and stork
is never
home

I’d answer
the phone
when it doesn’t
ring
but on
film…

I’d save the drive-in

from children
indians
and sound

here is my son asking me if I love a piece of bread.

I understand it as his speechless inquiry
outside of the eating we do
and into
love.

you have heard, or are about to hear
of the boy who said nothing
for his first five years
because everything
to that point
was fine.

sometimes the boy is a girl
to whom god
also
speaks.

a disabled
child

and the chance
to destroy
my body

my son
created
for me
a world
I wasn’t
in.

in world, no person
was named
that had not done
an act of note
good
or bad.

very few  
cold
standing outside
fancy restaurants
as most
were on phone
trying to make
a reservation.

the world presented
its problems, and one of them
became mine.

I took it by the hand
to bite
what was Timothy’s
finger.

any bird
with no birds
around it
was a bird
father called
his good
his writing

hand.

you
are a better man
than you.

her eyes

loot
the imagination

whose only obstacle was god
the dying woman
returned our baseball
to another’s yard

where it stayed
where it might
still be

the mother is not so human as to be beautifully flawed. the mother is too perfect. take her poems. they are good somewhere, but translated. wound comes to me in a headlight. her visions return spineless men

their undrawn
ovals.

(I know by cobweb)

the childbearing age

of a ghost, that dream

has taken
mirror, and also

that I cannot reopen
the mouth
my mouth

erased

I’d have gone grey
smelling
his hair
and he
to smoke
during the gospel
of the bruise

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

/ everything I had was in that mirror

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire

you can’t take the wire out of the lamb.

when I look you in the eye
I feel my brain
is cared for
under the seat
of a snowed-on
forklift.

to get my son’s attention
I tap with a spoon
on the glass circle
of a running
dryer’s
door.

my son is of course
hungry     but in the meat
of a difficult
book.

the night is never young.
to read the book
is to believe
one can see
blood     with blood.

at times my father
in the middle of my dream
sits on a riding mower
as if it’s a boat
he dragged
without help
over the parts of this land
feared
by glacier.

part of my body is sad.

with one finger in his mother’s belt loop the child lowers then lifts then lowers again his free hand without touching once the grocery’s tile.  the long front pocket of his jacket boasts from one end the upper body of a woman whose ******* have been covered with one stamp each and from the other the woman’s bare feet I’m guessing won’t make the trip.  the child’s two younger siblings recognize me from last week when I halfheartedly rolled over them with my cart and they graciously go stomach first to ground with their fists under them as if they’ve been given charge of a rose but are unsure which has it.  the mother looks at me like I am long division to be avoided much the same as I was looked at in my prime.  I have no cart this day so instead I mock stand on the boy and girl making sure my balance keeps me.  the mother says enough and presses the right side of her nose with the back of her wrist which upon removal has on it a spot of blood I follow to her hidden belly button at which the transference clings and then reveals.  I want to tell her my brothers never retrieved a single bright kite from a tall tree nor did they ever pull from their loose and ***** jeans any kind of toad that lived.

a non-person interacting with a baby I began.  I am bright
but want to be distance.

inspiring kindness
busies
the kind.

the photo captures nothing
that is not
aftermath.  you can keep

your

to god I tell my secrets.

to be my father
I fight his.

when younger
than ***
but older
than grief
my greatest
ambition
was to give
context
to the left hand
applauding
despair.

now, what I do
for grief
is translate
a passage
from one language
to the same.

your attacker has a history of being baptized.  identifies as male.  was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father.  we shot him not knowing he’d already been.  his mother says his stutter is an act.  she is what we call empty inside.  you look like your father.

i.

his hands looked as if they’d been born inside a tree.  his **** as if god had thought twice about burning the entire stick.  who am I kidding.  find that ******* tree and have its baby.

ii.

my body was so hot the stretcher caught fire outside the pig pink temple.

iii.

what’s left of the human wall are the feet of the human wall

says mother
to the family
of the secret
wig.

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.

if they were the stories of my adoptive father I have no way of telling.
he told them and forgot.

two brothers I remember in one had built, separately, time machines.  
their sister, though, had been done for a week.
she lost them to anger.

my real father noted the repeated references to god and rolled his good eye.

god, he said, is the mark of a first work.

I had spent years changing them, hoping my brothers
would visit.

this
is a projection
of my mother
reading aloud
to herself

she is preoccupied
with the worry
that her gift
to my son
is too big

I want to tell her
it is just
a shirt

     and
about the crowd

they wanna put my teeth on a billboard. mom doesn’t care.  cremate the moon.

the whole town was in the parade.  the newer babies had a float to themselves.  at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father.  I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory.  somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire.  I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness.  my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart.  she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.

he’s died
and envies death.

in life
he drew
what didn’t arrive
and did not
draw
the line
rumored
to separate
the heavy drunk
from the unaware
sober.

he was part
openly
gay
and joked
if he left
a will
it would be
god’s.

was it the dog
fixed
its little
house?

mom, keep your magic.

memory is a funeral-

attend
in my absence.

I fall asleep
on my hand

my hand
reciprocates

-

a baby
there for me
to take

from that high
chair

floats into
a pig / enters

pig

-

a mother expects to be careful

but is crazed

     it is a very strong soap

she uses

this soap that squeals
against

the skin

-

inside a bubble I scour the bubble

-

[sic]  terrified
god has given me
gifts

god

is the beast we believe has power
over
the dog
that answers
to bloodbath

the name
of a child’s
fish.  

