I Know Why I Suck. by John C. Krieg

I ’M an ASPIRING WRITER who Doesn’t know a noun from a pronoun A verb from an adverb And, aren’t adjectives good for everything? Every time I get stuck on writing a complete sentence I just throw in a semicolon, because Nobody else knows what the hell they’re for either And they’re so embarrassed that they just let me slide
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Under the artificial but highly industrialized canopy that was the D-train running directly over our heads, we stood outside for our first heart-to-heart conversation. It was summer in New York City, distinct in humidity and activity from summers anywhere else in the world, and the workshop process for your Black queer theater group with its five playwrights under fellowship had begun. Monumental was the fact that we were Black writers commissioned for actual pay, read: real money; miraculous describes the dream realized and its impact on our creative lives well into our queer futures; “divinely powerful” is the phrase that comes to mind whenever I think of you, a young gay Black man whose ministry meant creating theater for queer Black playwrights when it wasn’t a thing, wasn’t trendy or an identity-marker to distinguish oneself at parties among the liberal elite or leftist intelligentsia who tend to populate if not dominate theater circles within America’s artistic landscape.

A fingernail stuck inside
each dumpling is a sign
of betrayal.

How many wasps can I light
in one go with a flamethrower?
will their wings burn first
their bodies falling
like New Year’s fireworks to the ground
or will the swarm disappear
in one mighty swoosh

She was one who was a writing one. She was one who was a thinking one. She is known as a writing one. She was one who was thinking of writing. She was writing. She was one thinking when she was writing. She was a writer.

Undescended- I can see stars, how obviously there          there.
                                                                                         there

when i was forty i lived in new york for two months
after a funded playwright residency at banff in canada
that i’d received through the australian arts department.

Burn your memories.
Stand on the threshold as you do it.
Inhale.
Hold your breath until you become breathless.