The body is a scam.
I don’t know what heaven becomes when everyone has died.
Some wild
last
dog
with a numb
mouth…
Some human
tongue
mistaken for a bar
of soap
or unbathed
fish…
Unlove me, I write.
Then say.
I’m sorry
now.
Longing
of course
erases
brevity.
Are fish
born
in the afterfrog
of god’s
face.
My sick
boy
stiffens.
I am not hurt.
America kills nostalgia
nostalgia
when we got here
was dead.
words toward Ann Jäderlund’s LONESPEECH, as translated by Johannes Göransson, (Nightboat Books 2024)
LONESPEECH
Ann Jäderlund
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Nightboat Books, 2024
Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech lets sound do the clawing and makes of surface a thing once heard. As translated by Johannes Göransson, it is a work of remaining transmutation. Its verses of desolate accumulation form a one-being cult of the deceptively stripped-down, and with every word comes a new word you’ve only heard repeated. Infant loneliness, rain audio, fried speech. This is an endeavor of transformative non-ness. So, escape and swallow and return. A thing is time if you have time. A thing is time if you don’t.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
This Sunday at 3pm EST!
A couple of my favorite writers. I'll probably say something stupid. They won't.
The SECOND of the 'I think I can't speak for everyone here' reading series will be held over Zoom on Sunday, April 28th, at 3pm EST. Featured writers will be Tom Snarsky and Darren C. Demaree.
**Please email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the Zoom link and to sign-up for the open mic.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-one poetry collections, most recently “in defense of the goat as it continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff”, (April Gloaming, February 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025, and the title poem is available to read on Metatron Press’s GLYPHÖRIA platform. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky @tomsnarsky.
Current and other:
Sunday April 28th, 3pm EST, featured: Tom Snarsky and Darren C Demaree
Saturday May 18th, 4pm EST, featured: Nadia Arioli and Jay Besemer
Sunday May 19th, 3pm EST, featured: Pamela Kesling and Bee Morris
Sunday May 26th, 3pm EST, featured: Dylan Krieger and Alina Stefanescu
(no events will be held in June)
Nothing is working.
Here are some photos
of my children.
I need them
like I need
them.
I wanted to write very one long beauty that had a small shadow a bomb’s shadow that did not belong to death but smelled like sleep one long very
beauty.
Nothing is working. Don’t have kids
who write
Some CITY poems from my self-published collection ‘untouched in the capital of soon’
untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages
poems, Sept 2021
collection is pay-what-you-want and can be purchased
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
~
city 13
God wasn't there when image called off its search
city 14
A photo
eats better
than a mirror
city 15
I don't imagine that I'll ever be
as angry
as every
third wolf
city 16
The detail that got away from death
was almost perfect
But I should not
have understood
your poem
city 19
Time
an exit wound that god closes with our need to miss a creator
city 20
Death
still thinks
my son
is fast
city 21
Future is the part of the snake the astronauts eat last.
city 32
sleep cries itself to death
I wrote
a poem
similar
to the poem
below
You love
another
city 36
A running shower that prays impossibly on the body of our lowest sibling for the return of a bomb-maker's homesick drone
city 37
An angel burned for soundproofing crows
city 40
The dream on its deathbed
sees a film
on emptiness
city 41
Animals pretend to live here
But don't
eat much
city 44
Keeping the baby despite its perfection
city 46
A paper airplane on fire in a helpless mirror
city 57 or 58
A puppeteer rubbing her hands over a book of spells for the untouched
A shy thief whose items change shape
city 59
Practice
forgetting
city 60
(how to starve a microscope in god's museum)
city 69
Crow, with seashell
city 70 or 71
The short past of my body in the small
of yours
A baby chewing on its hand in pile of leaves
city 72 and 73
The boy has one mouse
All named
Cigarette
city 74
In its shadow grief the window
in the open
Mirror
city 77
Occasionally the odd ghost that worships
blood and glue
city 78
I can't always find the year I believed in god
city 79
Instead something joins the body
And two
places
Die
city 80
How quietly they eat
This far, even
From the birdwatcher's strangled son
city 81
I forget to eat and god says I am swimming
city 115
Ballet or the lost
mind
of a snowstorm
city 116
Oh how gone it is the ghostjoy of lighting a mother's cigarette in a dream that gets my mouth wrong
city 121
My memory isn't what it will be.
Povertavoid, avidsad, handbefore.
She wants a flowermysonisdead.
city 122
We get our thunder from snow's dream.
A baby
invents
kneeling
with a fork and an outlet.
The wind is slowly eaten
by what
city 123
There's not much to know, really.
The puppeteer sleeps all day
and the fisherman
all night.
Hide your hair in your mouth.
city 126
I can't be around people who know how to swim. It's not, I know, the best way to start a city. God wants to be alive all the time. Everything in my body is recent.
You’re dying.
Tell me what you see.
Whatever happened to me isn’t happening now. I can’t take you there. I can’t take you there, but I can be a place. Bruises hold auditions in hell. Every newborn beast sets a record for going the longest without touching the earth. My son was here before we knew he was sick. I don’t talk much. Silence is a color that form hides from shape in a dream where god feels loss for more than three days. There are creatures in heaven that will follow you out.
kingsoftrain 