Bio: Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and four children. He is the author of Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018). Most of his works are privately self-published, the most recent of which is deer as permission to die in Ohio. He writes at kingsoftrain.com
HICKGNOSIS
Field, woods, hill. Moon, milk, man. Reading month as mouth. Nine mouths until the babies live longer. A simple dog barking at a rolled car. Specifics. A brother born hoarse. Earrings in the stomach of a city deer. Me not wanting one of my hands. Intimacy on three, pronouns on two. A violinist, an electric chair, and a lost erection. Someone my age.
Tornado, movie set, sex. A palm burned by the brain of a baseball. Frozen streetlamps. Reading mouth as moth. A mother giving a mother moth-to-moth. Touch as the author of swimming to god.
I wrote about death. Say that. Say also that I thought breaking my arm would keep me from getting erections. Say I was nonviolent. Say groundhog say shovel. Say I had no weapon. Say some lived because I rented a movie and others because I waited for it to rewind. Say I was there but my wrist was late. Pick a wrist, but be shy. Not like you would a child.
Sleep, death, leapfrog. Two infants swallowing a blip from the same radar. A few pianos made of frostbite. Reading moan as moon. Then moon as moan. A circle writing a poem for god. Hipbone, jawbone. Teeth brushed over a bowl that remembers nothing.
Eye factory, fog, touch machine. Paintbrush, bicycle. Reading lice as less. A dog with nine lives. Movie deer. God pretending to make a forgetful sister for me to live above. The far stomach. An unset mousetrap. The noiseless ear of baby sticklegs. Face tattoos of empty handguns. Your red doll’s hospital bed. Comb as come.
RETURN BODY
We are home when they turn off the water. Son slides a sock puppet down a naked window. Each of us becomes a sound afraid of a different footstep. The window falls asleep. The dying forget how to stare.
RETURN TOUCH
Her poems about swimming are all in the same book. You look too long at the photo of a hand. The food is hot and it hurts to be naked.
RETURN ENTRY
God keeps the house small. My head in one room, scissors in the other. I’ve lost my sister but can hear now and then her cheering for an insect. I tell her that we had stairs until our last dog went up them. Gravity comes from the wrist of a paper doll.
RETURN MEDITATION
God and death have each a picture of a rabbit taken by the same camera. Our mothers trade black eyes and go to eat in snow-covered cars. Sober, you fill balloons with a wasp in your mouth. I think on the rabbit. You, the camera. I lose once a year a poem about sound.
Fevers of the Mind 
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