diets of the resurrectedA Poem by barton smockThe baby has jumped. The baby is trying to find its place in the
home of having done. The baby will land
and maybe you can say something over it in that voice you do. In that voice your mother loves more than
ruined gender-reveal balloons. Cold prom
balloons. Than your father’s spit. Than a star.
Horse’s forehead. Than a horse
clapping for a lap-dancing horse. ~ The baby will be dead and bleed like a
dream. For now, it licks without you the
insides of a tree. Have you read its
book? It wrote a book. ~ When an Ohio rabbit stops eating, every
couple not married thinks they are. This
is how baby, not how rabbit, happened.
How babies not how rabbits. Ohio. ~ The baby was on a date and began to feel sick. Suddenly, the baby’s date was able to crawl. It crawled into the sea, or something nearby. Something nearby is always the sea. A neighbor girl in a pillowcase. All of her, the whole thing. And then the sea comes that thinks it’s the sea. She is saying we have bones because angels don’t know how to eat. ~ I
love the baby. Apple’s footprint I love
the baby. You love the baby and you lord
often that you’ve a more alien emptiness.
The baby can’t see mirrors. That’s
not why it jumped. Jesus
wants to come back, but god isn’t old enough. ~ I
remember as a brother I fought with mine for the number of toothbrushes we
could spot in a horror movie. I can
still tell what’s caused a bruise by the baby it’s on. Baby
the thinking man’s miscarriage. Lung’s
lookalike. Lung’s missing lookalike.
Psalm the plural of palm. ~ The baby slept on and off in a prop oven. In
Ohio, holding your breath underwater is called insomnia. We wrote poems with
lines like does anything look more abandoned than a table of contents? Titles
like priest of snow, pipe tobacco w/ showerhead, and abuse was better as a
sitcom. ~ On tv, the baby guards a salt lick while
wearing the crown of thorns as a belt. Outside the tv, a random sister pulls
her thumbnail loose and a paper doll starts to breathe. The fish watches all of
it through a hole in the fish. ~ Its
favorite movie is the wind. Its mother
found its father waiting for a cat to die.
Is
there no one to hold its mouth? Even
god is afraid of sex. ~ Mom
I am the third boy to finish my wolf. Mom the baby likes you when you're eating.
Mom the snow has picked the water clean. Mom Ohio. In the food you couldn't
help. ~ Some
history: The
baby had heard of a quiet glacier searching Ohio for the lost belly button of
nothing and so left us in God, the capital of Death. ~ Some current: Absence
spares no one and birth keeps a record of who birth skipped. ~ Loss
is just an absence that’s outlived its helplessness. I say this knowing there is a tree that my
mother keeps two of her teeth in. I say
this unsure of the shape my stomach makes when on the moon my siblings gather
the bones of god. Our
skin is afraid of angels. Have the baby
that makes your ghost cry. ~ The
baby holds its breath beside a bag of blue flour. My stars I didn’t mean to die so plainly. ~ This
rabbit hole we use for the shadow’s mouth. These squirrels bowing in the
priesthood of sleep. Do we have briefly what
we want? Each of us a bad hand that
drops a baseball? Is fasting a weight
class? A
tadpole is Ohio’s nightlight. Babies,
when touched, belong to the same alarm clock. ~ Ohio: Sounds
from the childhood of god’s vocabulary. Animal
hair in a father’s shoes. Lightning. Brothers reaching into scarecrows for
ice. ~ The
baby tells me in its own way that its mouth is sad and has been for longer than
mine. I need proof, but the movers eat
their moth then come for the dark. ~ You
know that spotless child, dead from swallowing a question mark, who believed
you could scratch a bullet with blood? She
says we all have a second body sleeping in a hole that never comes. ~ The
color of my toothbrush. To miss god. Which
bible stories still have nudity. Small
things, new to the history of my forgetting…
Those
creatures, that boat. A
smaller vessel with one of each. ~ In the mouth of one who opens a sentence with the word verbatim, there is a sorrow searching for the breast of a shadow. Overheard is not the name of an Ohio street. The baby is no cook but is the only knower of what my eyes will eat in the dark. No one in Ohio laughs when you say bornography to your sister who says orbituary. One can be pregnant and study the wrong children. ~ Jesus
was the world's worst ghost. I hold my son but can't say what I hold him like.
