I Felt Like a Cool Dad
I shook out my reading material
asked if it was okay to be seated
then sat comfortably
maybe one more month and
her baby could have lived
she got a tattoo to remember
carved a thin tulip for a skull
now after pissing blood
there is no virtue in it
dreams about war and waking
up ready to run through sniper fire
which meant sharpen the knives
the little mammal says which papers
my sheet of postage is in between
if I sent her the wrong book
awake to the gridlines
I want to build a big coop
so she can rattle the hens at will
starting late and setting out the gruel
maybe that’s the sound of me
doing something poorly or not at all
ice-cold I phoned didn’t I
cleaning out the gutters just enough
to get us into next season
(How Will I Know) Don’t Trust Your Feelings
Your wetness drags the spiral discharge down
to join at points abutting drive chain fuel.
The work itself throws sparks, a fuss goes on,
like mice in fields. So how does training clog
when bells make calls to prayer, assembly herds
your mostly clutch old comrades into flu-
soaked pity bases? Solve that riddle once
alone, an endless overshare, a whit
of cystic sac to lure the tailor home.
They always rampage Sunday mornings clear
to midnight blue, a patch and needle hang
beside your private dearth of market steaks.
A purple lip bursts bloody near the pros
whose pills cut power, take the phones offline.
—
Krystal Languell lives in Chicago, where she works for the Poetry Foundation. She is the author of Quite Apart (University of Akron Press, forthcoming 2019), Gray Market (1913 Press, 2016), and Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011). A NYSCA/NYFA 2017 Artist Fellowship Finalist in Poetry, she previously completed a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council workspace residency in 2014-15 and a Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship in 2013-14. Since 2010, she has helped coordinate the activities of Belladonna* Collaborative while publishing the feminist poetry journal Bone Bouquet. Her recent work can be found in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Fence, and elsewhere.