smiling here to erie
too bad there isn’t such a thing as
conservation of grief
the chemicals only spread
the ache only keeps opening its hands
take this—until you’re ash and then
regenerate tenderness again again
supplies are endless spinal addendums
to what my pestilence once called
church, a chiming arrest of the cardiac
a frank i see you moon to moon
in the howling house the black bears
share with our particular
feral carelessness i met you
on the steps
and don’t pretend you don’t remember
what happened next
take the book collection, drink the liquor cabinet
my grandmother was an anvil
shag carpet sanctified by ashes
a bowl of cherries in rheumatic hands
thank you for holding
how may i direct your not at all?
nary a salve for what colludes here in the dark:
alzheimer’s
a meticulously organized hoarder
heirlooms putting down roots in nursing home desk drawers
when we cleaned out her two-story condo
i bagged all the classic novels
a brave new world of marooned fly lords and mockingbirds
and my sister and i sampled whiskey, gin, kahlua, crème de menthe
i didn’t know how a hangover felt
but the next day, i found out
chuck taylors dragging on the cul-de-sac cement
i said i was crying from the headache—true in part, i admit
but what i really meant can only be spoken by poison flowers in the amazonian jungle
i’d pressed my flesh against every wood panel
who would remember my personhood across time without them?
seven swallows flying past the u-haul window, that’s who
and all those bound and boiling leaves
packed up in boxes in my brain
about to brew
lakeside reactor
for Jason Palmer
this part of the country is an abandoned nursery full of fermenting fruit
sentimental in a deathbed sense, the nuclear plant stands at a distance
i wouldn’t call “safe,” but it’s something, while mount baldy, biggest dune
of them all, swallows little boys whole—even ghost towns have graves
we hang out sprawled along the center of the state highway, each
of our bodies a yellow line signaling different directions—don’t cross
unless you’re prepared to collide. beachside we climb up the lifeguard
tower and pass cheap beer and swedish fish back and forth like
delinquent kids—an argument could be made people never grow
out of this, just get paid to stay away, say things like, “i would call
in sick, but there’s a 50/50 chance of rain.” ok, ok. but isn’t it comic?
water keeping you from water. and all those eons we craned
sunburnt necks, reckoning that silver silo to be the spot of untold
castings off, cauldron where all the world’s clouds first formed from the dust
Editors’ Note: These poems first appeared in Nine Mile Magazine, Volume 5, No. 2
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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, 2017), dreamland trash (Saint Julian, 2018), No Ledge Left to Love (Ping Pong, 2018), and The Mother Wart (Vegetarian Alcoholic, 2019). Find her at dylankrieger.com.
ABOUT THE MANUSCRIPT
My writing has long betrayed a personal fascination with faith and doubt, not only in relation to religion and mythology, but also — more recently — the unarticulated beliefs and convictions we develop early in life that may or may not find validation in the more widely held worldviews of our cultures.
Particularly in The Scar Tour (69 pp.) — from which the poems included here are drawn — I wanted to turn away from the hard-nosed skepticism about religion, philosophy, and mythology that peppers my previous projects, and focus instead on those hopeful beliefs formed in childhood one can’t help but still feel sentimental about. While “smiling here to erie,” for example, tackles the ebb and flow of romantic hope and disappointment, “take the book collection…” recalls the revelation of discovering my grandmother’s collection of classic novels amidst her slow descent into Alzheimer’s, and “lakeside reactor” plays upon a surreal childhood belief of a dear friend of mine: that the nuclear reactor outside our hometown was the place all clouds were made.
I compiled The Scar Tour just last year (2018), while coming to terms with what ideals, if any, I myself still believe in, what sentiments aren’t yet sediment, after taking account of certain scars and their authors, after railing against dogma for as long as no one knows. If it’s true (and it is) that I’m hooked on writing about mythologies, The Scar Tour is about taking stock of my own. For, whether “true” or not, self-made mythologies, I believe, are worth explicating. Perhaps that’s one of the few ideals I have left.