B.K. Poetry

Hey there. My name is Brennan (he/they) I'm a Queer 30-year-old Métis poet and author and this is my dedicated writing blog.

✏️ Fic Writers: I run a transformative works archive called Fanfiction.lol, designed to be for fun, silly, low-stakes fandom. Sign-ups are open!

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📚 I have published 8 books independently, including poetry collections, creative non-fiction, and academic work, available on Amazon and as digital downloads on Gumroad (ePubs & PDFs).

🍓 I'm co-founder and lead developer at Berry House, a values-driven web studio building fast, accessible JAMstack websites and thoughtful content for independent creators and mission-led organizations.

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If you're a writer, like this post or send me a message and I'll be sure to follow you! And if you wanna get to know a little more about me, feel free to keep reading after the cut. 💖

Monitor flickers—a pixel, then a bloom of orange spreading across the satellite view. The red dot is a drone's last signal. Freezes over Tank 7.

Black stale coffee beside the keyboard. Ripple crosses surface from a subsonic thump arriving three seconds late.

Thru the blast-glass, flames are crooked fingers pointing @ nothing. Alarm panels Pressure dropping. Pressure dropping. Numbers fall, stopped clock's hands.

He presses the mute button. hum of the backup generator. His badge, clipped to his shirt, reads Jizan—Fifteen Years. & there's a photo from another life.

Outside, a sheet of dark tin is the Red Sea, reflecting doubled, trembling fire, as if the water is trying to give back.

eggshell ceiling, popcorn crater shadows no different than my arms, legs. 3 pink pills on the blanket confetti, still, no plastic red PEZ. phone screen nightlight, unlocked an unsent "be right back".

downstairs the green pine breathes tinsel. Stockings—one for each— hung by my mother's hands, red cotton knitted. She's wrapping box after box. Tilting room, not a fall— more of a long, long exhale. my mattress accepting my weight, a pothole accepting rainwater.

No struggle. instead, a thread pulled from a sweater, loop by loop by loop by loop.

an emergency siren outside climbs. Homer's siren— not yet for me. Pink pills still reminding me of the PEZ dispenser.

Tomorrow, Mom will find me propped on my pillow, eyes glazed like a painting. Phone stuck in my hand, as if I paused mid-scroll to think of something important.

Second watch. Radar shows single blip, low, fast, running dark. He keys the radio & static answers.

4,000 barrels in tank three, Saudi crude, the manifest folded against his chest, inside his shirt.

The hull cracks, & a door slams three rooms over. Then, water @ his ankles, his knees. Boots gone heavy.

He climbs the ladder, grease black on both palms, salt thick in his throat.

Captain counting by torchlight, finger moving down a list: thirteen Indian, one Yemeni.

He goes over the rail on a knotted rope, lets go the last three feet, the sea taking him whole.

Others watch the water a long time, waiting for the hull to surface.

Patrol boat cuts its engine beside him. Hands reach down, grey wool blanket, smelling of someone else's cigarettes.

He watches the water a long time, waiting for the hull to surface.

Sirens over Kyiv— a vegetable vendor in Kherson is chased by flying metal, thirsty for blood thru his stall.

Bodies by the train tracks, white sheets, dark smoke hangs @ sunrise over warehouses.

Thermometers crack 41.2. The Danube shrinks. Hungary’s nuclear plant idles for lack of water to cool it. The Rhine, too, is low. Cargo ships stop.

New images of the Sun show the surface in better detail, they say.

Propellers stitch the ridge line— strapped to its belly, insulin, sutures, one vial capped in foil, crossing hills no truck can reach. The same week a cheque is signed to close the road behind it.

Ash keeps the shape of a roof. Fence posts stand black & alone a yard w/ no house behind it. Every fourth door in this city opens on daylight only.

A woman signs for a folder @ the courthouse counter— a stapled corner, a crayon house, four windows, orange sun, a stick-figure family holding hands, four months late in the mail, folded by small hands.

A man's name enters a registry the same week his room does not. No further address given.

The fist goes up in a parking lot across from a bronze man who has held his own hand up for a century. Behind her, a line bends toward a folding table where paper waits to be carried somewhere counted.

I. Fayetteville, 1945

Fuse box hisses orange behind the office door. Jennie counts heads on the lawn: four. Barrel ice will not crack for the hatchet. Ladder gone from the nail on the shed. Trucks cough & will not turn. Phone line has no operator, only wire. Downstairs, the tree still blinking red & green.

By morning there's a cellar of ash. Five feet of dirt laid over as a lid, lilacs planted where the floor joists were. Years later, a billboard face on Route 60, rain running down a girl's cheek that never once grew older.

II. Columbus, 2006

Escalator glass rising into neon: TUNA. Timestamp burns 1:55 into the corner of the tape. Two women laugh, cigarette smoke uncurling. He turns. The door takes him back in. Rewind. He turns. The door takes him back in. No other way out but this one & the kitchen's, propped that night against wet concrete.

Pearl Jam inked green-black on his shoulder, a period tattooed into the iris of his left eye. Home, a phone rings four times, five, into a voice already not there. A suitcase, zipped, stands by the door in the dark, going nowhere, going to Miami.

