automatomic
there will one day come a cataclysm where everyone will turn magically
oyster--oy vey my own private apocalypse blitz--a pox upon the lips
of latin fiends full of disease, the master race is still unclean
feel free to stay awhile & watch me light my phantom limbs on fire
a whole new rite of woe is me! I’m fully gaud & fully man-eating
fully hamburger pasties & gnostic lobotomy--believe me, my inner parking lot
is filled w/ lost kittens stitching cancer symptoms to their paw pads
we are all so balls-out desperate to leak the clean stuff instead of
this murk shit cut with baby lax & groupon shopping sprees
lick the dirt out of my spray-tan creases, beam me up to new-
found statistics of thunder & sleet, then add cream
I am the curdled tissues you decipher when the goats bleat out their night-song
I am the underwater crucible who shows you its back-fins flash sheen
I’m still stripping my barbies naked just to see how far they’ll let me take it
stay put & feel my stubby fingers fumble for locked doors
I’m forming puddles but where I come from no one mops me off the floor
over[h]eating
sucking on a handicap sign in the street shine, my empathy muscle starts to burn blue. who are all these passersby, mummified by layers of vitamite mayo and bi-weekly payrolls? when I swallow their idolatries, they become a part of my overall laughing phantom physique, but they also turn into the chewed fruits that eject themselves from everybody’s excavated shock tubes. once, when I was only two, I gulped down too many special interest groups and got sick on their pharmacy stew. my mother brought me the bucket, but I refused it. I preferred to let their excretions leak down my forefront real formal. I preferred the bare brute of ruin, like a full frontal surgeon. I’ve never understood John Wayne masculinity. what’s manlier than braving a forthright exchange w/ your own demon babies, cracking at their softy head seams? they’ve been speaking in turns since the day you were born, egging on your unconscious under brimstony seethes of unseen. speak back, and they just might let you muzzle mother’s hungry cudgel. speak now, or forever molt your meat.
money / talk
thank you to the IRS for threatening
to fine my ass, for giving me a reason
explicable in psychopathic-speak to
call my mother, say “dear god I have
a problem only a bible-thumping
anorexic songbird can resolve”
and it has to do with some number
of shekels buried in the ground
has to do with the quantity of baby
teeth you saved inside a valentine--
red ribbon wrapped around--the
trouble with me is I’m turning to
rubble, the trouble is you lined my
childhood bed too many times with
vicodin & lemon trees run wild. “oh
the pill it is bitter but the numbing
power is sweet!” no straight & narrow
just hard 180’s, extremist to the marrow
whether apocalyptic harlot or the soldier
of a saintly light, one day evolution knew:
your automatic drafty laugh advantaged
you, a pathos pathology squanders unsaid
I’m helping myself--excuses, excuses!
--excuse myself from having nothing
left to say to you but what the tax
collectors tell me to
submissive’s song
in the fists of impossible monsters
this is what the future bites like
all dappled in broken blood vessels
& the angry ash of hazmat have-nots
take it from the shoestring-limp sub-
missive who knows: those who aren’t
experienced in daddy’s belt tightening
about the neck might do best to avoid
un-sun-goggling their eyes in front of
close friends. “what’s that violent-edged
corona radiating down your lash line?”
and you won’t intuit how to tether
their worry to your pleasure, won’t
coerce yourself to say what evanesces
in a chokehold: the not-yet-severed
dungeoning in someone else’s ample hands
belting
but who can know? even in the biblical sense. i made a mirror out of crows’ tongues and goddamn it really glows, like maybe whatever genetic junk i’m made of is meant to silence singing. i’ve been silenced one too many times to sing at full volume in front of strangers, so now that’s how you know you know you know you know me, when i sing so loud you cower--no no, my mother called it “belting” like i was the one beating her, a grand reversal where my oral dexterity takes a break from holding up the saints’ slacks--all day long I’m busy fashioning the fasteners between us. i say i’ll save my voice for jerusalem’s next yearend feast, but then i notice my sad-eyed raft has cocooned into a grand piano with the strings and pedals still intact, so when I lift my pagan beach dreads unto heaven, bless the tide, untie my tongue, i’m belting one world to the next, the eternal yes and never snuggled up together underneath my dress
Dylan Krieger is a pile of false eyelashes growing algae in south Louisiana. She lives in a little cottage with a catfish and her demons, and sunlights as a trade mag editor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Witch Craft, Quarterly West, So and So, Deluge, Juked, Small Po[r]tions, TENDE RLOIN, Rogue Agent, and Smoking Glue Gun. Find her at www.dylankrieger.com.
