/ my newest self-published collection of poems, [depictions of reentry], is available now on Lulu.

will send for free a hard copy to anyone interested in writing a review – make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

book preview on site is book entire

some poems from it:

[liftoff]

the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.

-

my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.

~

[attic radio]

the fattest baby in the nursing home can’t chew with its eyes open.

it’s a slow day.

looking into the future
a skeleton’s
dog
sees only
sticks.

lightning
marks
the robot’s
church.

~

[meditations on depth]

the mouth
of the thing
that eats
in fog
a doll’s
head

-

the holy spirit
high
on the bricklayer’s
toothache

-

a cat person
at death’s
door

-

poverty

a belonging
moved
by many
mirrors

~

[seeing]

bored as a slaughterhouse

crow / angel

on a skateboard

~

[depictions of reentry (xxi)]

the barn
bat
with the eyes
of a diver’s
shadow…

the dads were all digging
the nudes
were thinking
small

every chair
an electric
chair

in daylight, that motherless grief

~~

/ my first non self-published chapbook, [infant cinema], is available from **** Press.

I currently have three signed copies available for free- make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

excerpt, here:

my child. my diver who wets the bed. my worrier who rescues domestic scenes for animals accused of gaslighting. my swimmer. bather of grasshoppers. my lovely bird alone in an airplane.

~

two things to do on an empty stomach are:  

hold a séance.  

follow the spider’s trail of abandoned birthmarks.  

~

in the video, the young woman is being force-fed cake by a man with a ruined tongue. my mother can’t eat and watch at the same time. your mother is holding me and wondering what happened to this thing. our fathers are veering into the realm of film criticism. where you are depends wholly on my sister’s makeup. god’s parents have no concept of time.

~~

/ also, ending tomorrow, is the goodreads giveaway for my self-published thing, [FOUR], which includes four recent titles of mine in full along with some newer poems.  

some poems from it:

[the many]

as an uncle
can enter
any garage
and sense
the absence
of a nailgun
so
can a holy man
prepare
a meal
in the missing
church

~

[purlieu]

a bruise, a school

of fish.  a caterpillar

crossing

the floor
of hell.  a thought

sick
to a son’s
stomach, a winter

glove
in spider’s
nightmare.          

~

[mouthings]

a brother
dodges
suicide
with a piece
of paper
that doesn’t
work. a mother’s
blood

goes white
at the ink
of amnesia.

bus stop, breastmilk
there was

no me.

at what would god
not
be caught
dead? speaking

is how we talk
to the words
we say.

~

[stratum]

two brothers come to blows over which sister likes fast food more.  a man we want to love is shadowboxing a snowdrift from the parable of touch.  blood is a food group.  I pray to my hair.  call my footwork by name.  take my time

with amnesia.  

baby facts include being born again in the museum you were carried to.

I have a new collection available on Lulu, titled [depictions of reentry]

146 pages

book preview on site is book entire

/ I am not close to any named animal.  I flicker

in two
lost

minds.

~  

feel free to share, dissolve, emanate.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/depictions-of-reentry/paperback/product-22811652.html

the knee of hers I don’t kiss

this region
long
on religion

/ the house
she’d have robbed
had her insides
changed

my grief writes in the wrong diary
of the orphan
in her tummy

gathering roadkill for a game of musical chairs

/ the juggler, the darkness

at a costume party thrown by starvation

kissing the baby of the creature
that taught
Judas

play, image, your joke on heaven.

infancy, you destroyer
of nuance

use
the whole
animal.

I love fake things.  the tasered clown.  the sheep my young father remembers being sliced like bread.  the paper shredder that kept some animals from entering the time machine.  the baby in riot gear.  the other baby telling itself not to move.  the blood’s blood type.

it is allowed one diaper per ******-on anthill.  its mother gets everything on the first guess.  it only leaves its body to interrupt god.  it eats a stork.  you’re eating dove.

my first worm
I thought
it was being
dragged

I was just a boy

it was just
worm
like

/ stillness
has it always
been
genetic

/ the context of god, the deadpan

birth
of son...

