sacrifice 2

Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.

No god called me into this poem.
No god
calls me out.

Existence a distress signal

mimicked by those
visitors
looking
for the body
of god

An ambulance filling with doll bones hits a dog made of the wrong echo. A swimmer’s skull leaves itself to the math of passing through god. A tattoo artist, who once longed to show roadkill to a star, peels in the moonlight the white apples of tortured stickmen. Bringing them back won’t bring them back. The angels knew for three days where Jesus would be. Faked amnesia thinking they’d stop.

Stop using canaries. Small motherless bombmakers give birth on the moon. Their crying is real but they have healthcare. No one asks god what the body can do. Hope used to be devastating. I recognize this place again and again. A sick son’s brain is the dog of time. Jesus died, came back, and named his ghosts Cain and Abel. We fill a microwave with cigarettes and the television calls it a birdfeeder. A school is the church of school shootings.

Soon is what everyone dies of

sacrifice 1

Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.

My uncle
Lost god
In a bet
Came home
Asking
Had we seen
A man
Or a woman
Taking
His clothes
Half of us
Said man
The other half
Started drinking
And got
Naked
Longer
Each time
This poem
Wrote itself
Death
Is a radio
What was it
Before

film 1

An angel eats a mouth and sees for shape a horseshoe deep in the story of satan’s toothache. My sister’s hair listens while I grow nothing. I leave the poem briefly to raise an addict and the addict says pain is god reincarnated while alive. You don’t come back.

hand-like, unfixable, the hugger of its neck

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

I smell 49. My blood can’t find me. Jesus was the first crucified to turn his heart into a spider’s web. Everyone I know on the internet is alive.

blue hair crying
in your wrist

Dear Ethel Cain

I lick sugar from the windshield of a deer-shaped car. Make a bird from a hunger ballon. Have an ****** that belongs in a stomach to lovebombed plastics. Catch photophobia from the ghosts of angel suicides. Fix a machine with a drinking machine. Listen, glisten. Etc.

I dip my body in a paint that makes rain cry.

Alcohol is a warden.

I read re-predicted nonfiction.

I miss
my mom
with god
with god
I miss
my mom.

What if all I’ve taught my children is how
to love me.

I want to touch all the writers
in the places
numbed
by what
they read.

I watch that one movie where you pretend to be
disabled
poor
my smarter

brother.

Possessed by return

god
is unbearable.

Imaginary
bombs
imagine.

i write **** lyrics sometimes and it's so fun and i really just want to sing into a tape recorder like a detective then drive into a lake where I don't even die all the way

VOICE APPS FOR CRUCIFIXION SURVIVORS

Fasting in the pawn shop
Of my father’s early sleep

My sadness like a dog’s thought
In the pop-gun stage of grief

Three pills left to choose from
But I can’t leave them alone

Dog tells me to lose some
Like the sticks dreamed into bones

Oh the mouths of my longing that sing no hurt
Oh the bells in my body that ring no church

--- giving god a seashell
god can hear an apple cry
--- I guess it’s up to me now
keep the angel’s fossil dry


MY BELLY, HALLELUJAH

in a meadow is the navel
of a god I can defeat
a shadow on a table
set with food it cannot eat
my belly, hallelujah
and its field of empty meat
a killing moving through us
slower meals of absent sheep
I don’t lose any waking
though my hair has slept a lot
alone but pulled to making
dare these cigarettes ask for god
if you think that you could sing this
in the angel time of ghosts
my stomach let it ping bliss
to delay the tattooed crow

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.

Dear Ethel Cain

An abuser loses their phone, their fingerprint. Longing faces its first deadline. The eating competition of our dreams is on its third snow delay. The work my body puts into me is killing my children. I think of that fingerprint for 100 years in sunscreen time. My skin turns white from being seen by a ghost. My teeth go grey. And comb their fear.

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

gesture 3

Old poems, I’ve made my cry to the world. Puberty’s pop-gun. Gender’s low star. The short dream of touch meant to abridge the skin’s ceaseless letter to any angel that remembers blood. I’m not home. God’s teeth are very small.

