Skip to content
September 24, 2025 / barton smock

violences before eggshell

designed the tornado designed a still child's stomach for the painter of tornadoes

designed the healthy designed a tongue scraping by on nudes reading from god's fingertips

designed the sick designed the sick getting sick outside

designed vigil designed a prayer-chain drinking game

designed the baby designed a baby okay with dying

designed intimacy designed a son speaking near his father's mouth

designed a fingernail designed a method of tracing a haircut inside of a circle the moon met online

write to your mother and live
September 24, 2025 / barton smock

violences during resurrection

Stop using canaries. Small motherless bombmakers give birth on the moon. Their crying is real but they have healthcare. No one asks god what the body can do. Hope used to be devastating. I recognize this place again and again. A sick son's brain is the dog of time. Jesus died, came back, and named his ghosts Cain and Abel. We fill a microwave with cigarettes and the television calls it a birdfeeder. A school is the church of school shootings.
September 20, 2025 / barton smock

son poems

a cigarette loses time in a church for anorexics

babies jealous of our sadness die happy

I am trying to say the next thing before you have a mother

what if not hurting your children is abuse

my last words depend on the password I remember

choose any parent to make my brothers cry

belief a skull faith a stone

toothache a worm worried about a star

no one likes me I love your poems

can worms worry
September 19, 2025 / barton smock

fragment

Memory stops eating in the afterlife of the past. 
A cigarette can sometimes be a search party that finds nothing.
Angels change their sex based on the owl that hears them.
In church I break my fingers trying to open a baseball full of rice.
The breaking happens so silently we are noticed, say my fingers, by god.
Will my children see my body
September 19, 2025 / barton smock

pro fragment

touch sleeps in a blue mirror

I wrap a dead mouse in a blurry map and miss
three
of the four
children
that were me

super quiet parents
September 18, 2025 / barton smock

anti fragment

sometimes they kill every last
others
every
first

oh nursery of injured microscopes,
we only bomb those whose blood can disappear

when I don't hear from you, I don't think you're dead

I'll see it when I know it
in fact
I have
the words
September 16, 2025 / barton smock

no lines


with some distance
god
gave suicide
to a crisis
actor
September 12, 2025 / barton smock

eden things

I was sick and tried to finish a cigarette. Online at least I can speak my prayers to a god that leaves me godless. Any weapon you hold has been tested on a child. Any weapon you don't on a field of children put to sleep. I don't love my children because loving puts nearness on a map only angels can fold. I with them watch cringe compilations of miracles. They die but who's counting.
September 10, 2025 / barton smock

first thing

Climate change killed a ghost and every angel slept. 

Animals hid their dreaming.

Microwaves
confessed

to hummingbirds.

Our longest death
remained a boy
his brain
god’s
now
September 6, 2025 / barton smock

listening to my son breathe

You put your body
in which
day