/ nowhere’s

by design
butterfly

older poems

~

[dream’s fossil]

dear eggshell belly. dear mother. dear church of my father’s owl. dear Ohio. dear owl the deaf bee’s church.

~

[the lost]

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread. her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on. her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours. her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door. when the door opens, any dog will do.

~

[men hermetic]

the crow
the fine print
of nowhere.

the bomb shelter
the rumored locale
of a mother’s
laundry room.

the bare cross
the teething
toy
a baby
bypasses
for the neck
of the woman
waiting
for her junk
to fall.

the mare
the anxious
bike.

~

[cessation psalm]

the less said about god’s addiction to brevity

as heard
by the angel
of birth

~

note: 15% off all print books and free mail shipping on Lulu with coupon code of SHIPSAVE16

paint
with fire
the funny bone

the fence…

stray thing
from dog’s
ashtray

some eyeless thing eating for none

a volunteer
to snipe
the crucified
dentist

appetite’s bedsore

a baby taking up for a chicken

15% off all print books and free mail shipping at Lulu through the 31st with coupon code of SHIPSAVE16

my books are there.

~

some poems from books available:


[male music]

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

~

[afteresque]

what bone am I, stillness?

what can I tell my son
I carried?

what is it knows me
that isn’t god
by the humans
I am
in my sleep?

infancy, what overtakes
your period
of mourning?

~

[pocket]

I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined. nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave. the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube. my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his. mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost. I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog. I have not heard of the spoon that has a past. something in my stomach wants to see a star.

~

[church bell]

the waters recede and god

good for him
saves

with the carcass
of a deer

mama’s
parking spot

/

unrelated, I have begun to see

the fat kid we surrounded for pulling a knife on a bird

the boy
is today
a bloodhound
tracking
the lone
acolyte
of his mother’s
handprints.  as another,

he once
led
a horse
to a woman’s
watermark...      

/ give suicide someone to widow

the boys are off to hang a turtle.  I didn’t know I felt nothing.  her father impressed a piano from puppet heaven.  but pregnancy was all god knew.

I was
for desperation
a woman
crawling away
from her walker.

I still, gender, have
your raincloud.

/ nothing whispered is a language.

the mouth chews on its ghost.

the barn
bat
with the eyes
of a diver’s
shadow…

the dads were all digging
the nudes
were thinking
small

every chair
an electric
chair

in daylight, that motherless grief

it’s my turn with the body

/ I was thinking church
but meant
museum

/ brother is horrified

/ he’s made
this face
before

/ I was saying
in the oven
of the observable
crow
this hologram
is the butcher’s
pajamas

/ I was thinking
fork
that’s not
how telepathy
works

ask a man what a rabbit hole means
he’ll say
logistics

/ everything I had was in that mirror

the dreamless baby of a kidnapped mime.  a god whose mirror packs light.  the hand-me-down

self harm
of the terribly
made.

(-)

how sad?

god
with a shovel
sad.  

/ does your blood
know where
to dig?

30% off all print books on Lulu thru the 24th with coupon code of LULU30

some of mine are there, including:

~ shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems]

~ MOON tattoo

~

poems, from:

[ally]

the robotic jaw
lifting otherness
from a hole
in a body cast

no litter
of bewitched
kittens, no wild

crop
of soundlings
angry

at the wrong
life

~

[tocsin]

the singlemost mother has heard of a skin cream can turn one into darkness.  

a bar of soap that reads palms…

-

on display for the poker face of birth, you are the vision footage dies for.

-

you have this father
leaves
no stone
unseen

this brother

haunted
by surplus
aftermath…

-

before it was an ear, it was where

she scrubbed  

~

[On contact]

hold kitten
like a rifle.  pop

a paper sack
at your father’s

ear.  ah, your father

who was made to kneel

for two
maybe three
things

(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer

from the wreckage of his church

~

[purlieu]

a bruise, a school

of fish.  a caterpillar

crossing

the floor
of hell.  a thought

sick
to a son’s
stomach, a winter

glove
in spider’s
nightmare.          

