cool when people are like Lulu isn't real publishing and then they are like my friend says I'm funny so I am offering instructional classes on how to be a comedian here's my paypal / rich white quarterbacks who couldn't take two seconds to believe in covid talking about the softening of society in response to another rich white quarterback who golfed like so hard with Trump shouldn't make my radar but when they do I'm like is it Thanksgiving yes yes it is / not afraid the clumsiness of expressing remote imperfections anyway glad some are allowed to go back to the most bare definition of home but some can't so be full but also be empty / I get drunk and say stuff like my brothers are strange and great and I could be a better father and I didn't need to be so distantly kind see what I mean anyway love your family and humanitarian pauses should last forever / should I believe amnesty international or celebrities asking for a friend whoops former friend / sorry I'm trying to distance myself from my writing by writing
Grief is sorrow with bones. I did things slowly, then. I could enter a room without an empty room knowing. I didn’t have kids and there they stayed listening to the hunger pains of drone operators. There are bodies death cannot experience. Being poor just means you’ll go up stairs that are hiding from stairs. Fuckers say weird stuff about whales.
None of us know how to move. We’ve been here since god went to get god. I see a stick and you a stick in the shape of a gun. In my first dream I’m a bird that can’t breathe and fly like that for years. It’s selfish. Some are kidlike. Even in size.
The silence is fake it’s that good
Rain writes to god mostly about skin A mirror traps a mirror Our proof is the same
from Wasp,gasp. (Incunabula 2023) birthplace 71 I have my pipe and my pictures of the crucifixion. My brother says 'rabbit, rabbit' above a frog. My brother is dead, but only on the moon. The frog is dead all over. / Praise for Wasp, gasp. The worlds of these poems are apocalyptic. Is it the past searching for the present or the present searching for the past? How does one reconcile all of this life but trying to find the words. Touch, god, owl, moon, son, daughter, Mom, Dad, brother. Sex. Ohio. The movies. Baby. Death. The things we brush up against that tell us we are living / that tell us we are also dying. The insidiousness of religion, but also the saving grace of belief or worship. It is clear that Smock worships the word and the world the word can build - a boat. When I read Barton Smock’s work I never want it to end and I always want it to end because it strikes me deep in my heart. He writes in birthplace 76 I want to have these talks. Dog parts and lost hell. My hair dead longer than yours. These poems - a child stunned to find themselves an adult, the search for answers seems meaningless, and yet here is the word, building a ladder out of the muck. Here is the word continuing to make sense of all that has been lost. Of all that will. -Jane Stephens Rosenthal, poet and filmmaker To read Barton Smock is to unlock a sliver of a Midwestern surrealist's (frog-less) dream. Here, God is often in the other room, consumed by the death of childhood and the stylings of the continual family, where famine and loneliness and love all succumb to the image-driven line. To the sideways divine. Grief as a sting. Most of Smock's poems (of which, he has thousands) are often a couple dozen words. Rarely more than a paragraph. A snippet. A breath. A postcard to bury in the ground, its flowers to be shaped like ancient ghosts. Barton Smock's newest ode is his collection Wasp, Gasp, a lyrical visit through childhood handstands and Ohio backlands and lackluster devils expelling hunger in a drunk stomach discovered in someone else's coat. To tackle the line is to fine-tune the prayer-in-hiatus, the blessed text of sleep. This book is the drink. This train is the king. -Benjamin Niespodziany, poet, author of No Farther Than The End Of The Street 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 SleepCover Image by Noah Michael Smock
have signed copies of 'Ghost Arson' (2018, Kung Fu Treachery Press) and 'Wasp, gasp.' (2023, Incunabula Media). Pay what you can. PayPal: bartsmock@gmail.com / Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 / CashApp: $BartonSmock
