Gregory Kimbrell
[Utility] SA
When we get out of prison
our return is through the black
gate. The leopard does not move in
the garden, frozen smiling.
In the lower domain the
children live like the poorest
dogs. Their ugly sheep produce
yellow sputum. Tanikos
smells death in the milk. Mikic
and I eat a soup of cat’s
meat and want to die. Meanwhile
the blue light of the dog star
is not dead on the way to
Sammet. I understand I
pay for knowledge using my
body, that I may be killed
challenging the spiritual
harvest of Onin. How do
I face the pyramid when
in the end there is no door?
Gregory Kimbrell is the author of The Primitive Observatory (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Phantom Drift, Infinite Rust, Otoliths, Manticore—Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities, and elsewhere. He is the events and programs coordinator for Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. More of his writing, including his sci-fi/horror magnetic poems, can be found at gregorykimbrell.com.
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