God wanted to leave a mark.
A mark. Not a god-
sized
mark.
I thought poetry would keep me from writing.
I do everything without my body.
I was pulled
from a sound
my mother
couldn’t make.
The longer the waiting
the faster
the aftermath.
Your kid is dead and was seen
dead
by thousands.
How many
likes
make
a past-
Pick up a gun
or scream
I’ll find you
I take my pulse three times
before I know
what I’m doing
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.
kingsoftrain 