i.

the biological mother

in her eighty first
year

appears
in an online

article, something

about catching
frogs and keeping

active, she is in a group

from which her photo
was not
selected, the group

catches
more than just
frogs,  the article

goes on
to say…

ii.

the biological father
suffers

from jet lag, maybe, maybe

also

pushes
wheelchairs

iii.

of the attempts
made
these were mine
at being
differently

****

someone is kissing the top of my head.  the garbage disposal is a thunderstorm that’s taken my tooth.  the woman who introduced a kitten to a cat named birdbath is painting my fingernails white while the man she’s admonished for pacing is warning me about using a hand for a pillow.  came all this way

did the raindrop
to highlight
a stone.

it treats the paintball injuries of contagious dogs. dry-humps to the sobbing of saint visitation. its sister delivers her own snowball in the binoculars of a man with a limp and a finite supply of plastic lawnmowers. I learn about its town from a poster meant to attract what’s never left. this is where I go to look like I’m here.

a dog is not barking.  father, no mystery.  mother is telling a woman that what the woman has is a child of god.  I’m in my room like the sort of thing exists in certain parts.  ****, doghouse catalogues, the animal that saw god finish.  my real friend has imaginary muscle control.  I want to touch him but am not sure how much my fingertips have.  my brother’s sanity is how a baseball bat makes it onto a crowded subway.  in the dream, my father irons my mother’s back with his palms and his palms are scarred.  in my friend there are magnets.

on behalf
of the soul
which entered

you, father
then you, mother

I report
my disappearance
and applaud
the cameo

memory
of the countless, sounding

born

the spider has seven legs no longer in the raccoon’s ear

-

god is from another planet

a ghost on the sincerity of fear

a sleepwalker
on hibernation

god on faith, acolyte
to wheelchair

a listener to a mime
of the yawn
that tricks
grief

I’ve worn black for as long as my husband can remember.  because of his photographic memory it is hard for him to imagine how things might’ve been had the unidentified person lived.  I try to look the same everyday but am curvaceous.  we have no children.  our therapist is gay, broke, a bit shy.  a changed man.

my son helps me open my fist.
he rolls up my sleeves.

Christ is still dead.
my mom doesn’t smoke.

not played
it is having
a vision
you cannot
see

-

someone knows the someone

who says aloud

piano

-

into poverty’s
overthought
ear

god
puts death

-

I am
than pity
sooner

to my son

-

in every gravestone
a dog
of stone

lazes
loyally

as word
choice

skips

-

rope

-

in one

window, a shopworn
stroller
with a more
cerebral
destination
than decay

exemplifies
the seller’s
push

to mirror…

oh, here they are.  the interested persons we will find later.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat of exodus.  if my mother is watching it is because she long ago dropped birds from a single passenger plane.  if instead she is privately seen by god, then the whole bird thing was a bit of a stretch.  in memory alone I am alone.

so be it, you’re a male.  in darkness sitting on the charred rocking thing stilled by your grandmother’s approval.  profoundly meditative.  a blessing to all who have in their future, what?  proximity?  ask any female reaching for the dark phone of your lap.  who returns to you a childhood fascination with ant
for your thoughts
on abyss.

above
a ramshackle
transmitter

is my father’s
bright
mind.  

the angel’s mouth is a mouth to feed.

a man
packs a baby
in snow.

stood up
by his thoughts

two boys at a rest stop

one cowboy, one indian-

also there

a mother’s
burning
car

and the mother herself

flipping open
a pocket knife

oh place, you are not
my first
language
but

it was men
created
machines
that they could tell
those machines
the little
they knew, and it was god

found god, and it was your father

that with his father

while in
their astronaut
poverties

took shyness
from a gun

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation.  in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god.  my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery.  if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.

[transformative melancholies]

frog
in the throat
of a lowing
cow

dad, smoking

two nearby deer
nosing that headlight
into place

poem is dead

~

[her father, his pipe]

all

them broken
babies
of tornado

drills…

eat, she says
to a fog
machine

~

[mom is using after the dream a home pregnancy test as a microphone]

I am counting
the realest
sheep-

my brother’s toothbrush
good as new

in my broken
hand

~

[the rapture]

grief is grief because it attempts to mourn the infinite. my leg’s blood becomes a branch. I breathe and think I’m eating.

