her work has been anthologized in Singing in the Dark (Penguin, 2020), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Hachette, 2021), Contemporary Indian Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), Best Indian Poetry 2018 (RLFPA editions), Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021) Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press, 2022), Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Penguin Random House, 2022); The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab, 2022). Her work has been translated into Hindi, Spanish and French. Her interviews have appeared on the websites of The Pablo Neruda Foundation, Chile; NERObooks, Boston; POV, Denmark, Queen Mob's Teahouse, London and JCAM, Massachusetts. among others. Medha was longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards (India) in 2019 and 2020. She took her MSc in Creative Writing from the Uni of Edinburgh. Her collection of poems Afterbody is slated to launch in 2025 through Blue Diode Press, Edinburgh.
A few things:
Self published two collections this week.
The first, 57 Letters to Ethan Hawke (or I wanted to stop saying god), is what the title claims.
The second, The Crow's Book of Wrists, is a full-length collection of poems at 193 pages. Cover image by Noah Michael Smock.
Both collections are pay what you want:
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
Include shipment details in payment notes. Request PDF for review or just for the heck of it at bartonsmock@yahoo.com
ALSO, more details on both of the below reading series dates, but please join me next weekend on either Saturday 9/7 or Sunday 9/8, or both, for the next two installments in the I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here reading series.
Medha Singh Saturday 9/7 at 4pm
Kristyn Garza and Clara Burghelea Sunday 9/8 at 3pm
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the zoom link and/or to sign up for the open mic.
Outside The Joy
poems, Ruth Awad
Third Man Books, 2024
I hear, here, a remembered crying. I scrape forgiveness from Ohio to Ohio without a sound. I am in the bearable deepness of Ruth Awad’s latest poetry collection, Outside The Joy, where inquiry is a crop unjudged for the blueness of its yield. I want to tell you where I am that you know I’ve disappeared. Loss is an animal changing search parties in a museum dedicated to exhibiting the same, held differently, gun. This is a verse of hidden performance and dark display. Mother, sister, place, peace. Awad is a poet of the between-life, of old anger and resettled cure, and works this work into one of unmarked resettings to love the world with burnt care. How else, how else. Inside the inside, it shapes answer with response, and whole gods lose muscle to the memory of carried creatures.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Available now:
The Crow's Book of Wrists
poems, 193 pages
August 2024
Barton Smock
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
Pay what you want
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
kingsoftrain 