angel tantrum
poems, Barton Smock
171 pages
April 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock

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A couple short poems from the collection to convince one of nothing:

A CIGARETTE IS A STAR DE-AGED BY GOD

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.

ANGELS WANT BODIES THEY CAN LEAVE

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.

I don't sleep anymore.
I can almost see
god seeing
a child.
My stomach remembers every olive.
I have two phones
but no favorite.

An arm cast
in a long
heaven
raises
not from birth
a hand

100 bodies
learn to count

The mirror remains an unfaithful marker
of those Ohioans
presently addicted
to the speedy
sameness
of decay

Re-hungered

a needle
boils
its nearness
to the doll’s
backbone

A cornfield made of rain

A ruined ghost
showing the palms
of my mother’s
hands
to infants
ecstatic
with eyesight

The low miracle’s most vanished
pleasure carried to its invisible end

My unreachable
mother, new

and unreachable.

All the bodies I’m sent into are in pain.
A caterpillar bellies across an hour that’s been touched

by the last
butterfly’s
moment…

I know that’s easy. I’m not here
for the writing.

I bring wine to the table but also my will to place the blood piano on the front lawn and play it for the vomiting passersby. Touch writes the unreadable bible on privacy. Fill a baseball with the stop sign’s blood. One death is hard to process do you think Death has a story about a particular life? In the afterlife of your gone-ness I am de-blued by shock. I write stuff like that because I can’t write more than three times with my wrist. I know you’re tired of me carving belief into the face of god but please **** the golden poet who knows we can’t eat food. Howl non-starlike into the flash of the eye-prone before. Dear addict ask image what god did only once.

I’ve put my hands on my brothers hoping they will want to equally die. In the dream it was me checking on me to see if I was faking sleep. You can change the mirror’s past with the face of god. In the dream they find ice in my stomach and shatter notions of conception concerning dying glass angels. **** my aunt again I dare you. Eden had to be super small.