~

ALSO

I have a new, privately self-published chapbook/exploration titled {the accepted field} that I’m making available for free for about a month to the first 10-20 people that request it. if interested, message me on here or at bartonsmock@yahoo.com with a physical address.

surgeries
performed
in parked cars.  

the ghost
limb’s
     muscle
memory.
  
knowledge
of the child
lord

before adoption.

i.

rain, bunny, prison yard

ii.

a boy
salts
a wet
fly, a hole

goes missing

iii.

soon as a spoon
a baby
becomes
its mother’s
bar
of soap

iv.

(going grey over parrot soup

v.

resurrection’s
hall of mirrors

vi.

a barber’s ransom note

the face of Jesus and in it the human aspect of aging.

Anne Sexton
nine years my senior.

I jumped from a tree seven times
trying to break
my arm.

which arm
by morning
remembered.

/ a ******
doesn’t really see
his last
scarecrow.

/ if you open a pack of diapers
and some
are black / I have

four kids.

I dream
every night
one
goes missing

which means
by morning
the three
from the dream…

I am not the first to know how the world will end.

image

my second language, my lost

ghost / be alone

be like
a motorcycle…

your mother
she took an apple
from the wax
pig
museum / with what,

no,

where  

do you poke
starvation

i.

the only nightmare my parents remember me having was immediately traced to my prolonged exposure to a select group of schoolchildren I’d bloodied for how they spoke to god.

ii.

the bus rides lasted long enough for me to cultivate the belief that no being is brought into the world.

iii.

drought’s teacher paddled me into reciting a prayer from a ghost town’s chalkboard.

iv.

father protected me by saying there’s a word for how you feel.  he was a writer because asemic writing had yet to occur in the randomly evil.  abuse was a star.

Lulu is offering free mail shipping and 50% off ground shipping with coupon code of MAYSHIP50.

some poems from available collections:

[cripplings ]

touch is a sign of weakness. my father opens his mouth after speaking. meanwhile, miracle, it occurs to me in separate car accidents that bringing me to my son in god is less an undertaking than that of arming the man who transports a stopwatch to a cemetery. do we live the lives of those experimenting? beauty is not alone. suppose it knows.

~

[notes for stimuli]

I start my sentences
like this:

the thing is.

thing is
my son
like yours
is dying. thing is

I was told
by god
to be a man.

I love you all.

I love
but start a fight
with someone
I’ve never met
over what
a *******

poverty

no one
talks to
not
in years.

one must apple boldly in a cornfield of rust.

baby clotheshorse
eats baby
litmus.

taste
keeps my tongue
in the dark.

~

[fasting vision]

to punish my brother
for no reason
I told him
I could see
his stomach’s
shadow
but because
my visions
never
work
I vomited
what my sister
ate

~

[sylvan vision]

nudes
from the circus
of harm
grab
the evolved
handle
of my father’s
apocalypse
and though
I call it easy
what I’ve gone
on the doll ****
I can’t help
but bride
up
a storm
giving oral
to a corncob
from fixation’s
honeymoon

~

[daughteresque]

what would she ask
sadness

that old blindfold
from the future

how did you
get old, how

did my father
eat
and eat
at the same

time

perhaps
you’ve seen it
the mask
that took

my face

~

[forty]

because I wanted the poem
to feel
as rare
as my father’s
anger, and because

a pigeon
is
what it eats, and because

mad with bread
the oven
my brother
buried
took a snapshot
of our dog
bigfoot
sleeping
in hell, and because

my son is not a pattern
his body
can resume: the alien was impressed

but my mother
god love her
was bored

~

[BURNINGS]

~reanimation

it is nothing

compared
to the sobbing
of worms

~outhouse

the bathtub is full of ****

it wants to be
an egg

~frogsong

depression

decorates
a bird

~miracle

a bunk-bed for sister’s hair

just as art
is not
the external
sadness
of one's
inner
monologue

this poem
is not
an apology

for blackface

the dead triplets     harmonize

-

it is the mattress
speaks to
the massaging
of imagery  

it is the mattress / mother was
from / wait

     yanked from
like a spine

-

I *****
but keep
praying

I am not hoarse
I am trying to catch
god’s
throat

-

     evanesce

is father’s
favorite
or second

favorite
word, he says we have to share

the smallest opposite
of resurrection

-

they glow     eating a hole

they attract

my wordless
my disabled

he was licked
at birth
by a deer

-

as a writer, the writer
wrote to me
****

-

writers

-

have you ever
tried to give

a stomachache


-

to a shadow?