III. Varna, 2014

Eardrum split like wet paper. White bottle, Cefprozil, rattling in a jacket pocket. Elevator doors open on an empty hall. He folds himself into the corner of the car and lets them close on him. Twice.

Whisper down the phone line to Marne. Four men out in the parking lot. Tarmac. He runs from the terminal shedding wallet, then phone, then passport. Photograph still smiling straight ahead. Six-foot fence, cleared in one motion, shirt going green, then gone, into the pines. Dogs lose the scent @ the tree line.

IV.

Noon presses down, a lid on a pot, asphalt soft as a tongue @ gates where nothing taxis.

Wings folded on the tarmac. Four thousand four hundred name tags catch light & throw it back, Placards leaning on terminal glass, paint curling in the heat.

Ten coat hooks by the door— many bare since May, a stethoscope still coiled on the ninth like a cat sleeping.

A phone lights up face-down on a desk, over & over. Yr a moth hitting a screen door over & over, desperate to spiral against the light until you die.

In the loop, mouthing the words "I appreciate the pushback"— twenty years of reputation airless by chokehold in a day.

A knife taken from February, stitched into the sixth month's hem. The myth of a man's face on an ancient coin, costing sins of the father.

Grain goes down into dark plastic bins. Consus keeps the lid shut 'till the threshing floor is swept. She crumbles stale bread into barn corners, against the coming white. The burning eats the pine in Blagon inventing new clouds— flammagenitus, pyrocumulus.

Shoes at the fences in Ceuta, without feet in them. Kumamoto flashlights cross over broken concrete, all night.

Pumpjacks bow & rise in dark— Refinery flares burn orange against orange sky. Another gas station held up, cashier sleepy in China white.

Hecate stands at the crossroads, torches lit. Dogs bay @ nothing. Persephone ties her sandal for the walk back down.

Seven lanes hum south at five o'clock, brake lights blooming in heat shimmer. Red-tailed Hawk holding still— above the median grass, nothing else does.

The sermon begins as a daydream museum paintings of naked lunch, of her. The tarot card reading "lover" a yesterday's yesterday, soured by an apocalypse. Salivate & wait for salvation. As careful as the butcher is, he cannot predict the internal marbling, or live-to-carcass weight loss. You are flesh & stone. Get up again, caught loving people who don't deserve anything less heavy & real than a rope around the neck. Blinking, lungs exchanging alchemy throat wet with possibility when will you finally hark? I stare into the mirror & ask dreamlike vaseline, grease stains bruised arms from IV lines I need to get my shit together we both know only a poet can salvage this bubbling Earth I will become wormfood before we get married, won't I? there's no other path, no shape, no way forward towards the lamb-born tomorrow anymore. You cannot melt the ground into warm gold and tender ivory. You will, instead, black sharpie 1 CORINTHIANS 13:4-8 on a piss-stained public queer bathroom stall with care, straight from source. where mirrors reflect Rainbow fish the colour of gasoline alleying up the north rivers swimming against the current news headlines, blinded by tradition. Carrying heavyweight drunk spit until yr back gives out before yr even 31, no lumbar support supple lumber burning & smudging every city in North America. I am fluid, taxes unpaid, roads cracked like the skin around my eyes. I beat & mangle the dust before it settles,

Soot will suffocate you, the sky crimson scarlet red. Tomato or maybe gushing fresh cherry, the lipstick strawberry still smelling like her. Bell pepper prayer where you mistake a vivid dream for yr past— A memory from childhood, when the world wasn't ending, Ramshackled, unspun spool threads. Drooling rain chasing lovers down the windshield waiting for dad to leave the liquor store & @ the clinic, the neurologist writes out no MRI activity when you are in the whirring machine & hear climate change children shot dead by children wolves eating their baby love pistol whip Jesus Christ amputates the wounded to save a life full of potholes & stretch mark of Satan and gentle caressing kiss. I will brandish a kiss on the cheek Start a religion from the clay of the earth Burn my flesh in yr kiln, how much more could I possibly offer you?

Sixty years back, the ward-office abacus clicked one bead short in October, then the next day, then the next— Mothers ran their fingers down the calendar.

A paper horse rears, mane the colour of a struck match, & underneath, it reads: she will outlive him.

But a lodgepole cone doesn't open on its own. It hangs sealed in its own resin through droughts, through decades, until the crown fire finally reaches— then the scales curl back, then the seed lets go, then green through the ash before the smoke has cleared.

He tries to save a life, as rope leaves the boy's hand & lands slack on brown current, drawing tight on the stranger's wrist.

A waterbomber banks west, & red rain falls slow across the ridge, smothering orange out of it.

The sign comes down in Fort Simpson— ALERT. ORDER. propped against the porch rail. Suitcase beside the still-open door.

Where's the chart's red bar? used to run to the top of the page, this year it stops at the middle.

One cactus flower opens on the cracked pan nothing else does. It's like how twice a week, an old man's thumb finds the smallest chest in the ward, counts the hours & says nothing.

Here are all the relationship types we currently have built-in to fanfiction.lol