3 poems
from Joy of the Worm
Two Primes
Unbreakable code of two primes multiplied.
Encrypts 16-digit numbers streaming through walls, bodies,
launching boxed products
from six regional warehouses to ten thousand residences.
Unbreakable codelessness of puffs of dust
kicked up by a fly in the lamp’s metal cone.
For a moment I am not re-living
the warm-west-wind, dream-frog, leafing-out, willowy, haze days in this
new edition of Thoreau.
Staphylococcus and Anaphylaxis
Staph. Your nipples do to me
what robot assassin bees
do geopolitically.
Ana. Even the hairs in your nose, your ears,
appear to be tended expensively.
Even with cheez dust sprinkled on your team gear,
I know posting pictures of you will propagate jealousy.
Staph. The growth mindset lighting your smile reminds me
of mother, touchscreens, and wage slavery,
and is even more leverage-able to me.
Ana. Your ambition is like permafrost burning,
blackening glaciers to melt them more rapidly,
spiking my net worth by sinking
the dangerous neighborhoods in the sea.
Staph. Now that you’ve diversified my portfolio—
from district-renewing condo high-rises to
unregulated mines in nth world countries—
I could overdose on you, insured mightily.
Ana. The way you extemporize haphazardly,
the way you forecast trends so plausibly
builds in me like an odorless gas.
It will martyr me.
Staph. Cryogenically freeze me.
Ana. To wake embracing thee.
Staph. To landlord Eternity.
Mass
“In addition to endangered species, there are endangered forms of thought.”
—Brenda Hillman
Pregnant with
pinesap,
ants,
he
stood face to face with
significant unto themselves
horseflies, sunfishes
in wild fertility of surprise
met
Ellen,
first love, she
died soon,
he resigned
that church,
henceforth
bridegroom of
her impress,
what
promptings what
shocking scrawls
wrote and wrote
her name
rainbow, whirlwind
but hiddenly
grief, two curled leaves
think pray
no-bark dog
days passed over
heart-careful
visited her
tomb,
even the corpse of
summer light
Solitary solipsistic
Sol
did this,
solar flare
perception
“not callused
or indurated”
ardent
sequences penetrative
of
deep and copious
impurities
Alone on Christmas
predictably,
architecture
of
snow
twilight
finches
and tickled
later as by wires of a battery
by
wild apples,
raking cranberries!
Can I not rake
thought,
for
hair’s-breadth
alterities, correspondences:
creaking-insect opera
my
thank-program?
*
Did sea never
damp yer basement
unknown recipient,
edge of yonder?
Today, danced
pursuit-retreat
with
the nonhuman swallowers:
coral,
sediment candelabra,
hissing
to dissolve my face
and you
#233
kissed my opens
with
waterfall mist
spectral liquid
gauzy
endlessly unveiling where
do nerves end?
lightning in the mountains.
I’m struck
I’m gonging
in the language I’m repeating
release states
Unitarian
of thermals-skyey
fluvial unattendeds
cliffic gates
allergic
to familiar paradise
Brandon Krieg is the author of Receiver (Herring Alley Pamphlets, 2021) Magnifier (Center for Literary Publishing, 2019) and two other collections of poetry. He teaches at Kutztown University and lives in Kutztown, PA.