-

it is not all graph

not all

grief, not worth

-

one’s salt

-

to speak
for any
content

that demands
form

I think I’m in hiding.


of two men, both go to hell.


I was given a glimpse of the dumb glance.


violence is a nothingness.


god has one hand.  one eye.  and one son he takes back.


     you take retrieval so personally I am sent again to start a war but I’m early.


some of you were children first.


to whom it may scar,
I drew a flower without a stem and it sealed your belly.


terrifying
idea based
ideas.

the healed are chewing their hands beneath posters of fast food taken from the walls of god’s cell. poetry is dead. prose the bone placed in the bowl of a frostbitten dog. nothing burns. not like a baby’s ears at an oyster farm.

when
as two
ailments
embedded
in the health
of an Ohio
motel
we marked
time
with an ant
crawling
the arm
span
of jesus
and were told
by a man
who
to this day
muscles out
of our
memory
to say
again
how he’d have
better luck
finding
a part
for our
or for any
car’s
shadow

peace
was found
in the backseat
of a cop car
where no one
was held
outside
a closed
thrift store.

when faced
with being
left behind

passed over
wins out.

I’d go fishing
if I knew
where I’d gone.

would drive, dog walk, divine

would these
our mothers

were it not
for sudden
bouts
of lucidness.

again
an illegal
pair
of dogs
has diagnosed
dad
with doll’s
ankle.

the movers

take the table
leave the cloth.  please

love our baby
like the man
they didn’t
send.

father sends me to school after being won over by what mother calls the artifice of experience.  father puts the dirt in my blood.  father cares for the doll of my instructor, a woman whose pet writes on the board that we feel neglected.  my twin sister puts gently two eggs in a bra she’s saving herself for.  I don’t hug.  I don’t hug and so prove my father’s rib that I am the tombstone half of **** and tombstone.  my boyfriend says I can have any girl I want but he also says his mouth can bob for snowballs.  this is my body the teachable moment.

my father jokes that he is only attracted to gay men.  

that my two left hands
must’ve rubbed a balloon
the wrong way.

I know if I kiss his bald head
he’ll ask for a comb.

I am never where I am left. I am in my head where my hair is long. give god nothing to pull and the devil nothing to scrub. these, are my sister’s. and this: I was born to be here for my location. her exact words are covered in body language. her seizures come in twos in the order they were named. ghost reader, passive hypnotist. she wants only what I send in my sleep. her baby to beauty’s audition.

saw satan
spit bread

I was with
my son
we were      

differently / enthralled

this sunburnt
man / unable

to eat
or put his hands
together

who then
hissed us
to take

a picture / though

I think
     hissed / only appears

in retrospect

No one told me I was crying.
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies
are never
young.

though the man says
it’s all
****
in the fire pit

he holds
in disbelief
the sadness
of two
*****.  dog is as dog does

to the dying
of its language.

pressing
a cigarette
into the double
absence
of what
has become
the snowman’s
mouth
the woman  
begs
for a light…

it is a thing done softly
in a larger movement
of searching
belly-up
the nowhere

that sober
looks funny
alone

poverty a calendar we pay for monthly. birth a loudmouth.  my other yacht is a crow.

our collective identity is a sick child.  some say fever, some say welcome to the loop of the biblically speechless.  people are for others.  are for making eyes at the gender of the god as it oversleeps in the coma we slip from.  the child prays.  the child causes a stir in the pastoral urgency of a moral imagination.  we pray.  we miss yearly the showdown between the town drunk and the town ghost.  I trace a finger to put my finger on.  the television belonging to our lady of snowy reception has fallen on our little angel more than once.  nothing in the world is the world.

as sure as death
does its job
to keep one
from further
dying

I carry

my boy
to bed
where I remove
his remaining
shoe
and am seen
doing so
by my wife
who thinks of me
as one
who acts

in theory
on a thought
to ****
some spider

we both know
we’ve lost

/ 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

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

[Adonai]

as if asked to bathe an angel
father drops mother
from an open
first floor
window.

with little effort
my brothers move a trampoline
over her body.

