I think at night my bones are making glue

did my pain
mention me
at all

not to a hymn of madhouse flies

said if I let him
touch my breast
he’d put his palm
flat on the road
let me run my bike
over his hand

said I could
think about it
didn’t say

it would be
all

-

my sister backed out
of teaching me
to kiss

she told me
don’t worry
as one cannot destroy
or be destroyed by

the aftermath

-

someone
in the film we’re watching
turns off
the whole room

little boy

in my lifetime
the unborn
will be identified
using
the baby
you were warned
by.

the moon will die
and the owl
will stir
something
in a wolf.

a bird will say
not here
not in front
of the eggs.

there’s something about holding the stick and there’s something about throwing it.  two things I can walk to while thinking of how my grandmother lost her first husband and only son to water.  two things I can cough into my mother’s blindfold as my father soberly misses as many trees as he doesn’t.  two silent bodies of dog named after what came.  my son after what came back.

dream: a contortionist on a stretcher

bulimics
at a tortoise
crossing

I was copycat
to your
baby machine

game shows were the work of grief

I was the fat kid, jumping rope

had the bug brain
of a palm reading
scarecrow, quick

to imagine
the past-

who was it
told adam
he had something
on his face, moved

he
like the ghost
itch
of deeper
gods

the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.

I want
in the cookie-cutter’s
dream
to find out
I’m pregnant

/ what do you feed
absence

/ in most kitchens, the microwave
is above
the oven

/ tornado

it does not
put

a bedpan
in a projection
booth

/ before it is born, the mouth of the hole is open

only god himself can enter the church of the easily missed

so make
of boy
a stray
being

drunk above a son I cannot feed, I don’t long to swim

but do
to have my mother’s hair
combed
by a horse-

birth
oh when
was I tamed

I am too wrapped up in my own stomach
to visit the mother
who worships

mine

loneliness changes hands.  when wife mentions the baby, I borrow a phrase from father and it works.  care packages are my sister’s forte.  by the way she dresses, you’d think she works for heaven.  you would not entertain for a moment that her child was sent by god to interview itself.  on the plus side of my brother, my brother has a fog machine.

food on my plate, I am always one suicidal hairdresser away from my past…

lead your lives, touch

increasingly violent.  I have this image.  it is broken.  physical.  like a being.  ask your mother.  practice.  not on your mother.  she will feel left out.  let her be.  like a mirror.  I have this image.  it’s blinded and has been since the moment it was.  I have this father.  builds to nothing.  builds and builds.  I have this friend you’re the uncle of.  shakes his right leg as if his foot is stuck in a bucket.  there’s no bucket.  he’s all yours.

my body at three years old
is being carried
to a mailbox
by my mother
who blizzard
or no
puts her ghost
on the map

this
from the angel
raising
a zebra

mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.

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

I have a privately self-published chapbook {BASILISK} that I am making available for free from now through the end of March by request only. if interested, one can provide me with a physical mailing address via message here or to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

as my brothers tie me to the world, the mailing of the chapbook will also include a short work by one NC Smock, one of said brothers.

there is a god
but you’ve more
than one
birthplace

brother peace and brother quiet
dot
the same
neck.

so far, my hands have remembered being hands.

if on a balloon
a face
is drawn
you too
can call
it sister

whose dolls
have biblical
names.

the spell we’re under for mocking the wrong ballerina

it learned here to roll over

there
to be
on fire

childhoods of dog-breath and wand

give death a sign. pumpkin seeds to the weatherman holding his throat.  nostalgia a reason to *******.  a gas mask to goliath.

history doesn’t repeat itself so much as curse the language it just learned. this is their there. escapist fare for those still fleeing. and I thought my hands were loud. one headset per foster home. shadow envies prayer. prayer has lice and ghost

a bathroom for both dreams.

memory
has nothing
it remembers
making

-

I’ll know an animal when god sees one

-

the guard
I slept with
gave me
you

-

pain, indicia, Amen

I tell it what I tell my stomach. if I die, you die. but there are limits to what the past can do. I had a kid once. insects were invisible. my mom was a face turning two from god. never worm do I know where to start. nightfall, and the number of hands I’ve collected hasn’t changed. brother still kicks himself for the nine months he couldn’t film. the best thing he wrote down had in it a father, who’d never seen a wheelchair, setting a trap for a wheelchair. it is like me to wait.

I tell my boy
shuddering
at the word
doesn’t mean
he’ll shudder
at the thing
itself.

