Brandon Krieg

four poems

Insights Outsights Crowbar Beaks

Tail of dead
mole, bud

of oak leaf,
cold spring

That’s a nice perch but
I like walking

under roots hanging down

(part of me
rooted in air)

“to make a sail / of an herring’s tail”
insights outsights crowbar beaks

Don’t

stop talking though—

I like your grass-note

undertone

I’d know on any hill

Like a Child Given the Small Pieces to Lose

I walk
with black acorn, peeled stick, ode bits, down the railroad grade

under evacuated heaven.

My steps at the pond’s edge
hush toad croaking, meaning: “Beware this one
suffering hierarchy.”

Over the hill, coyote
silence, sun hangs

in mist on a cliff, another loneliness

lobbed stones that cracked,
but couldn’t break through this last edge
of ice.
Every thaw unwanted
advice sinks
to the bottom of the mind. I let it

fall all the way
down

through the skulls of the dead,
watching slow-

turning wheels
of falcon flight above the ridge,

and bring down the numberless

uncommandments.

This Other Season

Our disownership
of the road
showed

“The Great Pyramid”
an orange pine on an orange stone outcropping gladly
amateur I
fell awake

to what dark clouds
did later to that room
around your sleeping face

Son your breath
lifting the blanket patterned with
cartoon pumpkins
in this other season

called
Who Cares to Climb

We planted messy
seeds scooped from the grocery kabocha
laughing to start life
Soon the thick, yellow-flowered
vines snared
the wooden porch stairs,
and we sat there Funny,

when a bee bombed a puddle
and I flipped it struggling over
to hobble off in bitten wings,
I hoped you’d see me

Rained-On Snow

Rained-on snow cast-ice crust
landscape fell from its mold with
parts pulled off

motel roofs ripped off,
one museum
now the museum of rained-on
masterworks that re-froze

Long ago
we had feelers all over our bodies
and were like the small stream creatures
called scuds:
filtering
food from light

I don’t know when I’m making it up

In Ez’s comic, a spray
makes any object

come to life: a hot dog, scissors it’s manufactured
on the site where
people told a fable once
about a stone that rolled millennia to find its child

Halcyon days? Go back there? I guess it couldn’t be
any worse than this era of pretend choices

But really the whole planet
fell out of its mold last night
as I was reading to Ez who wasn’t there
five years ago,
and it was a new landscape

of brightly crusted frozen tire treads

and silent
and I felt the vertigo

of all the worlds falling out of worlds
on countless nights like this
and sent a telepathic message

to my five-years-ago self:
careful, friend, you may not be there at all

Brandon Krieg is the author of Magnifier, winner of the 2019 Colorado Prize for Poetry chosen by Kazim Ali, as well as In the Gorge (Codhill Press), Invasives (New Rivers Press), a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and a chapbook, Source to Mouth (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, BOMB, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Iowa Review, West Branch, and many other journals.