I triple along cold water, moss, and poisonous rambum, drop downmy den at the sound of the hunter, who follows the gossip of asister tongue. living matter gift of this wilderness I leap, then slither.I divide. I watch our two suns with my binocular hearts. praise be to insides the insides of others Crouched in a grid-gray marsh,I slobber at long-legged laws springing like fat lobes from their posts.“The unseen is called” “inside,” “your insides are” “alive.” I changeas you taste me. One sun in my chest. I part the meadow before I tumble through it, sometimes years in advance. I prove the hunter alive, for he eats me. “The hunter was the first” “to translate your growls”“and tome them.” in adoration An iron throat in his hands,crackling like a stomach in thanks I have three tails, two spines, and one end. He ravages me in dialect. “In the moments behind you”“the meadow parted” “towards you” “running” “like a hunter.”
Whoso Hunts
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- January 11, 2024
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“Whoso Hunts” from Impastoral: by Brandan Griffin.
Published by Omnidawn on June 10, 2022.
Copyright © 2023 by Brandan Griffin.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Brandan Griffin is the author of Impastoral (Omnidawn, 2022). He has also written a chapbook called Four Concretures (forthcoming from Theaphora Editions) and an experimental pdf called Holy Typing O 500. He has poems in Cloak, new_sinews, Tagvverk, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
Poems that blur the boundaries of language and species, inviting us to imagine a new world.
The expansive reworking of language in Impastoral flies through the possible voices of outsides and insides—slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language, in Brandan Griffin’s poetry, is neither human nor nonhuman, and it undoes that very idea of these distinctions, so beings—slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode, mammaltexts—morph and change in between boundaries.
Each of these poems is an organism, a collection of living connections, looped interiorities strung together in worlds tunneling through worlds. The poems’ composition becomes a decomposition of budding, breeding, and fluctuating. Reading this collection is an experience of becoming deformed and merged into the experiences of other beings; you are sea vent, microprocessor, cell gel, bug, a greenly translucent leaf typed half a sound at a time. Griffin invites us to imagine all possible beings and to hatch into a fresh world.
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