Translation: Attack ~ Rating

Gregory Kimbrell

 

My research has just begun. I’ll sire the
monster. I’m the fertile stud who drips

liquid from his mouth, thick and warm.
I’m a massive smoking animal pearling

against the black hole where the young
parasites gather, sticky as calf’s liver, to

burn and to abandon. It should be easy
to understand pain. I aim to be perfect,

spilling my biologic fluid in all the dark,
carefully explored recesses of the maze.

Drugs cause the hole to shut tight. But
under my fingers, I still feel a hot heart

pump. Now open your eyes. You’ll see
in the mirror the pain is ebbing. It’s no

longer visible. Listen. A sea of oxygen-
rich blood fills the network. The newly

patterned hematopoic bone gum clings,
like the cocoon of the silkworm, to the

blue pillars. The steaming blood smells
sweet. This couldn’t possibly be wrong.

 

***

Gregory Kimbrell is a gay, furry writer who uses poetry as a means to exercise his imagination and create fantastical and surreal new worlds and to explore, and locate his own, sexual and social identity. He likes to reclaim the tropes of science fiction, horror, B movies, and period dramas and experiment with form and compositional strategies such as erasure, predictive text, and magnetic poetry. His guiding lights include Aase Berg, Anne Carson, Haruki Murakami, and Armand Schwerner.