here
to be
deleted
birth
is not
consent
(breathing
is the only
meal)
the resurrected
finish
cute girls watch when I eat aether
Maria Hardin
Action Books, 2024
~
Self-shrugging through retouched harm, Maria Hardin’s cute girls watch when I eat aether tongues its verse across a scratched fossil of care and brushes the shrinking hair of its homegrown language in a mirror that keeps color as the grey fetish of the omnisad. Worry and magic, here, are two shops left by separate aggressive vacancies to the mind of the same fought-over shoplifter. Both online and in-hand, both paused afterlife and gasping search engine, it asks us to go skin-to-skin in a mini-museum of penetralia where I was, you were, moved. What a still stilling work.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
not in the baby
nor baby’s
machine
to tenderly drown
in movement’s
dream
You can know everything
and die
forever.
Don’t worry.
Hate the ocean
close to god.
Loneliness had its own grief
but the future
moved
I drank and it wasn’t poetry
I drank and it was
nostalgia
a ghost
perversion
of sleep
Children know their bodies will kill them
Publication announcement, or whisper, or whatever. Anyway, a self-published thing, details and the absence of:
naked in dog years
poems, 55 pages
April 2024
Pay what you want
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
cover image by Noah M Smock
god upon re-entry died dreaming of re-entry
On an Ohio backroad, a costume is begging for the short life of shape. There is no land of touch but in the land of touch a blue sun goes from eye to eye of the less crucified. In pain, my son runs out of pain. His mouth has a language that stays in his mouth. I think often of that first that ableist garden. It is always today.
Instead of saying arm, my son bites my leg while daydreaming. My body is a skintight sickness. Saint meaning angel, angel meaning saint. A bruise moves through a fish. Silence a glitch. Absence the tooth fairy of absence.
Sorry but if your kids are dying, time exists. God sucks at revenge. I can’t dream during a thunderstorm nor sleep with my mouth closed. All art is about the bomb. When I was sick, I wasn’t. My food was going to hell. It is always too soon to be the angel that appears to Franz Wright. A whale can’t imagine swallowing but here in the anecdotal remoteness of my other stomach is the fat baby made of clothes. Create slowly. Don’t go to heaven. You’re just one person.
kingsoftrain 