(I can only speak for my daughter)

how

when her hand
to her
appears

a white man
gets a typewriter.

knowing
I will soon
go soft
on spiders
my mother
crushes
an egg
to keep it
she says
from choking (father

he brains the head of what god could not squeeze into (brother

invents
a dead
sister
and with her
laments
the loss
of the throwing
arm

that now
predicts
the rain

"We enjoyed our time together, all the good and bad weather and I cannot forget the cries of my friends before they died."*

I am explaining it’s a duck that for some reason sings you to sleep.  I say I don’t know what else they will come up with.  a man in the alley has brought his daughter there and is punching her in the arm and I don’t think it’s playful.  I say this, too, but the duck is singing and you are drowsed.  the man is hugging now his daughter her arm a carnival prize.  I turn the car radio on and have to lower it but lower it too much and leave it.  I watch as a woman who seems to be hiding some fetal creature in her back walks to the door of the clinic and leans at it with a key.  she then pulls the door but it doesn’t come.  she is surprised and drops the key and bends for it and its then I swear the creature yawns.

I thought
I’d abused
myself

where one can more easily
picture
the struck man
as a boy
obsessed
with walking.

the false
gods
of god
were simply  
evacuated

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

in full view
of my family
and the friends
they’ve invited
I am given
the child
who has
everything.

my father’s
brother
bounces
on the low
dive
until his legs
give out.

the child screams
in its sleep
where I beat it
as I would
myself.

my mother
     as previously
     reported
enters into
an arranged
divorce.

in exchange for food.

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I don’t have what I have.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  my eyes are male and impossibly warring.  I am trying to talk to you as a child who was read to.  I have seen only the future my parents memorized.  I can see her nodding off at the controls of my sleep chamber.

my brother enters an advanced state of vicarious living.  

I recognize him most when he is bare handing a baseball.  

     we both know I haven’t been myself.  

-

place matters little unless a deer’s eye brings the fog
down
with it.

in his prayer, my brother asks god for nothing.

     god prays back.

-

our resort cabin inhabits
each of us
differently.

it is either dark or darker.

     asleep, I touch my brother’s cheek
with a fly.

-

we both have reasons for not moving.    

I want to feel old.  to leave  

     knowing

he’s been here before.

balloon, blushing into the side of a mountain.
the hand, that came from the arm, that came
from the room.
the first finder of mirrors.
hair, brushed over the blindfold’s ear.
hair, tucked under.
pet rocks from Palestine.
wrist, dropping like a slipper, from the mouth.
or like a newspaper. nine months old.

a child
unassembled
and loved
by two
     strange
women-

a man breastfeeding in private-

this love
only a mother
could face-

overexposed photos
of a healthy
family-

a gathering
of bird watching
great
uncles-

     great
blind
aunts / with empty
pill
syndrome-

a prayer basket in the lap of a boy
sitting on a swing
during
a downpour-

     a disabled brother
and his three
rubber
nails

in a previous imagination the boy was able to overcome his attention span.  it was there he pummeled his pregnancy.  I wanted a clearer image but was told to take the boy as is or not at all.  I could feel his sister trapped in the same horror she was later revealed to be outside of.  up until then, I was sad her whole life.

I either have to **** my father or keep loving him.  a friend of my brother’s says she can get me cigarettes, a knife, and two cans of beer.  says her own father was a doctor up until he delivered a baby with a serial number tattooed on its arm.  she doesn’t know what her father does now.  her mother is in the dark.  her mother is obsessed with the three the disciple lied to.  people want me to back up but a man is never the same sadness.  define people.

my first non self-published work is available at **** Press...I can't post a link here, so you'll have to search it.  (a chapbook titled Infant Cinema)  

am asking that you help it do some work for the press.  it's six dollars.  

some reviews:

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)

mittens on the forepaws of a dead wolf.  

one must be serious
about art
but also
flirty.

I will raise you as my own.  

I will make two parts
of your mother’s
passing.

she will live in childbirth.

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

far
from the oral
present
of wine glasses
     broken
in the rhythmic
*******
of gulls

     the girl
allows
the boy
her measured
swoon

as he curls
to his ear

her swimsuit’s
mute
waist

him

mouthing

to a lost plane
above a silent
orchard

every name
in the banshee

book

some medicines / don’t work / how lonely

–

change diapers

else
you invent
evangelism

–

suicide, all those dates I didn’t

–

formless herself, she makes an image. animals

were the end
of god

the shopkeeper’s wife is named after the town she was taken from.  I work for no one.  when I tell her this, she gives me a gallon of milk she’s reported stolen.  three days pass in a house known for the loudness of its phone.  I meet a stranger in a park of suspects.  bread is the main concern.

he regards his ice cream cone as if he’s the lone yearly visitor of a grave.  because I cannot remember his name, we are together two men home from war.  it’s how I’m struck

just as my son
might be     on some

hot day
when life
shortens
fame.

I put my sense
of taste
behind me
by placing
a sick child
beside one
sicker.

a crow is not a star.

loss
is the salt
of now.

my brother
jokes
in the barn
about suicide.

the ****
would eat snow
if it came
from a cow.

I ask him
does he think
mom will miss
two cigarettes.

she’ll miss one, she’ll miss yours.

I am half his keeper.