#kogg.logg

[koggthryn]

michelle k., i know i deserve more | mitski, first love/late spring

[koggthryn]

vi. willow street

in the rose creek house, where you learn for the first time that, for some, the world has neat edges. and in the cab of dad's truck, road maps are spilling out from under the seats, are plastering the dashboard, are fading and softening in the heat. you, crouched on the curb, watching and watching and waiting. there is a light at the end of the street, beside the willow, and it is flickering. the willow is shuddering. neighborhood children, knuckles like switchblades and smiles all wrong, all cruel, stop there, look down at the asphalt below. as though the end of their selves lives there. look around, a little confused. seem to have forgotten how they came to be here.

vii. disappointed father

smoke and cold sweats in the truck's cab. a cigarette ember filters back in, lands in our little sister's lap. we watch it burn a hole through her. and he is growling, still. is growing over with that rage he's infected with. WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU? what have you been told? HOW MANY TIMES? will you keep forgetting this? LOOK AT ME. LOOK ME IN THE EYES. but he is grotesque in the rearview mirror, burnt neck and grizzled cheek. mold in his eyes, soot and carcinogens on his lips. and we will dream this every night: the constellations drifting apart, becoming unmoored. his mind and his fist further from each other than ever before. we will dream of taking him apart, limb from limb, orion and his belt coming undone, the sick pop of a ligament in his ankle, the grinding of his joints and heel-toe march. we will pull his eyes from his skull, hold them out from us. we will refuse to be the first to look down.

viii. seaward

we have been here before, another dead end, another sea and sky. chillier, blacker. further from god than before, we have seen the end again and again. we have always turned back, we have always sought more.

ix. relapse

she wakes to tv static and her mother, calling her to dinner. she is walking down the hallway, and the static is still a dull roar in her head. and she wakes again. and she wakes again. and her mother's still calling, she's moaning for her, COME, DAUGHTER, COME, to find her way home, to pray over dinner, to WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE

x. ruination

IT IS THE END, IT IS THE END. the harvest is past, and we are still not saved.

xi. trilogy

god the father, the son, and the holy spirit. an old man foaming at the mouth, belt and broken bottle in hand. that lost boy on his dirt bike, dark eyes shadowed in shame, a blooming at his lip and brow. a crow carrying some rosary, and the beads slide off, roll to a stop beneath the holly bushes, where we buried baby birds and the last of our polly pockets.

'23 september prompts days 6-11 | @nosebleedclub

[koggthryn]

xii. asters & goldenrod

once, we lay with our skin stripped off us in a field, the grass growing up around us two, your jacket bleeding out beneath our bodies. we watched the wind mills turn over, the cattle slide down into valley villages with butchers and cleavers, the aster and the goldenrod root in the heavens above, rotting there. we exhaled exhaust and moaned against our mouths until the sorrow left us. OH OH, OHHHH GOD. we curled together, strong knees and proud chins and jaws, set. AM I HOPELESS? HAVE I DONE THIS TO MYSELF?

xiii. lamprey

she has learned of cain, condemned, and sinned against her own brother with the jawbone of an ass, blood under nails and adolescence brought to an end. she has been taught to unhinge her jaw and grown to shed skin in sunday school, has tasted the real paleo diet—plucked a lash from her eye, pierced a nail in the rind, peeled the flesh from her thigh—her moon-hungry pack of teeth have sunken into the pungent and the spiced, the wet meat smell of memory in a fine china skull.

xiv. final rites

YOU HAVE RETURNED. YOU HAVE RETURNED. they found your skin smoldering out back, where the dog pisses against the fence and motor oil leaks into the yard. they called in every prayer tree over the phone lines, bowed their necks and heads and lives over you, and the preacher didn't shut his eyes—how lustful—didn't even blink. he pleaded for your soul and made sure you knew it. SHE IS RISEN, PRAISE THE LORD.

xv. trespassing

you're out when you're not supposed to be, tipping your head back, back, back on the church's stoop and looking up. looking, seeking, searching, you find hollow-eyed grief gazing back down, the crucifixion looming over you. the garden angel out back is cracking, paint peeling from its cheeks, from her cheeks, but the wood carving of christ himself, christ almighty himself, doesn't bleed. doesn't cry. and you, you cry: LOOK AWAY LOOK AWAY.

xvi. below

and below us, below us garnets churn, minutes unfurling like leaves. we are still waiting. we are still watching out truck windows, watching our faces grow dark in the side mirrors, watching the statelines and welcome centers and exit signs all blur together.

