girl, overdetermined

 

here lies the pythoness resigned to piledrive toward a new body, anesthetized. doctor-gods, hear my cry. resuscitate these age-old horror stories like a double-sexed child underneath the knife, parents standing back terrified some otherworldly alter-ego might go bump in their binary night. in this dimension, before the world formed, the nurses chanted out their sterile windows to the streets, an uninterrupted cacophony of teeth, but eventually the seeds of juxtaposing beasts combined to forge the moon new horns, the seasons’ warring warmths, the sordid orphans we call ‘angels’ wailing for what would ever after halve beyond repair: glitter fish from gutter bird, pearl from oyster, puckered boy from suckered girl. in the suckling stage, they may strike you the same, but soon enough the surgeon demands a decision, each incision a distinction between tumor and lesion, between the multifarious deformities of windward and leeward demons

 

 

 

 

 

 

girl, self-determined

 

i want to be that lone songbird first to know it’s morning

to prophesy the sky’s fall sans a single storm cloud

or the divining rod of a coxswain. o dim sinnery

of the underworld, disinherit this my reproductive meat,

my intravenous morphine stream, hooked on histrionics

and the will to grow new wings. with this slice of the knife

between the knees i prune back all the moody brutes

i have no room to humor anymore, the briny brood

of porcelain insects and egg sacs demanding ransom

or else threatening to turn blue–what hubris it must take,

they’ll say, to play god under the shade of a replacement

palisade, to adopt a different name, saving invasive species

in a vase to later plant in spades. during the surgery

the doctors see there is a river flowing inside of me

insisting i never swim the same self twice

eclipsing literal cells with a figurative sea-swell

in which the river’s telos tells me, don’t turn back

i am but a toady ocean, you the infidel

 
 
 
 
 
 

DYLAN KRIEGER is an automatic meaning generator in south Louisiana, where she earned her MFA at LSU and now sunlights as a trade magazine editor. Her debut collection, Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), was one of only three books of poetry to appear on the New York Times Book Review’s list of “100 Notable Books of 2017.” She is also the author of dreamland trash (Saint Julian Press, 2018), no ledge left to love (Ping-Pong Free Press, forthcoming), and an autobiographical meditation on the Church of Euthanasia called The Mother Wart, as well as numerous other solo and collaborative projects. Find her at www.dylankrieger.com.