TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE
poems, Barton Smock
125 pages
October 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
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A reading, here
I have all the words that have gone missing to say that I am thankful for being in the August 2021 run of Poem-A-Day at poets.org as guest edited by Kazim Ali
Read the poem here
about the poem:
“I can't speak for all fathers, but my own fathering is littered with necessary and fake finalities. As such, I wrote this poem by hand on a small piece of paper while worrying about the long and short lives of my children. In the spacing of the poem, I tried to honor the little room I'd given myself for its projected concerns.”
Frog of my stomach, mouse of her brain. Aw, sis, we could never let the same animals go. The creatures good at hiding were god’s. A tooth tells a bitemark about the quiet inside of your mouth. I become in dreams food that in the morning my children can eat.
Dearest deep panic machine, god isn’t for the detail-oriented. The first loneliness is the most fun. We say melancholy while smoking in a cemetery because no one actually died here. Dies. I flapped my arms while painting and saw the angel of animatronic suicide. Death and trash. The far loneliness of being present. Of unchecked repetitions. In a poem about my arm a star became jealous of a cigarette burn.
I tell my children
for years
no one
remembers me
In Ohio we choose the car
based on the deer
it was made for
I tell you what an angel
tells god
We are too drunk
to write
this poem
I don’t know how to be here. On the moon I was with my nephew and I taught him the best form to use when running away from snow. My knees gave out and not all of my brothers stopped breathing. I searched my father online. Mom sent me pics I needed to be there to see. My sons died in this order: daughter, deer ghost, ex-angel. My stomach took suicide as a noise stuck in a falling rabbit. It’s not hard being sad. Take steps. If your son is sick, say a prayer that he is sick long enough to sleep through AI songs about Charlie Kirk. Call your dreams deer dreams then don’t. Fuck them deer. Ohio is a hole in Bethlehem.
Abel wanted Cain’s collection of crickets.
Beyond that, I name
in Ohio
things.
Beyond that,
my brothers
call arm
both arm
and stick.
We all stopped reading on the same day. A suicidal boy entered heaven holding his father's cricket-sized coffins. The angel of breathing raked leaves from one dream into another. Horse, deer, handprint. I slept near the hair of my listening son.
Satan built a machine that pulled bullets into hell but so many kids lived that god noticed. The date of this poem is weakness. The date of this poem is the daughters of fathers in ICE drew each on their right knee a face and a blue ghost released its chokehold on breathing. Here is the value of my body if I believe in christ. Here is an angel made from a cop tired of not beating a person. My son is sick in a past that hallucinates brief futures might the illusion of miracle settle on which mother to heal. The date of this poem is drinking is easy because everyone can help you. All bellies are moonmad. Polish the empty eating of humane absence.
Jake was an orange dog that came with the farm. I ate quiet bread and trucks left for the fire. Car horn, airbag, bullfrog. The reigning often of the overruled present. Look, poet. My uncle took a gun into a phone booth and crickets ended Ohio hunger. Too soon, they said. A mirror is the smallest thing in the mirror. I fasted and saw: a cigarette in an icicle, children being had in a museum of sleeping positions, god found by her sister. Drinking is easy because everyone can help you.
Mother Fur, Nadia Arioli, Fernwood Press 2025
~
“It is not enough to bear,” writes Nadia Arioli; “one must erase all evidence of having done so.” This book sheds light on what it costs to bring another person into being,and stands as a bold refusal to hide that cost. In deeply embodied writing, Arioli pits archetype against reality in order to illuminate the human and profoundly animal experience of motherhood. Arioli’s gift for word-on-word poetic friction builds a devastating heat that makes honesty inescapable. This writing demands we understand the exhaustion, tenderness, pain, and absurdity of birth and motherhood and the fact that each of us owes our existence to “life pulled from a wound.”
Lisa Huffaker, teaching artist in residence for the Writer’s Garret
Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is that rare commonality that is both an interrogation of crowded stillness and a confessional written in the ghost dark of movingly lonely observation. Spiritually tactile and physically worshipful of the exhaustion that invents fatigue, it is a verse that musics itself beyond the chorus of admittance and into the recalled invitation of a witness that acts as the inner life of the photo. A work of protection and parenthetical braveries, it is full of a draining care specific enough to parent emptiness in all its bullied and stray forms.
Barton Smock, author of Wasp, Gasp
Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is a wonder that begins and ends with tenderness-a new mother teaching her “son / to use / dandelions / instead of / flame,” a new mother coaxing a banished family cat into her lap to be loved. But Mother Fur is no Mary Cassatt painting of early motherhood, all “pink and green… a sacred circus.” It is instead a hardscrabble landscape-one of loss, the complexities of familial bonds, and the search for identity, all centered in the unlikely mythic figure of Grendel’s mother. Grendel’s mother, who lives and breathes and struggles in a sequence of fifteen astonishing poems that comprise Mother Fur’s fearless animal middle. Grendel’s mother considers, yes, many things from her inimitable vantage point, even the need
for “convalescing”-which she boards a Greyhound bus to accomplish. What a ride.
Robin Turner, author of bindweed & crow poison
To enter the gorgeous music of Mother Fur is to become one with lyrics that sing of a new birth, these songs resonating with the beautiful mystery of the rebirthing moments within our lives. A triumph of compassion and lyricism, Mother Fur unveils the growing truths that await us all.
Dwaine Rieves, author of When the Eye Forms and Shirtless Men Drink Free
I tried but could not replace Vik Shirley’s deer. All darkness being the rabbit’s blindfold, I could not unsee the blur in which it went by. There is no other human I could be being so deer-deep in attending these called-off moments. Being present is not the answer. No way in deer hell does anyone love us.
kingsoftrain 
