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79 · Oct 2017
wildlet
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
I lost you before I lost you. your stickmen were free of anxiety. they left a church to the potbellied ghost of your muscle. their word for tree was branch. what god couldn’t finish they called wind. baby an air that stopped breathing.
Dear Ethel Cain

Mom cracks an egg and says she is no longer holding onto the fingerprint of god. My brothers look at me as if they know how to erase my eyes. There is a problem in this poem that only a poem can solve. Death is death because it couldn’t sleep in heaven. Stones here are thrown because a stone can’t eat more than one bird. We listen to our fathers argue over whether or not ghosts are angels that are sexually active. Then to the same tooth for nine months. By the time we’re assaulted, we’ve not been uniquely suicidal. Echoes learn the wrong language.
79 · Sep 19
PRO FRAGMENT
touch sleeps in a blue mirror

I wrap a dead mouse in a blurry map and miss
three
of the four
children
that were me

super quiet parents
Barton D Smock Aug 2017
and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss
79 · Oct 2016
dear other
Barton D Smock Oct 2016
it was with me
absence

when I took
a shape / the alien

had wheeled its thing

in dog years
to nothing
Dear Ethel Cain

I heard a song just now and my stomach wept weeping still. I started a band but we all had pianos. Frogs showed their throats to owls stuck looking away. You told me your opposite loved god for making jesus attracted to nothing. After is a place in the wristcutter’s belly.
78 · Sep 2024
SAD HAND MACHINE
Barton D Smock Sep 2024
fish
fishing
for grief
idk
I always
cried
near spiders
so made
to display
their hunger
78 · Jul 2018
car shows for shadows
Barton D Smock Jul 2018
a mirror keeps leaving me in the same toy. smoking allows grief to imagine thirst. I have a mother; she misses yours. god

sees turtle, thinks mask.
78 · Jul 2018
untitled
Barton D Smock Jul 2018
people are leaving my body

it is not alarming

together, how many birds
have your parents
seen
eat

I picture you
as prepared
to imagine, they will judge

her
her hunger

on its form
78 · Sep 2024
GOD THE CANARY OF NOTHING
Barton D Smock Sep 2024
Light’s
egglike
silence
Rock
paper
infant
Infant
omen
hair
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.
77 · May 22
EVER TIME
In the movie hidden by me watching god

In the movie hidden by me watching, god gets in the ambulance ever time

In the movie hidden by my watching

Their poor happiness

The child running after a wild tire they’re poor

Poor acne the handwriting it becomes

Angel acne a bone popping out of an echo in the ghost of my soul

The handwriting it becomes when put by the handless

On that tire gone

God of hands
77 · Oct 2017
untitled
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
I was dead
I thought about death
I died

sleep was the only spotlight my mother could avoid

if you see a wolf, know suicide

has stopped
working

swimming with father, I said jesus is not the best scarecrow
and father said
swim

I still can’t find Ohio in the the bomb-maker’s Ohio

sister
she feels
brilliant
when there is less
of her
to eat, she is often alone

people I’ve never been to
77 · May 22
gesture,
gesture 7

Loneliness spreads into regions of sleep never before undiscovered

When I say my son is dead you can’t say if he is or isn’t

In a field of handpicked *** follow not the glow of a sobbing fingernail

Recognize time when I see it
77 · Nov 2024
RESPONSORIA
Barton D Smock Nov 2024
God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.
77 · Oct 2016
shrine
Barton D Smock Oct 2016
amateur night
in the electric
chair, a bundle
of almost nothing
rocked awake
by a mime
76 · Jul 2018
others
Barton D Smock Jul 2018
I wonder sometimes
born
what was it
we fled

and how it can’t have been
our earliest yearning

to arrive

like when the water
got turned off
I still
got naked
and had
you know
my little
boat…

moms who smoke
that’s how
they dream
76 · Jan 31
BEGIN TIMES
My mouth somewhere open in the unmarked church of naming, I cover my face when I go to sleep. Each night god believes in you a star loses its memory of being seen. We don’t always know how to feel attractive and worried. Angels tell our toothaches to imagine a fly living too long with a small part of the sun’s brain. Your breast dreams of the hole in my lung. Eyes are on the way.
76 · Apr 18
sacrifice,
sacrifice 5

I’ve been trying to leave heaven but my body tastes like a photo I took in Baltimore Ohio of a groundhog’s skull
and my blood is still in the bowl of a dog sleeping on earth.

Before death dies does it see every lived thing

I’m in the accident
but I’m in the car first

It’s hard when your parents know there’s a god.
Babies think other babies are screaming.

Any last silence
76 · Jul 8
LAST ANGELRY
Adam makes bread for his sons. A mosquito collects mosquitoes from Eden. Everyone I talk to knows my mother. Shy x-ray. Shy tadpole. Brain a headlight packed in snow. Sorrow is sadness that believes in the future. This is what I thought my blood was doing. The afterdeer of it all. So what. So what, angel. Your mime my abuser.
76 · Nov 2017
soft facts
Barton D Smock Nov 2017
the cause of this grief escapes me and I worry can tunnel breathe. the snake in your love letter sounds real. it takes my belly to things

that are also
76 · Oct 2017
poem
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
to koan
the world
makes perfect
sense, to motto

it makes
none-

two vowels
in the word
poor
76 · Jul 2018
suggested titles
Barton D Smock Jul 2018
her dream the one where my father pretends to research the wrist of a deer



given another chance, I’d check my memoir to see if it’s happened yet



god is the least efficient way to feel nothing
75 · Oct 2017
the stone
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
sack race. minotaur.

