happy snapping, postman

in and out of love with dust

queer apparition, distant clinking

scraping the bottom of the feel-good bottle

careful or else your return address

might turn into a moth without a porch light

poor little injured everything in recovery

party so sparkly any real life feels like rehab

you should have told me sooner

about your boner for impermanence

clammy uprootedness contagious

i’ve been in bed with it for seven days

still sending personalized pornography

last will and testament trapped on a paper plane

═══════════




elated by god’s name taken in vain

whosoever madly my fur looms for


all the rickety bloodhounds around

drink the famish like it’s aftermath

by 30 i’m a love doll whose

feelings forgot to shut off

your teething ring, gladly

inanimate baptist almost burst

what if this board game could whisper

a warning, which move comes next

chance card announcing your death

xoxo, the abyss

crisscrossed with birthday streamers

the word you’re looking for is moot

after the moment, its fizzled pigments

whether a landmine or a limousine

this species speaks

only in smithereens

═══════════




i set my alarm clock so we know when to call the cops
and tell them to fuck off. everybody hears their own thoughts
better in the echo chamber of the shower, but somehow
it’s still a comfort, all that wet, like sleeping in whale
blubber, a curdle of fat turning matchstick as mother
mother? are you still there? i’m filling out military PTSD
worksheets too hastily and frankly having trouble understanding
my manslaughter in terms of bar graphs and percentages
how about i sound out each keyword of the instructions
real slow into the phone and you just correct me?
this is the entirety of what i want in another human being
for them to say, no, do it this way, and for it to be that simple
and then to look down at the dashboard and see the world’s
been padded all along, the semis all trademarked by playskool
every accident a naptime for the morgue to wake from, on and on

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Dylan Krieger is writing the apocalypse in real time in south Louisiana. She earned her BA in English and philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in creative writing from LSU. Her first book, Giving Godhead (Delete, 2017), was dubbed “the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017” by the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of Dreamland Trash (Saint Julian, 2018), No Ledge Left to Love (Ping Pong, 2018), The Mother Wart (Vegetarian Alcoholic, 2019), Metamortuary (Nine Mile, 2020), and Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse (11:11, forthcoming). Find her at http://www.dylankrieger.com.

*Image credit: Pipilotti Rist, (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler <(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes>, 1988. Video still.