Dad paints with ache. Mom with grief. Our empty babies rate the void. ~ In
most of her dreams, someone else is falling. Sound is the child of two
footprints that lose an earring. If there, see my wrist signal yours. ~ I
am allowed one imaginary friend as long as it's a boy when I share it with my
brother. This story has no bones. Its seesaw turns to salt. You can't watch
porn and say you believe in ghosts. ~ Ohio introductions: A
god finds its mother in a joke about the food chain and is no longer sad that human
babies don’t walk right away Hunger
remains your painting of the angel’s predicted appetite The
wind gets that way by looking for its twin ~ I
think of my mother in her block of ice summoning a curling iron and of my
father sending a robot to prison. Of a
leafblower named mercy hugged by my brother for outing my sister’s electric
chair. Of nakedness, poor nakedness,
always playing itself in the story of had we not been invented we would’ve had
to exist. Of how daughter she highlights
an entry on hair loss in the cannibal’s diary.
Of how one holds the owl and one pours the paint and how both, knowing
how to dream, choose this and
how they are both a boy in a bottomless mirror asking if death is still known
for its one mistake. ~ I
was not in love but I did go all the way to heaven to tell someone I was tired.
They were there, of course. But there like a sister. Sweeping a church. ~
Ohio
exits: Owl
is maybe a lamb that’s having non-lamb thoughts like did I forget inventing the
bruise? ~ Every mother
wants a five letter word for grief but has instead a son whose thick hair grows
when yanked. Outside means either tick season or John the Baptist. My blood
type is God became trapped in an Ohio dog when the color blue saw his ghost. ~ I quit smoking
and bought a fish I was told had stopped eating. No one noticed. I got angry
and then got angry for the fish. The fish did nothing. Like God when it snows. ~ The name of this
church was Mouth but is now The Baby Holds Things Up For Us To See. No reason has been given for the change. Ohio disappears from two places at once as a
mother might from two hospitals. We will
never be as young as death. Even now, our
eyes touch under a roof that mourns thunder. ~ Ohio prolonged: My drug use
writes to a jellyfish ~ There are certain
rooms I walk out of to make my son heavier.
Certain campfires disguised as nests.
God is here but has forgotten sending Death to fetch the infant
brainwashed by sleep. Death is here but
location lasts forever. ~ Ohio cut short: I am gathering
the eggs and giving each one a name as if each is a body part favorited by
those angels of the geographically vacant and then my mom calls to me and then
accidentally to my brother and her voice it never comes back ~ Ghost and angel
are never together when they see God. Their loneliness keeps us apart. ~ In our hair are the bugs that believe they’ve died on god’s skin. Does emptiness dream of its original? I still think babies learn to talk by saying they itch from being looked at. One of our children will deserve to be lonely. ~ A stone waits
for its absence to mature. I count for
the infant my knees and do my hair. What
I know of tornadoes can be forgotten. God
was naming your bones when you started to bleed. ~ Ohio sexuality: X mourns
outdated baby monitor by scoring a commercial for rabbit mascara ~ When it gets
cold, we tell each other it’s okay to use a photograph instead of soap. It is not common for language to keep its
word. If you’re poor enough, snow takes
the pulse of the moon. We don’t believe
in the soul. But ate something to bring
it back. ~ As grief swallows those insects made of repetition and As god locks herself in the bathroom built for her father and As I mimic choking on the cord that wants to belong to the phone that reads your mind and As her baby waits to hear if it’s a boy or a girl who meanwhile touch and As the beekeeper befriends for reasons known to homesickness the owner of a gun that was used ~ Ohio children
pine equally for ice and for cigarette. They have hated the holy spirit for
dying and have loved it for tracking blood loss in those with longer shadows. I
don't think we'll ever be young. Even the fires you set are shy. ~ Ohio sexuality: A private pencil
erasing nobodies from a blue past. A way
for fish to keep passwords from God. A
toy car from the world’s saddest drive thru and sirens in silent movies
overlooked. A pink
light. How it cared for snow. ~ Poverty created the moon as a place for loss to process God. It helps to have no one.