(the stone)

a before
and after
picture
of absence.
75 · Aug 2018
materials (xii)
Barton D Smock Aug 2018
as you do not struggle to recall the titles of those empty sermons we composed while biking uphill after our sister’s head, I tell you that a baby eats like jesus in a haunted house and that dad was right the lawnmower dies because it knows where in the yard his mom was deep enough to bury doll and I deny that hibernation is real

(is more a ghost started by two wise men dressed as animals
75 · Aug 2018
materials (x)
Barton D Smock Aug 2018
you have to count them quickly

the bite-marks on my son’s arm

-

either you touch a goldfish
or become
a dentist

-

does it matter whose dream
my mouth is

-

make art and make it empty. god has run out of room.
designed the tornado designed a still child’s stomach for the painter of tornadoes

designed the healthy designed a tongue scraping by on nudes reading from god’s fingertips

designed the sick designed the sick getting sick outside

designed vigil designed a prayer-chain drinking game

designed the baby designed a baby okay with dying

designed intimacy designed a son speaking near his father’s mouth

designed a fingernail designed a method of tracing a haircut inside of a circle the moon met online

write to your mother and live
75 · Jul 2018
prayers for small
Barton D Smock Jul 2018
that I be baptized by a vandal whose frostbitten hands…

that I could touch you with what I’m seeing and that a thing be worth

no words.
Dear Ethel Cain

A spacecraft carrying blood for the animals god didn’t name loses power near the star of Bethlehem. Those on board have nothing to write with. It’s not the saddest thing, but has happened prior to there being sadness. Later, sound takes a chainsaw to the sound of a chainsaw. The world makes me afraid of movies.
74 · Aug 2018
{ some }
Barton D Smock Aug 2018
some entries from poem sequence [returning]:

~~~~

my angel is a scarecrow in a sleeping bag. heaven a movie theater in spain. she walks that way because she is trying to step on her blood. the boy at the gate is lost and must choose either frankenstein’s childhood or a more diverse nostalgia. orphans on earth smell like bread.

~~~~

there are pictures of me sleeping that are responsible for my brother cheating on his diet.  apples the shape of going home.  *** addicts fighting to direct a musical about the number of people disappearing

to let death
mourn.  there is a chair in an open field.  a throbbing in the palm of sound’s publisher.  a kid under a blanket asking god

when did she know
what perfection
was.  a mouth that was a bomb

/ before I had teeth

~~~~

with sound
the second language
of absence, with

mother, bible, bee

(I am trying to memorize missing you

~~~~

church
of the removed
stitch. what I would bite

to have your mouth.

~~~~

in the history of newborns
not one is named

shelter, and we’ve called

only two
attraction…

my dream priest
dies
in the desert
after making
with death
a movie, no...

the blood’s
search
for brain

~~~~

they took
the body

lamb
stayed with star

~~~~

you can train
a bird
but not
a fish
to care

for a thumb...

fire is the skin of god

~~~~

a father
at peace
with how many times
his hair
has died
is standing
in a museum
before the shell
of a giant
turtle

his infant’s mouth
has gone home
to lose
its shape

he is alone
like any
grocery cart

some
cribs

~~~~
74 · Mar 13
BEGIN TIMES
The angels let us drink for six days before telling us about god. Day seven, they give us each a son old enough to bite us on the arm. It’s a lot to process. This rabbit is all ribs. Eight is wasted on angels who miss their ghosts.
74 · Oct 2017
entry
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
I tell the mechanic my car sounds like it’s drinking blood / I am not trying to be funny / end.



abuse, 1980: because a tornado won’t touch a house on fire



in the nursery, the babies with elderly features…
TRY, RUIN

I put all my knowing in the hands of the known
thinking things wiser would **** me in peace
the roots of my going expanding alone
where drinking sings finer to pill popping beasts

you placed all the growing in a garden so burned
a leaving built into your still lover’s teeth
the pace of your smoking so slowly relearned
our drinking spilled into the pillcrusher’s feast

oh bombs made in heaven too perfect to drop
  I still think the angels are ******* with god
the mirror a creature that image resists
  unmoved by the seeing of its own basilisk
74 · May 1
ANGEL TANTRUM
As forever’s divine infant, god inherited permanence. Think about that for a second. I cross my legs in front of light bulbs. Our food catches up to us. Shape is just rain wanting a past. A room is a line break a film is a room. I can’t move. Bring the deer inside. The horse is so small that nothing but a moth fits in its mouth. The deer is washing the feet of a doll. Bring me the doll it is crying. Bring me the crying of the doll. Turn something on. Turn on toothaches in the wild. Start a car made of toothaches. I don’t know what poems look like. Don’t die in poems.
74 · Oct 2017
mood piece for apple
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
a father remembers making dinner and whistles at the sober. his death nudges a turtle in the direction of some absent creature chewing gently on its tongue beneath a poster of a missing dog. lightning prays wheelchair and preaches lawnmower. there is a woman here said to live on hair. on whose mouth we survive. birth thinks only of itself. not a day goes by in the grocery of touch.
74 · Mar 28
FAREWELL
to the goodbye
that created
distance
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