Dylan Krieger's Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse

(11:11 Press, 2021)

In summer sun our stomachs alloplast the sea.

Hospitalling blood to our deserted organs.

(When there was a living sea and not a common grave of dust.)

X.

We wilt in skin suffering against the sky’s sepsis – perfuming the air with a funeral’s accord.

X.

Your boss would murder your head if they could retain your blood’s delegation. Your muscles, your veins and your toil. Hearts that pool dromocracies of torture into someone else’s profit. A garland of bruises overgrown from your labor. Where morals are codified in markets, and prayer squanders its share of your senescent breath.

I don’t believe in god

But I worry death is the allodynia of sleep.

A void except for pain.

“What’s true is that sleep and death

Seek confirmation from you

Through every pain’s advice.”

- Ingeborg Bachman

As X-rays bloom pornography from underneath your flesh, a words insides are coarse and liquid, like mold growing on blood.

I turn the radio to static and listen to the ghosts of outer-space hemorrhage through the air.

Yet hope my death will tune from pain to silence without the body’s interference.

X.

After industry blisters the weather and pelagic blue burns orange.

The earth will be no more than flames haloed in leprotic stars.

When billionaired Patmossers have privatized heaven on Mars.

X.

The photographer assists in executions. They pull the convict’s head through the half-lens of a guillotine.

X.

A photograph inlays the event it’s derived from with death. The ruin of its captured image. Like a fetus papyraceus / the twin is denied by the photo’s development.

X.

History bleeds in the sky’s observation unit,

but the apocalypse is perceived as an artefact of the present,

not an infection spreading from our dehiscent past.

X.

Dylan Krieger is “writing the apocalypse in real time.” The live ingestion of ourselves. A mukbang of autophagy at the end of the world.

X.

Per Etel Adnan, “writing comes from a dialogue with time.”

A poem is a séance of its own haunted flesh.

Its construction corresponding with its subject.

In Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse Dylan Krieger creates an ontology of pain and desire that doubles as a sympathetic portrait of our decaying world.

“[I] don’t take the rain seriously except on days when my own pulse shakes my face into a sob...”“when the biosphere of my body muddies...” “the earth bears witness to my woozy inner ear...” “watch me bleed into the seaweed and vice versa...”