star of leaving the house for once
captain’s log:
gentle drowning
my personal introvert rhythm:
circle perimeter. drink. circle perimeter. cigarette. circle perimeter. joint.
eventually, sex with anyone half bear
you tell me at temple they call it a hungry ghost
appetitive complicate unconquerable
waiting on the closet’s contents to avalanche right at you, salu!
when you reach the afterparty
find out how to fall off the balcony first thing
pick a nursery for your smoker’s spot
there’s so much you rub and rub that won’t come off
someone shouts from the kitchen, there’s more alcohol for that
and you just laugh like someone else, a thousand bee stings on your breath.
how to mourn your fellow monsters
pour out a 40 by the river for the fallen. pray to be haunted real hot like you always wanted. stop approximating cool by the hour o’clock–that’s not how anyone earns their mettle, getting punched in the face for smelling real leather. remember when you took a greyhound bus from new york to chicago and then miraculously back again–don’t bother with the details, just the general sense of teenage torture, 18 swilling jim beam out of the open mouth of a gap year stranger, bugging the atmosphere with handheld heat, because sleeping on a masculo-stunted shoulder in motion will always take you back to bad touch nap time–quiet, small, inconsequential, youngest of a swarm of mayflies not bound to any single pinprick of light in the night, smell of spaghetti, cheap family starter apartment, mom saying words like “almost ready,” “hold still,” “would you like me to leave the door cracked or lock you in?” please please, she’d wait for me to say, don’t lock me in
Dylan Krieger is a repository of high hopes from hell in south Louisiana. She collects your lips mid-sentence and sews them to all the other lips of the world. She earned her BA in English and philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University before getting body-snatched by the private sector. She is also the author of Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), dreamland trash (Saint Julian, 2018), No Ledge Left to Love (Ping Pong, 2018), The Mother Wart (Vegetarian Alcoholic, 2019) and, most recently, Metamortuary (Nine Mile Art Corp, 2020).
