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(a small sponge cake with a synthetic cream filling)
Rolling around in the champagne tower broken glass,
all sticky and bloody rifts and princess slipper like
splinters. That ladyfinger tray crashed down, too.
The creamy grainy. My earlobes wrongfully pierced;
canals discharging their stiffened sugar mixture.
I can’t mutiny, I have no sailor uniform.
What happened is that waitress dress slithered off her, onto me
& it had hooks. It fit like a second skin, a shame
to say. It hugged me in inappropriate ways.
I’ve always had this weakness
for perverted pastry chefs.
I’ve always had this cleft
begging for a dressed-up twinkie.
Those esters of sulfurous acid seeped into my head.
When I tried to serve the suckling pig, it turned out
more like a skinned kitten with its bloody mouth
all stretched around the apple gag. Eyes milky slits.
Part of me expected horror. Part of me.
Abscess
This charm school is a crumb cake
held together with rubber cement
and bitchy fragments of soap.
Black stitches fasten her rotten
eyeteeth in place. Chocolate lava
seeps in between. Arm in a sling
of the decorative bent. Drooping.
What used to be foxy modus operandi
is now another dirty wolf girl
with a wolfhound for a father.
Should she hunt herself to gain his approval?
Instead she pops out bon bons,
watches the tube, watches the blood crust
after the gum graft procedure. Frankengums.
But she doesn’t want her fangs back.
She doesn’t want to know what she does want.
She only wants to know why her bon bons won’t behave.
No matter how dutifully she plucks them,
they try to grow hairy paws and run away.
With no real consistency, they harden and soften
from candied cherry to diseased cow udder;
milk ducts dried up or uncontrollably leaky.
They shift to the bottom of the bowl like melting witches.
This couch is an empty black dress
stinking of wet dog and coarse sugar.
The rotgut. The episodic whatnots.
when flesh equaled rotten peach
The meat bones inside, the scratched linoleum, the surgical implements
lined up neatly on silver trays. Those ambulance lights when you spilled
bright orange nail polish into your wide open eyes. You were dangled
like a stained rubber doll over the sinkhole. The pulp inside your slits.
You were ankle-gripped by powdered latex gloves.
A beautiful refrigerated woman in white uniform
taught you beautiful equals mean; sickly equals unclean.
Beautiful equals tell you what to do. Order you.
You’ll be painting this plaster of Paris sunflower.
You’ll be using this laminated color chart.
You’ll be eating out this Styrofoam bowl.
Macaroni held together with glue.
Wipe the bacterium-breeding fingers. Sanitize equals sanity.
Wipe the messy smile off your gauze strip seepage reek.
See her dead serious face as she squeezed the bulb
of a nasal aspirator and ordered you to tilt back your head.
An orderly taught you catheter, enema, ostomy.
Medical rubber bands, medicinal wet wipes, underside of
lined up seamy wrist. You’ll be dragging this IV cart beside you;
a sick girl’s pet. If you resist, the needle might pull out leaking
your trail of bloody medicine. Tongue depressor, specimen cup, the shunt,
the runt of the litter. ‘Your private area’, a hairless little girl whispers in your ear.
‘For some operations, they have to shave it’.
What if you don’t have hair? Where would they put the IV
if you had two fake arms? What if you had an uncorrectable curvature
pustule-caked hunchback? Would you rather have prosthetics or hooks
connected to stumps? Beautiful equals cold metal
stirrups, sharp implements, rubber hose, nozzles, pinch clamp.
Quivering Jell-o squares, cottage cheese, a Fun Pad
with only three sickly colors of crayons—yellow orange, yellow green,
waxy sky blue under fingernails. Even if you clawed and hacked
through the zippered-shut croup tent, you’d still have this plague
of failing fluorescents bearing down on bald domes, crusty stitches,
shameful glints, the dirty little secret of your bed pan.
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Juliet Cook’s poetry has been published by Diode, Diagram, Octopus, and many other sources. She is the editor of Blood Pudding Press. The three poems appearing here are also part of her first full-length book, ‘Horrific Confection’, available now as a free e-book from BlazeVOX. For more Juliet information, please feel free to visit her website at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.
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