dylan krIEger
the cave
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whether plato was sapio, celibate or gay, still it’s awkwardly oedipal, i say, to return to the same cave from whence you came. the hero’s quest of no escape. but sometimes real life doesn’t work that way. sometimes when you sidestep your hometown, crawl out into the sun from underground, it’s already caught fire and begun to burn down. sometimes you can hear the screaming masses douse themselves in flammable astringents to accelerate the process, to turn the somethingness of anguish into nothing but an ash smudge. sometimes when you return to your home cave years later, there’s nothing left to rescue. not even a shadow. not even a bus pass, a necklace, a candle. and while you’re down there, grasping at the lowest ledge imaginable, you might let go of the notion some intangible realm would be better than bringing your family back from the dead, might admit that this--the last ledge you have left--is at least solid enough to support the whole poor-baby heft of your head, to take your sorry weight and carry it to bed inside a stonehenge stained with smoke rings in the shape of your unrest
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brain in a vat
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and then a greek chorus of sci-fi nerds enters stage right to remind us the body’s not all that important. and i roll my eyes like, well then, you should have been aborted. all save the sacred brainstem. all save the space of intellectual infection, delicately suspended in electroconductive fluids, warm and red-hued as the cave-womb we worked so hard-pressed to undress. but with a single signal here to there, this disembodied spine can sense most anything, the chorus wails. even a bus pass, a necklace, a candle. even the ash smudge of an ancestor. but i imagine if this mass of grey matter were aware of its surroundings, it might pull one of the mourners aside and ask her, why bother, when the devil knows better? all visions of hell being equal, this simulation named america is just a circle of the underworld where i can’t vote in the elections. where when i try to tear the paper, push the buttons, my fingers are suddenly slathered in butter. because the blunder of my body is an eyesore i only find reflected back by poreless cisterns made of glass, and so i shatter it
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mary's room
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whatever we mean in those moments is beyond the tongue’s sad spastic reach. beyond the measly scope of this poem soaked in arrows and steam. miss mary mack didn’t teach us how to kill our siblings, just how to choose which one to stone. and so we go about the eenie meenie miney moe of the self-loathing scapegoat, pick the poor bastard who will piss, shit and sleep in a colorless room from this point forward, and before he/she can even start forming memories, the walls hug close and say i’ve got you, still insisting the comfort of the familiar can trump anything, and the radio and b&w tv drone on in tandem 1950’s banter, and the bony loneliness of every cinder block starts growing antlers, and by the time the loudspeaker starts announcing the science behind the ultraviolent light spectrum, you’ve already divested yourself of hair and nails and any worldly interest in what’s beyond your grayscale slice of hell, so when the language comes it hums like rain: hello, voiceover. it’s me, mary. red is just a feeling. for shame, for shame
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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 Seneca Review, Quarterly West, So and So, Deluge, Juked, Small Po[r]tions, TENDE RLOIN, Witch Craft, Local Nomad, and Smoking Glue Gun. Find more of her work at www.dylankrieger.com.
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