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September 26, 2023 / barton smock

hickgnosis

The mother says she is between twins. Half-life, hard-on. Harmer, Ohio, sexual. Factories of fishhooks that modify loneliness.   
September 26, 2023 / barton smock

hickgnosis

A ghost in the word gone. The word gone has a ghost in it. A cat circles a crushed beer can three times, plays dead. Cats don’t do that. Either you skip stones or let a baseball carry darkness. I love so much my sleep is a muscle. I love so much my sleep is a bone. I’ll drink until god wants to feel that again.
September 25, 2023 / barton smock

hickgnosis

Church, comet, centipede. God saves his son’s hair. The sun closes our baby’s mouth. Psychic, cyclops, cyclist. Our son loses his voice on a boat. No one is born for years. 
September 25, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

birthplace 73

I fall asleep to the kids naming toothaches underwater. The poets I don’t hear from are teaching each other how to die. You do your best impression of the ghost that god killed for knowing which animals can see the future. It’s not a great impression. My kids are alive more often than not. I won’t forget there’s too much time.    
September 25, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

birthplace 72

The aching swan of a father’s stork. The tiptoe blood of a mother’s wasp. We paint for context our privates blue. Touch wrists to sadden our mouths. I still go outside to say any small thing. Our dolls have the same limp.
September 22, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

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.
September 22, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

birthplace 70

Nostalgia
an emptied
spider, Death

a breadcrumb
suspended
in a ghost, Ghost

ghost
September 21, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

birthplace 69

God is man’s yearning for a complexity that god cannot recreate. My teeth were fine and the afterlife was doing its thing. I said I wouldn’t say god then made my brother mutter kinder thunder until my killer’s mother kicked her prayed-for stutter. I said god god the moon is dead. Puberty came from its haunted blue mud. A cigarette, a toy. The lost rib of joy. 
September 21, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

birthplace 68

Also
hio:

Wrong
way
wrist
September 21, 2023 / barton smock

birthplace,

birthplace 67

Designer Ohio traffic:

Brief
yield.

The babies
can’t see
their breath.

Stop sigh.