~

[notes for eggshell]

beneath the tethered astronaut of his dream

the impossible boy
misses

something small

the human ear, its recent
brush
with whale

~

[domain]          for Katherine Osborne

falsehoods
I was sure
to say
to a horse, things like
god is sending
his middle
child
to collect
a drop
of my daughter’s
blood, or

it’s a sin
to be
1989, things I felt

I owed
the horse, that were
horse-like
in their stillness, that went
nowhere
when nowhere
was

come fly
or flat
earth

the dark’s
*****

rag doll
our talisman
of verbal
abuse

and crystal

ball
the whale’s
brain

/ ******

saw pigs in chewing gum

a mother cuts her hair in the house they’ll drag her from

/ my hands, proof

I was born
at night / it is normal

for a woman
to have lost

to a vision
from Ohio
her speaking

part

old
pencil-****
in the church
of the outhouse
tattoo / birth,

its suicide
vest / seashell

on turtle’s

grave / my shadow /

its table
set
with noise

/ the unique stagger
animals
in Ohio
have

/ a god
slow to pray
for the magician’s
loss / the fog’s

blood

this
from the angel
raising
a zebra

sister has her tail

brother
his paints…

satan’s baby can clap underwater

20% off all print books on Lulu through the 18th with coupon code of LULU20

also, I have three remaining signed copies of my chapbook [infant*cinema], published by **** Press-  will send for free to anyone interested in writing a review- make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

~

some poems, recent and from available collections:

[asker]

I’d put something
in my mouth
and my nose
would bleed
and mom
would press
my ribs
and know
like that
the name
of the boy
buried
a horseshoe

-

return is a drug

hunger
a choice

-

and the lord said one of these animals is a writing machine
and the lord

he turned
the woman’s
shadow
into a garbage
bag

and the man’s
into water

-

sister dragged onto some dance floor
a scarecrow

-

pregnant / is what you get

if memory
remembers
to eat

~

[plain sight]

a hearse emerging from the shadow of a school bus

/ a mother
trying
to return
a baptized
mannequin

/ that poorly
lit
bait shop
star

~

[example]

after leaving its memory to the hibernating bear, the insect died.  I don’t know what story you’re trying to tell.  the angel has three fathers.  the angel was born to blackmail a ghost.  this bald ******* thinks I need shown how to chew my fingernails.  the mask is my elevator and the pig my coffin.  I have a sister was made to make an egg disappear.  a father who’d shave to give the thing in the stomach time to plan its escape.  the angel vomits into a pink wheelbarrow.  shows affection.    

~

[residua]

the hymn

in all its
cephalic
worry

has me thinking
bathrobe
while saying

statue / why

always
this dream
I join
others

to find
a small
body / death

had a spoiled
child

~

[distant]

the child you won’t have because the child hates surprises. the story, your mother’s, of the pillow that struggled like an owl. the werewolf, humble, and afraid of clowns. the ramblings of a newborn. the twin boys of Cain.

my tongue wanting no part of my brain

I’d launch
a dead bird
from a seesaw
and take
note

the short legs
of exodus

bored as a slaughterhouse

crow / angel

on a skateboard

the bear and the elephant

the last
believers
in the integrity
of suicide’s
memory

/ nothing speaks
to a brother’s

fascination

with stones

/ for light

bend it backward
the baby’s
thumb

a woman places my hand in the stomach of god

as fire
the stickman’s
barber
betrays
my hair

surely the boy should have seen by now his father hit a man.  a girl walk in on a television.  a bite mark on a baseball.  a bug-eyed nurse.  a dog on two legs.  a god on four.  a scarecrow on a diving board.  himself as a baby.  the band-aid

my dream’s
blindfold.

the sisters compare how many months they’ve stayed pregnant  

/ nearby,

a boy
believes
he’s guessed

from no more
than the image
of a swollen
fish

which alien
showed interest
in our
despair /  

(I am looking for a place to whip my brother that is not a bathroom)

/ my father
he is waiting
for the price
to come down
on a thing
he says
will prove

theft
has no mother
and forgiveness
no god / as a dentist  

dreams
it’s all
in the legs

I offer my shoulder to the mouth of little baby angel-bait.  my wife is touching up the secret room we’ve rented for a reptile to display its sadness.  I am worried my son sees no point in knowing whether or not a slug heavy enough to snap a mousetrap has died.  to be clear, a sound twice as long as my ears made its way to god in the photo god is using.

