POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.
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.
I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.
Even from this distance I could go out
the door it would bang shut and crumble
If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
Dylan Krieger’s poetry is unflinching, grotesque, and beautiful. Her work tackles trauma, wrestles authority, and is a decadent sonic feast.
I count my homes—
those of my scattered youth
the sanctuary of our young family
the intermittent rest stops
of apartments and vacations.
you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?
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.
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
Part of being a good sad person
is always painting the shadows
in the right direction and knowing
what sorrow to art with.