I make my girl
another’s
homemade
soup.  she is nervous
mostly
about where
my cigarette
is
now.

what is the search term
status
of ****?

I carry the brain that is bomb in a timeless infant.

the future repeats nothing.

[removal musics (ii)]

how naked
the alien
as it paints
pictures

(nest
after nest)
for the ghost

of a bird
birds
want

~

[altar musics]

you were not wrong

(child)

to come out
scared

(thought you’d be)

my haunted
proof

of lisp

(and home)
yourself

~

[having a disabled child]

means
it is enough
this morn
that the weak
kneed
angel
of small
hands
dreams
from the disposal
the rabbit’s
foot

~

[son musics]

i.

the ambulance
the fog’s
chapel

ii.

the angel
obsessed
with a human

ear, the overbite

iii.

common
in creatures
of departure

~

[fact musics]

my dad’s
second book

how to look
for teeth
in the rain

forgotten
like every
spaceship

sister
            saw

no slaughterhouse
ever
moved
by rain

–

my kind
and subtracted
child:

the time
your bottle
spent
in microwaves

–

holograms

–

holograms
that ****
with my
mirage

mouth pain / in a clean / house

–

the weight
of sister

–

the passwords of worried creatures

a stroller’s
body
of work

–

treeless (quiet)

we had a baby together to solve our bug problem. god said all we had to do was read to it. the books made us look poor. some of them took batteries and, if struck, played music.

no person was made in the harming of this creature.

hands off, angel,
the baby’s
glove.

run the disposal for the fat-handed man who’s heard himself think. worship the out-of-body mother as you would a curfew from your past. ghost for angel.

pain had a son whose right hand became the receiver of a jailhouse telephone. whose left remained a seashell. pain’s wife a daughter whose shadow became a puppet when she’d floss.

my friend’s father had his legs break from standing after a day of drinking the father’s milk he said would take our guts to places not even babies had been.  friend took what of it he could into his mouth and left some there to smuggle into mine.  the moms thought we were kissing and his cracked a tooth on a cigarette.  my own swooned but kept composure enough to catch something in her stomach.  I don’t have an ounce of quit in me that’s not addicted to keeping quiet.  I know worry has some use but in these woods I’ve not happened upon any age of tree growing into another.

dropped from a hand-shaped dream

were three fish the length of my beating…

–

your ghost town anthills

this blank
taxi

seeable

****

–

by horse I mean
thing without a ghost / that we followed with our hair

the dollhouse needs a second bathroom and those responsible for the film I’m watching have nowhere to hang the astronaut

/ those who’ve boiled mouthwash in a baby’s bottle

/ my ice-fishing father’s crystal ball

/ the leaf
that prays
for hand

the words
I disappear
to say, the circle

I can’t
finish (that devoured

is the mouth
of nothing’s
babe) the knowhow

to inherit
immediacy

I was still new
to the angel
when I reached
gloveless
into the deer
for the baby
god
froze

mom looked for a large moth
to stick
with a fork, brother

made to strangle
a coat

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

I lost it
like a child
loses
a bee

the dot of my life

it is beyond me how a neighbor’s dog breaks all four of its legs. once, in looking at the smallness of my life, I dismantled my son’s dollhouse and told my daughters of the storm that didn’t wake them. I still learn in the church of the death I was taught by. I have my health and the healed their amnesia. do you see this ******* dog? and now for my previous trick.

if one can talk of it

one is most likely
not
poor.
    
we called you to life to give you a name.
odd imagery ensued.

a prisoner gave birth in the yard of your mouth.

god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress
he could see through.  a short history
of heaven
made its way

to hell
to have its
location

shared.  

your mother developed a stutter
for which I developed
a stutter
application.  things began to click

on you
and when that
didn’t work

your fake cry
took on
a depth

of meaning
made us dip

(into
your brother)

mom is talking to her wounds. dear baby I don’t have to carry. dear purse I don’t have to fill. her dolls draw blood and her animals say goodbye. there’s no substitute for loneliness. memory knows more than what happened. dad is an oil slick seducing a satellite. his dolls eat pillows.

/ the unique stagger
animals
in Ohio
have

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

blood

wear a cheap mask
to bed.

kid, your mama

she can’t
touch a baby
without touching
a baby

that’s hers.  

small brain,
I have less
to wash.

her hair
at night
is going
places

(a fish licks through the ocean)

this is my camera
the salter of dust

one less person
for god
to watch
write

in the not
dream
of deserving
birth

three
beakless
creatures

open
the mother’s
mouth

more
are coming
just

to observe