I talk over
with two actors
in prison garb
how to shoot the scene
having only
one phone and one
pane of glass.

all were rich
father included
when the window was closed
and he was on fire.      

~

[mall nuns]

a chicken with its head cut off
takes part in a melodrama
fit for a swan

-

both halves of my daughter
live thinking they are survived
by the other

-

mall nuns.

just nuns
taking a shortcut.

-

my daughter uses a pencil
when pretending
to smoke.  

nesting failure

makes her sad.

-

I spend my days seeing things.

as if
youth is a museum

-

poverty isn’t

~

[virtuoso]

mommy I am stones.  I am in the blacktop river.  my veins have been used to unpiss cows.  like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are.  the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten.  they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move.  I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed.  I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing.  if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t.  there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped.  I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

~

[cinema]

when as a father
one arrives early

one is lonesome

and given
by no one
the task

of remembering
the empty lot
roped off

and daughter
needing both hands
for the rock

~

[podium]

a toy tugboat
in an unfilled
baby pool

a dead spider
beneath it

I could talk nightly
on these-

my dreams would look for missing children
my dreams would turn to salt

~

[proximal]

this is the holding father
bent from the weight
of his child    

ear to eardrop

a hospital tree     in aftermath
hunched to the loss
of discovery

this is day 39 of 40
observations

each day I have so many
children     to name

differently

I don’t remember the first time you were here

anymore     I am blessed
to see your toes

hear a storm
when the storm
is distant

the young couple think as one
of a baby’s name
in the shower
and emerge
famished-

in heaven on earth every animal will be eaten by god.

I start my sentences
like this:

the thing is.

thing is
my son
like yours
is dying.  thing is

I was told
by god
to be a man.

I love you all.

I love
but start a fight
with someone
I’ve never met
over what
a *******

poverty

no one
talks to
not
in years.

one must apple boldly in a cornfield of rust.

baby clotheshorse
eats baby
litmus.  

taste
keeps my tongue
in the dark.

I am not one to criticize your method of self-abuse.  examples of god set examples for.  all babies are early.  all babies are the death of blanket statements.  sending a body to hell weighs the same but is not equal to holding the bloodless ***** of the poor man’s number one squeeze.  from what you tossed off, I took this:  twins are gay.  and how your father’s suicide was facilitated by your grandfather correcting his aiming of the garden hose at a hornet’s nest.  what I left were the sounds of war presented as souvenir eggings of the same fog swallowed house.  and my mother, the missing headline of my emergence.

Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from.  his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found he had no manners at the table and would have his older sister sneak up behind him and hood him with an empty feed bag.  I went in with Stephen once saying she’d called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough to soap her mouth in front of me,  loop a string around the least loose of her top teeth, tie the free end of the string to the **** of an open door and slam it.  because of this honesty Stephen and I were allowed to watch a movie where a white man and a savage pressed their wrists together after cutting them.  the movie looked away from the cutting so we improvised.  it didn’t make us any closer.  I knew this for sure when on the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up until I had to ****.  it was my dad found him days within the week making boxes a mile gone at a pizza shop because he said his name was Billy and would work for free.  to my knowledge his parents called him Billy from then on.  to my dad’s they got money for both.

I have for appetite a pair of scissors and for despair a silent vase. I have a louse like a flower and a crush on a doll. I take my meals with a three-shouldered angel. the head of my abstract dog is highchair real. food is a ghost. I rake the hair.

as I was burned
in the act
of nothing
brave

     the book of my hands
drew the flame

from my children
whose names
I mouthed and spat