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December 12, 2023 / barton smock

possibly I was only ever a shape being bent into a bath of naked blood

A bombed place is a place remembered every second by time.

Touch has three fathers
or a mother with double vision.

Was god told the mirror it could see.
December 8, 2023 / barton smock

anthill’s undreaming god aches thoughtlessly below our usual rabbit place

Data usage, teeth, xmas. Angels attracted to angels passed through a bomb. Waist up, waist down. The moved body. My son's age in being carried.
December 3, 2023 / barton smock

ohio snow and ohio ice protecting the same loss

Death is lazy. My kids don’t say this, but I tell people they do. I say to myself that my hands are asleep and my wife’s blood asks for a night off. I am in America when I say anything. Don’t bomb this place bc a friend of mine ate food there. Four bodies touching is it a season or is it seasonal. I keep my son from pointing the wrong way. I don’t know which muscle hates which bone. Amazing how long god can stay in one position. 
December 2, 2023 / barton smock

thunder hears nothing and this is the number of drinks it takes to like me

I dream myself into a fact about god

How to heal
your sick
son: Wait
his whole life
to miss him
then don’t

In Ohio
we kill
our dead

November 30, 2023 / barton smock

in slow pain dying the wrong death I am asleep outside of a church founded by two forgotten search parties

Body
isn’t far
from boy

Silence skips my son like a letter

Mirror ain’t deep but mirror can hear my unclear twin
breathing
erased
ice

Scrape god from a sentence that god has read

November 28, 2023 / barton smock

a frog howls its frogness to the totem mouth of grief

Before I can name what eats me
it eats me

Rabies and roadkill are two gods away

A dream sequence
skips 
my brother’s
death

A frog howls its frogness to the totem mouth of grief

Here is how to create a spider: Rub sand
in your eye
while your eye
holds its breath

No two gods
are god

The exploded foot of an angel
The microphone left in hell
November 28, 2023 / barton smock

we’ll know by cobweb the childbearing age of ghost

A lawnmower and a chainsaw
while sharing 
insomnias

make 
a quiet 
horse. 

I am not a tactile writer.

God fills my son with sand.
November 25, 2023 / barton smock

I left in your movie the book of my drinking

I’m poor. I’m poor, too. All last week, the wrong year. I am alive. I’m sorry. I am not in the right place to touch god with plastic. Eat someone who knows the future. Don’t tap the animals.
November 24, 2023 / barton smock

marker, don’t read, just want to remember what I’m thankful for, snapshot

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

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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

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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

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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

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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
November 24, 2023 / barton smock

most towns have a week that starts on the day all the dogs play dead at once

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.