POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

Unerased | Steep Steps

My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”

Lobster

I suffer visions and many indignities
while looking for the Lobster

i do not want to wait until it’s too late

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.

woman at bar
After She Told Me You Pushed Her Down the Stairs

Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

Observer of the Patient

Her brown eyes,
how a fig
considers itself.

Back Suplex

Gravel-scatted hell &
we were blessed to be able
to hold on for even a heartbeat

The love of my life moved from portland to new england

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

Tea

my father holds
his favorite drink

On the Night Row-Houses Across the Street Catch Fire

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

First

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

An Interview with Dylan Krieger

Dylan Krieger’s poetry is unflinching, grotesque, and beautiful. Her work tackles trauma, wrestles authority, and is a decadent sonic feast.

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?

Drowning in sky

I have observed, the theorist
I am

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

You can’t make them love you, no matter how artfully you betray yourself

Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

Me and Other Bodily Accessories

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

Clueless & Briefly Gorgeous

I buy too much, for someone of my stature.
could pawn a skinny metaphor to purchase a plump skin.
its reputed in our lineage— to daydream a life that shreds our pockets.

I could, even now, go down to the water

Even from this distance I could go out
the door it would bang shut and crumble