~ Some future: A pop-up book
about Ohio mosh pits is lost by a beloved chiropractor who has by default
become an expert on unicorn pregnancy and who is wearily attracted to cures
excluding those for bicycle legs as present in our newborns ~ Ohio alibis: Two sisters
learn from the same angel how to use an insect bite as a fingerprint ~ Listening to the rain as it runs interference for echo’s
disappearing hair is Satan with her mousetrap ~ I want to sleep
again on the kitchen floor beside my brother who is reading to himself from a
book of baby names for the dead as if such a book exists and I want to imagine
the velvet life of the thing that stirs itself so immediately soft in the
garbage disposal that it becomes your fear of swimming and erases mine of
having bones ~
Ohio exits: When you find
prayer, ask music how touch knows where where is. Ask hand if it was ever more
to blood than a lost slipper. Ask ghost why its miracle spared the angel. Ask
horse anything. You are dear to me. If horse is even there. ~ Satan was the
first to name the animals. I know we watched ours die. Anyway, I'm not sure
there were two of us. The child was a footprint trapped in a shoe. I disappear
and still you vanish. ~ Ohio math: A museum of
mothers who sleepwalk to get there. A father’s collection
of crying insects. Yes I forgot to
love you. ~ Oh moral
permanence, oh distracted beast- no one asks God about baby number two. We make guns together in the dream of the
stray hand and there are exercises a mother’s puppets can do that will bring a
doll peace. Angel can, but won’t, let
mirror look out the window. I still
wrote all that stuff. I’ll touch zero if
you trap its tongue. ~ A dress worn by the child who ate sadness. A gas station snow-globe prayed away by a
father’s dying goldfish. A town, or three people surrounding a dogcatcher. ~ Get a blood clot and sister will say on the moon they worship
these. If you sleep too long, you’ll
become a color. Rate your pain from one
to ten, with five being the highest. God
still thinks we don’t know. ~ Whose death got
you into heaven? The baby is older now
but has the kissing wrists of a failed skier.
Your children don’t love you because they will. ~ Ohio
postscripts: Shy, I could not
collapse in front of mothers who were born on the moon. As for the children, they’ll die for
baby. For any last fact that others
exist. ~ Dream supply: A pile of white
leaves in the corner of my father’s mind. Wind and skin,
or the angel’s forgotten spells. No longer a fire
hazard the wagon’s grey hair… The suicide of
God’s first. ~ It continues. The
misgendering of past selves. ~ My son writes to
me about the piece of glass they can’t find in his ear. He says it is like a dream. That he can describe its shape between the
hours of this and that a.m., and its size to a newborn making a grocery
list. He says they have people who look
like him, which helps. Like her, which
doesn’t. My writing isn’t even
close. Aponia, I write, and also, ballet. Everything in the cold is cold. ~ The coordinates
a son’s illness leaves for God. Cigarette and a mother’s secret typo. Camera the consoler of miracle. Elevator worship. Our food’s invisible dark. The gag reflex of his favorite astronaut. For whom we carry goodbye. ~ Every life is
long. Honestly, I think I just wanted to
see my handwriting. I sang for my children. Never cooked for my mom. owls okay with
needle sharing would explain Ohio trees ~ The boy, before
going to bed, has me kiss every toy in his room. If one is not there, it is
missing, and its absence is more vaccinated god than bad child or raccoon's
eye. More mother than sister on wrist number three. ~ Ohio we: save pills as a
god might the eggs of a ghost ~ And what would
you have me say? That I feel it was
given to another, the meaning of my hidden life? We name people every day. Our yearning, overlong. Our mother’s mothering of poets and of the
creatures they can’t use. This priest
with an ant farm. Eating’s moral theft. ~ two Ohio types of sleep the bee that stung my bee ~ Eating is magic. Hunger a rabbit removed from its environment. I can make some sense now, I think, of death. Of a grandmother’s life of cooking and loss. We wore our frostbitten noses. Did things with frogs might an infant laugh on the inside where a nothing was still in boxes. Took from blood its blue now. Which was wrong. ~ Ohio sexuality: Cain faked her
death. Ghost is that
itch the wall can’t reach. ~ pregnancy dysphoria has been found in angels to spread like fish do you remember in an oyster the arm of a squirrel mom is a dream leaving a pack of cigarettes under an Ohio pillow or, facedown, a
photo of God with braces… ~ Ohio solastalgia: In hell I am
passing a cemetery when during a housefire she makes a memorial to the last
time you won a staring contest ~ While close,
this is not your messiah’s insecticide.
