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  • For Caesar’s I Am
  • Brandon Krieg (bio)

Admired the gap in a rabbit’s leaping snow printsdisappearing under the sedan and an oil rig

exploded numbered casualties. Someonewill pick hairs from the wet mop

it won’t be me. I’ll be filming steamabove the reactor at sunrise—hive of light—

on my commute, wondering if it’s the sameindifference put together the ice-puzzle

on the farm pond. The dogs barkas if to tear me apart then sniff my glove.

They must think I’m white. Someone willhose hogs’ blood from the killing floor ten hours

today, if you are reading thisit won’t be you. Let’s drive

to where goats on a hill cavortalong the barbed wire and spin

the color wheel until it matches the sky.Wage-slave slate? Sex-slave gray? “Suffering

is honey of disappearing” your mentor declaredwithout pushback that day. You coined a term (you

intended ironic) for the unbearable stateof not being entertained (were verbally petted).

What made you laugh on that pleasant stroll throughthe Governor’s corn and beans left unharvested for game [End Page 27]

when the paper released the photo he tookof his mistress tied up and blindfolded to blackmail her?

Noli me tangere? Look at her there on the bednot yet repulsed by her own pleasure

degraded by our gaping. What is the color on the wheelwhen disgust and fascination mix? Look at me

on the researchers’ motion-sensor camerasauntering down a trail cleared long ago

by genocide. The hunter, white as I’m relievedto read as I pass him and his poached doe,

subtly brandishes his bow to show meour difference. It’s OK, someone somewhere

has already measured pink liquid into bottlesso my son won’t have blood in his piss.

Yours won’t either if you are reading this.Should I press harder? Should we

go all the way? I read a wolf will only gripin teeth another wolf’s neck, crushing it

to earth a moment before letting it go.But you and I, we’ll go on blithely scrolling,

walking, netting the wind, even whilesomewhere off-screen desperate children

tunnel deeper on our behalfdown the lightless shaft of a cobalt mine. [End Page 28]

Brandon Krieg

Brandon Krieg is assistant professor of English at Kutztown University. He is the author of the poetry collections Magnifier (2019), In the Gorge (2017), and Invasives (2014).

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