xvii. not a lover

the story goes like this: she looked away for more, and he went missing instead. right there, quick and quiet. light bends and withers around the hole left in this town, avoiding his empty seat, the road sign at his bus stop, the boots left molding on his front stoop. they'll say her name was carved into his gut or wrist or web page. they'll say you can see her calling for him in the tree line, with the strange eyes of a goat. and when he turns back up, if he turns back up, he's lighting up sheet music and staring through cops, face wretched. calling himself PRAGMA LIBER. updating his status just the one time: ONLY HERE TO PROMOTE A SONG. THIS COMMIE PLATFORM CAN SUCK A MOTHERFUCKING DICK.

xviii. study group

WHAT'S YOUR NAME, AGAIN? she wants to apologize, wants to say KATHRYN LAUREN, but KATHRYN LAUREN sounds like windchimes and rose water, like a mother's hopes and dreams, and she is more of a million spider march down the back of a gas pump. she is houses that look like faces and bitter pine needle tea she steeped as a child, was baptized in as a child. she is wild blackberries and clotted blood, ripped-up psalms and an incisor for the tooth-fairy, a headless doll trailing the undergrowth, hand in hand with her. IT DOESN'T MATTER, she says. IT DOESN'T MATTER. WHAT UNIT SHOULD WE START WITH?

xix. vantage

and besides, you breathe differently down here.

xx. rosary

in a box by the bed, there's some tinny sound. our father, and his father before him, left us their dog tags. DALE LYNN. PROTESTANT. we remember his singing in church. we remember his weeping. PORTER, LEONARD. some rust and rot. a dent in the name. we can wait with them, can count every pearl in the chain, keep the seconds in hand, feel them move through us. the days, the months. this is religious, this careful observation of time. and in a darker place, with dust storms and corpses curling into one another, our father counts the pearls. our father before him counts the pearls.

xxi. questions to ask your mother

mom—the word MOM hides a prayer: PLEASE, LOOK AT ME, AFTER ME, PLEASE LISTEN, LISTEN TO ME, PLEASE, PLEASE STROKE MY HEAD, WASH MY BACK, LET ME STAY IN YOUR HOME TONIGHT, PLEASE FEED ME, FEED ME, FEED ME—and you never stop calling her MOM. when you are her height, when the garden angel fractures its wing and cheekbone in a move and dad shoves his hand in your mouth, index and middle finger in the shape of a gun, when the ambulance comes for you and you change your name for the twelfth time, she'll scream THIS IS HOW YOU TREAT ME in your face. you'll want to break the entire length of your life over her head, want to ask DID YOU BRING PRECIOUS THINGS INTO A HOSTILE PLACE OR HOSTILE THINGS INTO A PRECIOUS ONE, but you'll only scream back WHY WON'T YOU JUST HOLD ME?

xxii. observer

look away, please. look away.

'23 september prompts days 12-22 | @nosebleedclub

[koggthryn]

i​. everything matters

w​e see it on the billboards. EVERYTHING MATTERS. EVERYTHING MATTERS. and we sigh. and we keep driving on.

ii​. house key

s​he steals a house key from every place she's been, keeps them in the bottom of a jewlery box. it's not really a jewlery box. it's the urn the family dog was supposed to be in, but isn't. instead: the keys and bones of every home they've burnt down, tissues to muffle the noise, cigarette butts, some ash or gravedirt.

iii​. bread

and s​o, we break bread at truck stops and roadside parking lots. we pray for ourselves, there, while dogs walk their boys and mothers try not to cry in the bathroom stalls. and in the treeline, a devil moves. he follows us from time to time. he is never too far from us, really. in spirit. leaves us gifts at our crossings: deer, with anuses torn open.

iv​. college football season (again)

o​ur brother's face in the home video reels we left to melt in the heat of the trunk. he is smiling, it's college football season again, he is broad and big-hearted, and GONE GONE GONE GONE. and golden, curling up in an oven, turning to embers. fading in the sun and heatwaves, like old photographs, like patio furniture.

v​. school bag

it is early september and we are again tearing apart notebooks, unable to write anything but the worst: truth. and our mother's old satchel becomes our own, and we bring it to school, fill it with mud and rot, with worms and writhing. it thumps against the backs of our knees. and we stumble. and we stumble.

'23 september prompts days 1-5 | @nosebleedclub

[koggthryn]

regarde et voit

[koggthryn]

at some point in my life i sat up and realized i couldnt outrun the catgirl

[koggthryn]

doors flap in the wind. everything is sentient and you cant stop it

[koggthryn]

you know russian nesting dolls??? im the smallest and most badly painted one