Are you happy with my body? Sex
is the breathing my teeth do for your hair. Faith a stork in a sea cage. Food is no expert but grows anyway brevity. They say crow after an apple sets a stone on
fire. Lonely people for appropriate
play. ~ I want for my son
a more regular sadness. Not touch with
its vacant déjà vu. Not the stutter,
untapped, of his far beast. More the
fasting of an unknowable fish. A
marionette gazing at a toy car. Are these hands? They say so little. ~ Ohio auctions: The unseen
wildlife of the ill. The handwriting of
a moonless toddler. A whole language
saved on an angel’s thumbnail… ~ I can’t tell if
I have nothing or if I’m down to three photos of God. I sleep to know that you’re asleep. I will take for my childhood a mother’s unicycle, a father’s
raincloud. The broken moon of any man on crutches. A dog drinking water in a white house. Brothers who draw me naked. Bones from her smaller baseball. ~ Sorrow a glove. Grief a mitten. I see in fire the small for a whale whale that my son saw in a wave. Ohio gets to
keep its hidden season. Poverty its sixth finger. Childish, but everyone
who’s looked out this window has died. Our
family was too close. ~ Ohio stories: I am fondest of
recalling my sister when sister in her sleep could sell drugs
to angels. Men walk away
from their fathers one of two ways with our favorite being Stars Reading Snowfall
Before and After My Career-Ending Injury. Our mother was a
spider once it’s why she smokes. ~ Their translating of the terrible things we’ve said has created elsewhere animals that don’t need to eat but bite anyway anything that moves. Neither silence is real but both belong
to God. My son my moodkiller of ruin in no dream I’ve
had pours gasoline
on himself and leads an abandoned bear onto an empty school bus. Am I pretty this third time if my parents
are yesterday and grief? ~ Her Ohio of war
and sleep: what if I said I see in a land of
tire swings your fishboat
father rubbing perfume on the knees of stowaways would you
consider the cricket God is trying to land ~ My mother knew
she was pregnant when from a darkroom her surgeon emerged holding a piece of
chalk. Before I had hair, I had hair my
sister sang to. Interesting men didn’t
make it to earth. ~ Early for foster
home karaoke, she announces God as the exit sign over the door of her body and sleep
as a museum owned by death. Because I am
lonely with not being there, I call it her best scene. She doesn’t clap. A ghost gives birth to a chair. ~ Jumping rope in
Ohio: We burn the
house might God see everything we own Her movie puts
them all in one place the photos a photo prays to When I kiss my
son, his ankles glow Mom I did not
succeed ~ As if speaking were a way of taking back what one has yet to say, the people are quiet. A group of smokers, perhaps, expressing their fear of needles outside of a funeral home. Who know of no god that can bury a swimmer. Whose children say birth as bird and are not corrected. Whose food is a memory of water gone sick. Whose dogs get passwords from dolls that blink. ~ Moon’s hair on a
hospital plate: oh with the eyes of a lost basilisk does god undress in deprogrammed rivers my son’s deer drunk cow ~ Shaking the breadcrumbs from his pipe, grandfather goes
quiet on pointing out the weak spots of passed over anthills. His poetry disappears but not before it buries
half a baby in the backyard of a surprised mouse. He is not sure what surprises a mouse. Nearby, I am only here to chew the distance
from the foods my kids won’t eat. I have
with me a change of clothes and a lunch box named God in three toothaches. The fish aren’t biting, and we say it’s
because grief must be getting an x-ray and that it likely looks a ghost praying
in the last of its birthday fog. ~ Moods for dying
wildlife: Missing pacifier
spotted in fishbowl. Barbershops on fire
in the childhood of your puking shadow. Abusers
who rename their dogs. ~ By poor, I mean
they are strangers to brevity. Like
babies and glass. By rainfall the bomb maker’s map. By god, our kiss
blown god. By death that it’s been replaced. ~ Ohio poetry: Escapism loses everything. With what other
formless art could one
address nothingness? Infants in the phantom
fit of a rolled tire. A mercy the knee in kneel ~ How we end up in
Ohio is I saw in hell a
star that in heaven I did not ~ © 2020 barton smock |
StatsAuthorbarton smockColumbus, OHAboutam the author of the chapbook {infant*cinema - Dink Press 2016} and the full length {Ghost Arson - Kung Fu Treachery Press 2018}. editor of isacoustic.com more..Writing
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