Free mail shipping or 50% off ground shipping at Lulu today with coupon code of SHIPWEEK16

~

these are from my collection, {MOON tattoo}:

[portion]

christ is a boy armless in christ. eats his corn

his teardrop
corn.

thinks he’s been given
by *******
the power
to spy
on a fish. thinks god

is part
food. hears

from a demon
touched
by snowfall

that the boat
is real

but first
starve a crow
that is blind.

~

[mud times]

satan began possessing squirrels

he did so
in the name
of footprints

my sister
the poor girl
was pregnant
with a people
person, she waited

with me

for my hands
to look
like mittens

~

[pinch]

mother
as she
unrolls
a tube
of toothpaste
talks
of a crack
in the lord

these empty
things
I’d rather
they not
look it

take your father’s
drag racing
or a fork
with you
when you bathe

I was scraped, she says

your cheek
to me
a wounded
dream...

it doesn’t last
the prophet’s

grief

~

[clearing]

god
my path
to meaning
nothing

-

she had a sock drawer and a  pair of secret hands

the hardest time
with houses

-

what if the end stops coming

-

what if

from one cannibal to another

it is extra
this bone
from the horse

Moon
ate

~

[curio]

making book covers
in the ****

my brother
my higher
brother

is on
about
some late
film

performance
by a woman
he says

has inspired him
to take a ****
on a baby
in a pick-up
truck
and to drive

the truck and to call his route

the border
of the last
miracle

or we can call it
something else

I don’t think
he knows
really
I am just
something saddened
by sorrow, a frog

aware
of caves, as if god’s

creatures
were a result
of god
imagining
what she’d not
seen

scatter...

longhand
the syringe
of poor
colossi,

wrists
both suicide
attempt
and apologue:

I love
brother

for how

he’d split
himself
into outside

time
and inside
time

that he might
tell
a door
****-off
or a dreaming

hieroglyph
his tale

the band-aid
and the risen
ant

~

[mesmeric]

the fish are biting and my father is wanted.

thunder the size of a seasick dog
has crushed
again
my sister’s
baby
for crushing
pills.  for every

hunchback
goes
to heaven

there’s a shadow
passed out
in a dream.

i.

deep down, I’ve always wanted my brother to knit as if he too would be beheaded

ii.

mother chokes

on the pill
the dream’s
light switch

iii.

I have also seen
the opposite

a ghost
into
a person

iv.

the late swimmer, the fossil

moves god
to brush

part
sign-language

the centaur
attends
the mermaid’s

crucifixion...

some of my hair

was cut
for being
blind

some of it
became

a scarecrow’s
purse

who wants to share
they’ve seen
but the mask
of god

I admit, I confess

as a painter
of chameleons

the art of the bruise

is lost

the zombie
sleeping through
communion, the love

coma

has
for death

depictions of reentry, parts i thru iii, were published at FORAGE poetry journal on WordPress...please check them out.


~

depictions of reentry** (iv)

/ the tadpole torching my stomach in the museum of the heartless alligator

/ the spider the star in suicide’s eye

/ the crow in the devil’s purse

~

depictions of reentry (v)

/ you can work here for nine months

/ it’s not like riding a bike
it’s more
like kneeling
in the center
of a stickman’s
nightmare

/ never you mind
the bloated
baby’s
yellow
tooth

/ at least the sick

they confuse
death

~

depictions of reentry (vi)

night terror, the handwriting
of imago’s
child…

/ resurrection, a memoir

~

depictions of reentry (vii)

/ the hands and the crushed mind they crawl from

/ god of the briefly ugly

/ the homeless child of nostalgia’s native

/ graveyard
our game
of telephone

~

depictions of reentry (viii)

we laugh about them now

scarecrows
the stepchildren
of apocalypse…

pregnancy as suicide prevention.

be wowed
by stuff
on earth.

