If my life was the size of my arm, I would stretch it out for you.
I imagine that undressing a color, though, would be so much like peeling a memory away from the grey and the white matter of your brain.
Listen to me: I know the winter gloom in mid-summer…
I am still waiting for the lion
I don’t know why I’m in the garden kneeling on dirt
You’ve spent a lifetime training for this.
my father holds his favorite drink
Even from this distance I could go out the door it would bang shut and crumble
Gravel-scatted hell & we were blessed to be able to hold on for even a heartbeat
Dylan Krieger’s poetry is unflinching, grotesque, and beautiful. Her work tackles trauma, wrestles authority, and is a decadent sonic feast.
I am not a guide for every traveler of loss.
Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night; should have boiled old coffee before noon.
We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…
Her brown eyes, how a fig considers itself.
the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.
If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray
The storm passes without snow. The car waits loyally in the back lot.
and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud
Even as the sun warms the concrete the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.
Empty vessels make the most sound, I think, as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.