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January 24, 2024 / barton smock

loneliness machine

The pill that makes you god is made by god

There's no
decay
machine
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January 21, 2024 / barton smock

attraction machine

A kiss trapped in a fingernail

A phobia of nothingness

My cornfields 
have me burning
with others
waist down

No storytellers, no gods

Repeat 
a thing
better
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January 20, 2024 / barton smock

alcohol machine

Death gathers info for the bomb. A baby

is the childhood
of a line break.

I have bones
in my sleep. I have babies

in yours. Pregnant

in hell
one is like
a sore 
thumb

tracking 
the genders
of angels. This movie

is a crier. 

Time and god are both the god that swallowed time.
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January 19, 2024 / barton smock

place, plus, pulse

Some words on my collection 'Wasp, gasp' (Incunabula 2023).

I have lived in Ohio, and experienced its liminal qualities. Both an antiheaven and an antihell, it has the peculiar promise of being illegible from within and without. The narrator's body in Wasp, gasp is also illegible in this way, vibrating slowly between life, death and something else. In this space made by vibration, another something-else can emerge, in sonic play and folding images. God and dog circle one another then flop onto the ground, roll around. I know the demands of a liminal body in a place that won't hold it, what that might create. Barton Smock invites a reader to enter that zone too, the place that is a mode of being, one form of secret (or secret form) revealed: 

The more internal/ the life, the longer/ the past./ A velvet cricket.

-Jay Besemer, poet, author of Men and Sleep

**A reading from 'Wasp, gasp.' 
***I also have two signed copies of the work, which are 15.00, and you can pay via:

paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock

****Also, some words on Jay Besemer's Men and Sleep, here.

~~~

Also:

A few individuals know about and/or have a collection of mine called 'the tornado that lost our emptiness' - it is currently all poems from my collections released 2020-2023, and I intend to keep it and update it as an ongoing record. I've left it off my publications as it doesn't fall under pay what you want because of its size (750+ pages) and mail cost, etc. Anyway, if one wants it, it's 15.00 minimum for the paperback (with cover image by Noah Michael Smock), and 20.00 minimum hardback (no cover image).

can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock

And, as always or never, there are these, below, which are pay what you want:

Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean
124 pages
poems, June 2019

MOTHERLINGS
52 pages
poems, June 2019

an old idea one had of stars
58 pages
poems, February 2020

rocks have the softest shadows
237 pages
poems, Dec 2020

untouched in the capital of soon
187 pages
poems, Sept 2021

blood to bathe us in its blue past
217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022

apartures
125 pages
poems, January 2023

deer as permission to die in ohio
43 poems
chapbook, April 2023

*If not comfortable providing a physical address, you can request a PDF copy with an inquiry to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
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January 18, 2024 / barton smock

bluish toy poem

In a book about the ocean, the number of deer allowed to be killed in a book about the ocean stays the same. Grief gives god to the wrong insomniac. A paper churchbell waits for the blood in my sister’s nose. No one in hell has been there. A seashell is a cyclone crying in the wrist of your ghost.
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January 15, 2024 / barton smock

winter poem

Underwater my brother the birdwatcher lets people twist his arm. His favorite owl puts a single person in charge of loneliness. We’re not close, but we both miss animals in the dark. I can’t have all my teeth at once.
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January 14, 2024 / barton smock

death poem followed by a poem about death

We play rock paper scissors to see who gets the gun. I’ve already pointed my hand at your stomach and I’ve already apologized like a fever for saying that your prophets needed headache medicine. Jesus was looking for his sister. He was on the cross and his father got the day wrong. The problem with pain is that it knows when to stop. A friend lifts the baby and says I don’t know what you’ve been feeding this thing. It has more memories than god.
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January 12, 2024 / barton smock

finished poem

Rainwater’s 
first ambulance 
never makes it

to the shy
legless
angel. Your mom

is still
pretty. She says

the mouth
starts
in the mouth

and that language

creates 
a reinvented 
scarcity. Anyway,

there’s this
southern
thing
that happens

when I talk. When I wear

a bra
and don’t.
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January 11, 2024 / barton smock

death poem

I don’t write
like that
anymore
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January 11, 2024 / barton smock

order poem

We’re seven babies away from god finding out that no one has heard the ocean. I say pain has an angel and you say it has a ghost. We eat for the last time. Some blank grief that not even a mother would save from a staring contest. I eat like a devil. You like a devil on a skateboard crying over the death of a ribless boy. Poverty is neither dream nor transport. I step on a nail in my scarecrow puberty and you bend yourself to rabbit, grocery cart, wheelchair. I run the shower and say things about your body into a coffee can. Birth is wrong about people.
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