~

depictions of reentry (ix)

before I got sick
there was a sound
my mother
could make
and a bird
perched
on the arm
of a snowman…

angels, yeah

some
grab their ears
when trapped

~

depictions of reentry (x)

the unlit candle

desertion’s birthday

–

the voice
is not god’s
that experiments
on children

but ask
away

–

the dog we buried
is sometimes
on fire

watched
we think
by our sister’s
cooking

~

depictions of reentry (xi)

and in dreaming
of what to use
for its body
and its blood

the devil
began

to starve / when it snowed
it snowed

on a tooth / this was in

the same
Ohio

where brothers
ruin
now

with hiccups

games
of hide-and-seek

/ anyway, sister said the crow had it coming

and I made this face we called

god
as a boy
tasting
a star…

~

depictions of reentry (xii)

mom needs a jar of jelly to call the priest. try as he might, my brother can’t seem to get his tongue stuck to the oven door. my hands are here to hide the fact I’m wearing gloves. dad snaps three pictures before passing out. the voodoo dolls of my invisible babies have passed each other underground. I am thinking of things you can do.

~

depictions of reentry (xiii)

a suicide
from my past,

a surprise
party
for death…

/ if I lose my voice long enough
will they let me
wear
the mask

~

depictions of reentry (xiv)

the newborn
yawns, reveals

god
to be
a biter

–

I don’t
in my sleep
do anything

let alone
impressions

–

it’s hell on an image

the mirror’s
alibi

~

depictions of reentry (xv)

I went outside and hid god under a rock then went inside and put a pillow over my brother’s face. don’t worry, my brother lived and god grew stronger. in fact, by morning, my mother was so at peace she finished my brother off with a cotton ball. my dad bought a boat and said the older they are the smaller the mouth. people came from a mirror called practice.

~

depictions of reentry (xvi)

with a sock in its mouth

suicide
the birthday
ghost

/ having heard
of the shadow
animal’s
ear
for the hand
puppet’s
collapse /

passes through
a wall
into a room
where a balloon
eating out
a prophet
stops not

to hiss

the holder
of stomachs

licking
clean
the doll
of a depressed
ventriloquist

until the website/press purchase link for my chapbook {infant cinema} is resolved, I have six signed copies available for free to anyone interested in writing a review.  you can request a copy from me here or email me at bartonsmock@yahoo.com

also, due to the issues the press is having in regards to the availability of the chapbook for purchase, you can request a free PDF of {infant cinema} from me here or, again, by request made to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

some reviews for {infant cinema}:

Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.

~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)

Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.

~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)

it gets around
at auction
that the crucified
they are planning
to bid
on a pair
of ballet shoes
worn
thrice
by the mistress
of radiation’s
exposed
angel

/  still, it’s nothing to shake a stick at

the addict’s
board game

that first darkness

dad
walking backward
while puffing
a cigarette

/ the click
of mom’s
fractured
foot

with a sock in its mouth

suicide
the birthday
ghost

/ having heard
of the shadow
animal’s
ear
for the hand
puppet’s
collapse /

passes through
a wall
into a room
where a balloon
eating out
a prophet
stops not

to hiss

from [shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~

it’s all in your head.  the newborn we had on a mountaintop.  the word it knew from memory.  its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate.  the cold our dog died from.  the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers.  that was never full.

~

when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

~

church of intermission.  church of the rolled-away church my fever follows.  church of it ain’t a baby until it spits.  church of the lawnmower left running.  of the space you give the grieving horse.  church of you when you die in my sleep.  of musical suicides.  church of the disinfected high chair.  of the false bruise.  of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.


~

and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man.  and we struggle to hear a father verbatim.  and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace.  and a starfish consoles a handprint.

~

(all print books on Lulu are 25% off thru July 11th with coupon code of LULU25)

a note on my chapbook [infant cinema]: it may be a temporary thing, but it’s been reported to me by individuals attempting to purchase the book, and I’ve also verified it myself, that the website for **** Press, the publisher of [infant cinema], is currently reading as expired and has been for a few days.  while I hope things are okay over there, I wanted to let everyone know not to direct anyone that way because I’m not a liar and neither are you.