Via hyper engaged writing that re-imagines tired time travel and horror fantasies into a very awake grindhouse style teen movie that's progressive in both its reverse reverence and anti-homage, Jennifer Reeder's idea-driven and visually off-road Perpetrator invades and enhances spaces usually reserved for male histories and occupies the timeline thereof by overthrowing the mundanely comfortable with the bizarrely familiar. Kiah McKirnan makes her impossible performance relatable long enough to give it teeth, and short enough to quicken the blood might the heart reclaim its beating. There's so much here that even its revelations play catch-up to the known and the knowing. I absolutely love Babak Jalali's Fremont. For how it memorializes memory, for how it details and decorates the abandoned time machine of place, for how its characters believe they are pressed for words when they are actually pressed for how to language them, for its inward humor and outward heroics, for the path it cuts for heartbreak, for the space it leaves the unfixed, and and and. And nothing I’ve said really says anything that speaks to what this film creates a voice for. As Donya, Anaita Wali Zada’s performance is both wall and fly, a movement based on a waiting impatience, a look looking for a look back. Visibility is no healer. Witness, no miracle. And yet, you’ll see, if you haven’t already, something new, here. Something wonderfully made. Familiar, far away, whole. David Fincher's The Killer is either empty male whiteness as deep black comedy, or it's just efficiently smug and hollow and kills everyone but the rich white dude. I am going with the former. But the joke might be on me. Morrisa Maltz's The Unknown Country is a work of deep location and knowing randomness that has a sweet tooth for the spare feast that is companionship and for the busy desolation that candies the eye. Aimlessness has many churches, and Lily Gladstone finds worship enough in her performance to cut the past with both clenched jaw and soft blink while drawing futures from a withholding present. What an elegant surplus of discovery is found, here, where nothing moves beneath the feet of those called to the body that carries their stillness.
TREE OF NOTHING’S APPLE I know a woman whose shadow will never be the same. We are eating from a bowl that wants to go home. * SURGERY, AGE EIGHT These names, before you were born. Colorblind orphan, yawnless fish. Ghost with calendar. Look at me when I’m invisible * NOTES FOR INSECT I will never know a ghost story god does not * DOORBELL, HOUSE OF NOTHING I cured my son in another language that of a perfect child born to draw a circle- doorbell, house of nothing * MOOD PIECE FOR APPLE A father remembers making dinner and whistles at the sober. His death nudges a turtle in the direction of some absent creature chewing gently on its tongue beneath a poster of a missing dog. Lightning prays wheelchair and preaches lawnmower. There is a woman here said to live on hair. On whose mouth we survive. Birth thinks only of itself. Not a day goes by in the grocery of touch. * SUICIDE ETIQUETTES the microscope god avoids by sucking his thumb – dream and blood- their unpainted rooms – the deer tipped off by mannequins – a zookeeper’s empty mom * FURTHER ANNOTATIONS FOR SON god closes the food truck and waits for his carefully chosen porn to buffer. even over this a star * A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR THE SHY The suicide of a mother’s swimming instructor. The browsing history of little ghost. * IN THE BORROWED DRESS OF A MORE VIVID SIBLING oh voice, my immediate orphan * I DREAM AT AUCTION OF A HELL FOR GHOSTS and stork is never home * FORTY -ONE alien that I failed my boys are lonely * CHASMIC Each drawing I do of my face is uglier than the last. God sends me hands I can’t use and prays for his hair. If I have a daughter, she is returning items to a small mirror. Keep me if I don’t. * UNTITLED I was dead I thought about death I died sleep was the only spotlight my mother could avoid if you see a wolf, know suicide has stopped working swimming with father, I said jesus is not the best scarecrow and father said swim I still can’t find Ohio in the the bomb-maker’s Ohio * DEATH & PRAYER i. to be called forth from nothing how perfect / no melancholy is fair to insect ii. would that we could be separated later by birth that we might enjoy shape / the darkness of being remembered
I thought reading would last. Loss has the appetite of god.
kingsoftrain 