DEATH AND A DEATH PLACE

The eyes have only
their childhood

SON IS SHORT FOR LONELINESS

Try
in a coffin
to roll
a cigarette

from angel tantrum (self-published, April 2025)


RESPONSORIA

I said something perfect.
Your father loved you.

~

I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.

~

A sickness moving through the angels. One theory: Two guns in a dream tried to make a hand. A second: God had *** while pregnant. For the third, stay beautiful. Death thinks you’re still here.

~

A movie died and I wanted to write better.
You put a lake in a lake.
Whole childhoods
of an angel
went nowhere.
I binged
for my brother
body horror
from an invisibly
watched
loneliness.
Mom
gave us mom.

~

The last
beast
I wish
we knew
the order

There’s a crow
crying shape
under my fingernail
that looks
if you look at it
like a map

Angels make little dares
beneath god’s blood
angels
make little dares

~

I want to drink and cook.
I want to watch movies and not drink.
I want my invisible teeth
abused
by color.
I want my doctors to say seashell
*******
syndrome.
I want these meds to sadden drones.
I want fatigue. Hell’s rubber mirror.
I want my children to be so exhausted that they pray
to a ghost
that’s praying
to them.
I want your poems
your shorter
poems
to drive
death mad.
I want to crucify my tongue.
I want a wasp to crucify my tongue.
I want shape
to burn faster
than form. Nudes
to zoo
nakedness.
A fed raccoon.
Or a dog that believes.

~

A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll.
Stop drinking.

~

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.

~

God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.

~

My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.  

~

My son is sick and I want a gun. I forget three times in front of a ghost how to *****. We lie about déjà vu. I say dog. You, whale. The world destroys loneliness.

My stomach travels
with an angel
back
in time.

I miss roadkill. Freeze my brain.

Death becomes death when it forgives god.

~

I will always know what you look like and it terrifies god

~

I die and look for my mother.
I die and look for yours.

I die and my brothers don’t.
I die in Ohio to impress
with a bruise
an icicle. I die and my daughter

I die and my sons

I die
and which
of my sons

I die and god says
that is not
salt
that is movie
salt

Death gets over nobody, I die

there

I die on somebody’s birthday

I die bc pretty
Because I can

I die where
I die with a rich interior death

I die for rich poets who’ve time to be good parents

Love dies from god

I die and see an uncle trying to drink his eyes back
I die and you can’t
I die in a shadow from three thumbtacks

meant
for the savior
of a self
harming sister

I die in my father’s dead rabbits
all of them
die once

~

The poem says so little.

Food is a ghost that saves my mouth.

Hi, all my gods stop dreaming at once.

~

God was in the room that was later turned into god.

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.

~

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

~

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

~

Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

~

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.  

~~~~~

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

Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.

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Carried
by a parent
one becomes
a ghost.

I can fall asleep anywhere.

Crucifix, cop car, etc.

Mirror,
the photo’s chapel.

Days my son
forgets to walk.

On a bicycle I was a priest. A girl who liked me told her father that her mother was dead. She gave me orange peels and said they were from a book she couldn’t read. I put them down my brother’s shirt then hopped on my bike. My brother said it burns it burns but not enough to put a wasp inside of god. I rode until my friends had daughters who shot them near cemeteries that were never used. There were days when I could string together days that I was well enough to drink. I don’t know that my sleep ever touched yours. If you can get the skin off that rock you can throw it.

I don’t mean to be hopeless.

I mean to be
hopeless.

a color
terrified
of waiting
mistaken
for the color
of waiting

Distance makes touch in the skull of an angel

Beheads god in front of a star

Poetry didn’t save us
And we weren’t smart

No one
on the moon
gets dragged
by a train.

A star
milks
a split
baby. It’s noon

and you are choosing
******
for god.

The land is ours where we cry on stilts.

Dear Ethel Cain

I try to sing. I am not cold. Where deep designs of making hold.