Cadaver Of Red Roses
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
O, Miami (2024)
In the elegantly wrestled verse of Cadaver of Red Roses, poet Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi takes actual place and actual thing as a gift and re-gifts them as a fair and brutal math, a hungry and clawed-at grammar, a headlining and interrupted voice. Its anger illuminates hallucinations that are ever-present, and its peace reverses ritual might its purple prayer leave a mark looked for by a bruise. It says yes, and so what, and it sings home using the notes of the seriously remote. So sing, so look. Keep pace. Its portals have softspots for the void.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Forgetting loses its house to an angel with a photographic memory. Hell falls back into hell. Most deer remember a deer in headlights. Loss beats me to my kids, but not to yours. God can’t dream. I wear a blindfold and throw a rock made of blood. Up to three wasps fit in your mother’s eye. Week ago I saw a man punch a woman while she was driving. I’m not weak. My knees, my teeth. Mean rain.
Three days after surgery and god is still saying violent things. The angels have gone to see the oil spill. My son cries weird, but not like that.
Keep, cricket.
The mirror’s
been
unplugged.
I drink
under star
the y
from stray. Say god,
say nearer
my stomach
to thee.
The outside child
is outside, the inside
child
is a pill, a lobster, a banshee
in a cup
of mouthwash.
All things dead
dead
right now.
I deleted the poem. The kids were out of food. The kids were praying to the period detail in your dream. The kids were all the same. One went missing for like seven minutes. The angel of toothaches pulled a weeping bone from a tree we thought would cry. Cry, we said. Angels aren’t even strong. I deleted the poem. Your death, your death.
SELF PUBLISHED New and Selected
The Tornado That Lost Our Emptiness
(cover image by Noah M Smock)
700+ pages
poems 2019 to selected present
hardcover 30.00, softcover 20.00
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
The clothes I had were eaten. When you are god, you will miss being able to stare.
My Life In Brutalist Architecture
John Gallaher, poems
Four Way Books, 2024
This seems invented. Not invented in the sense of being made-up, not in the sense of a tall-tale meant to distract, but invented in the way that a starter gun creates a stray yesterday, in the way that a chapter can absolve closure of its premature end. The riven this I speak of is John Gallaher’s movingly erased illumination as hallucinated by the nextness of now and as given the progressively remnant title of My Life In Brutalist Architecture. As memoir, as poem, as a thing secretly narrated and openly recorded, as hybrid meditation on adoption and lonely séance held for belonging, it is not a story for everyone but is a telling for all. Show me everything. The ‘hard joke, friend’, the cell clocked by the wrong time, the astronaut’s double, and the scar that won’t scar. Gallaher’s verse goes by quickly, but is not a single note, is not a brief music. It sings and songs itself into such inquiry that its asking has absence weighing in on the etiquette of disappearance and has its golden yawn gasping for shortness of breath. I don’t know. We might just be from those kissed places that a landless god won’t wash. Invented. In the way a ghost might fall asleep to the same repeating blip from an unfixed radar. In the way that same ghost elsewhere makes its own soul, then looks for it, then pictures it. Sees it twice from the same abandoned eye.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
It came out of the woods and never swam again. I had wanted to give it a shape, but want is an angel burning a star with its stomach. I was most nights writing toward want. I started a magazine with a man bent by god. The man had a name, but I didn’t care. He took my form and then one for himself. I still have some of his needs. If a thing lived, it was our bulimic bird with no young.
kingsoftrain 