Barton Smock : my (small press) writing day

Though no same day is the same, these work, daily, for me:      

~Write as often as you misunderstand the world. 

~Evade, but don’t erase. 

~Facilitate a great avoidance and be on the lookout for that sudden thing. 

~Accept god’s memory of being human. 

Or:  write, evade, facilitate, and accept.  I can’t speak for the order, or for the whole.  But, a typical writing day is one that allows.  The file I open at my workplace, with lines and ideas and missing punctuation, is a ghost I hope to haunt on my breaks and at lunch.  The three journals I write in at home, each a different size, are the formatted desperations of family, fatherhood, and of a young son’s lasting illness. 

Monday through Friday, I lose things by looking at them.  The entries I manage to not immediately vandalize end up on my personal blog and social media platforms as screenshots of their own disappearance. A bill needs paid.  A car needs scraped.  A wheelchair moves empty or not empty like a sermon through a small house.  Navigation is the art no one documents.        

Saturday, and no writing is ever good, really.  Morning is a thirst keeping diary for hunger.  Noon a blank sun that whitens the crop of alien fields.  At night, I run the bath because I want to hear water.  

Sunday is a warning.  This crow has a comma for a heart.  Stop softly enough, and longhand gives silence a spine.

Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and four children.  He is the author of the chapbook infant*cinema (Dink Press 2016) and of the full-length collection Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018).  He writes often at https://kingsoftrain.com and is the editor of {isacoustic*}