Shrimp Crystal Flavor Packets


shrimp crystal flavor packet: deep sea shrimp

thick syruppy sound, drift of fall graceful to clamp and test: sand, watersurround, gill fizzle. i freed from egg and drove straight through that middle self and now the final pointilize and urge rises atop memory fuzz. then updrag came and i die toward otherfeed. i split apart in struggle and will boil down while looking.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: salty crunch

it's at. crink. brightly tall. 
at it at. 
alti is multi. its tallglass prior fly. pendulabyss down. it's up. 
kadrink. tinkle is glistle ply. try i.
this it's at that. send and rum higher. pointy mound is down.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: conceptual shrimp

letters as limbs of a conceptual shrimp. evolution shapes action through appendages which harry the water like living tools: claws for grabbing, cutting, scraping, sensing. its form articulates in series; skeleton becomes casing. a conceptual shrimp uses its limbs to reshape the reader’s mind, mounding and clefting your mental world until it is the mental world of some other creature: shark, scallop, arthropod boiled down to pure flavor crunch.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: plant-based shr'mp

so, little glow from molecules, chlorofilmic patter. rinsed nutrition, sparsed and isoled in late degrade, never mind. fashion a protein, fine, dunk in as protein, fine, whole spoil soil living from sugar to protein, finefinefine. stemptiness, vinestrungliness, ponic even in dark of dehydration.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: organic wild-caught shrimp

driven or handily or placid, or in case of skeleskin, well that's fastcised down, spectinned, or let loose as i may tect and tap out, or outout scare!—no-go cavern driving flee or furl-all, scutt deepdrop, down through torrent or getgone past swish, past fobble, cold boil the meshy ones make in flashing our medium across my mediawn.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: i am your technology

the i-point through them-thing. i and i and i and i and i as pre-we are your body. the i-form connect-storm trouncing down the band splays and hairs the they-makers you make as you. thempouncing and us-bussing. it-body from i-planes volutes in pelts of over-i. i-go you-go.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: arthropocene 

this arthroplanet boils apart, boils this plump of its tissue, pops planetwide fissures that am, am arthrotissue this planet is plump with, spread in scream by shadowspace taste, breaking in bubbles through fissures, arthrosolute am planetshadow of taste.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: factory farm recall

do not want to die. they put me in this life-history do not want to die. glue me to this life-history peel me from my sea but do not let this pass. do not let this pass. do not want to look without looking. they put me. do not yank yet.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: glass sponge shrimp

incame and too big got immediately. clasped with yother twine me. yours and am 7,000 tips of limbs seemed it. that’s good love if it eats waste. so we pulse could out those progeny. left they left world our itself. because onder yon must, begon begon and further on they begin. here, all the same is new with you, smooth foodwalls the world's insides. child-side out, they spot in own starts.


shrimp crystal flavor packet: frito-lay factory recall

delicious culture, product with mold, metal shavings convert corn and potatoes. awful place to ruin your marriage to pig farms. healthier oil force shift and pay over time. seen-waste meeting, crumbs fluctuate backhaul. you’ll be floorsame machines as other, taking our chips fresh out, ensuring hygienic corn, oil-salt, and water any rubber duckies floating on a sea of cheetos and laughed into shrimp.



A note on the poems: I wrote these poems for a reading hosted by Spiral Editions in Kansas City in February. They emerged out of a series of discussions with the poet Alex Bersntein revolving around non-human poetics. More shrimp content from this collaboration can be found at SHRIMPONICS.

Brandan Griffin

Brandan Griffin is the author of Impastoral (Omnidawn, 2022) and Four Concretures (Theaphora, 2024). His poems have been published in Tagvverk, Chicago Review, Cloak, new sinews, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Kansas City, MO.

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