It gets passed around and we are told not to be careful with the grief-mask because if we are careful with the grief-mask the grief-mask will know.
It's possible god is real but has no power here.
I cough blood into my blindfold. Paw after a grape. Eat the rolling loss of mom's eye.
-
I see a face in what your face has done
A frog forgets the size it needs to be
for god
to leave
it alone.
Your silver
absence
lives
on the skin
of white-haired
infants.
They say
over a bomb
good
bomb.
Wind and hair
grow
in the blood
of loneliness.
You can take
it with you
how well
god held onto
being the oldest
thing
we remember.
Sound
loses only
its past.
Sometimes
there is nothing
sudden.
My mouth thinks a baby
has in my body
turned
to salt.
Don’t have kids
you can save.
Sense Violence
Helena Boberg
translated by Johannes Görannson
Black Ocean, 2020
Helena Boberg’s Sense Violence, as translated in the before and after by Johannes Görannson, is a wounded spreading that knows to embed itself in the healing amnesia of sobered yearnings. Its anti-retreat is a two-sided debt that scratches the inner wrist of otherharm while scooping secondhand into the deep lottery of the sensual. There are pinecones in the mirror’s abandoned nest, and handwritings that die on the wall you imagine and that live inside the wall you can’t. Proximity starves distance. If reclaiming is a weakness we overproduce, then this is a return of rich scarcity. A return of the already to the thereness of a permanence mistaken for golden residence. Touch is a verse. Touch a tender anarchy. Touch a seeing that is looking for the looking that male witness has observed to the point of boring the vision. ‘Or the child / inexhaustible / drills into / the world.’ ‘Topple / through a window / let yourself hatch.’ Yes and no, memory. Be the last of our late hurt.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Lost
lost child
machine
This uniform allows this unmarked man to call discovered those who’ve been overly printed by phantoms of touch. My word is crow and your word is bruise. Dying is not a dream but dying dreams on a beach of dust. Entry is the ghost muscle of arrival. Memory
the last joke that god told to no creature with a name. I wasn’t born, but wanted you miss me. How else. How so.
Predators Welcome
Dylan Krieger
Limit Zero, 2024
A twosome seen by three mirrors. An intense slowness. An intricate demystification. Doubly homed horrors that miss your missing. Digital bloodstains on teeth we cannot lose. I want to be uncurious in the middle of anything put to paint and paper by Dylan Krieger. I want to undress so midwestern-esque. By which I mean I want to invite. But can’t. But won’t. Krieger’s Predators Welcome is such a melancholy nuisance and such a built deconstruction that one might not know how to reattach or when to return. Details kill the devil. Stalk your family. Avenge closure in the open. Krieger’s verse is a ghosted intelligence that raises the already heightened ecstasy of privacy. Open the book, sure. But close it when done. Let it eat.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
Pain's crushed wilderness
for god
fed to
a bird
Do not love me. Wear, suddenly, clothes. Restore on a lake of ice the groundhog to its ghost. Moan my fingerprint through a drughouse stork. Flee the young museum or the youngest that turns you on. Eventually there will be a church and your balls will drop. It’s a joke, of course. Not quite insect art. But def a tornado’s bones.
kingsoftrain 