*After initiating a series titled “Odes to Female Demons and Their Unbiblical Genitalia”, I’ve scrapped the third installment and decided that this second piece had stagnated: it’s a wee bit dusty. The original work is still a poem in progress.
Acrid skins dangle through our fruit baskets
and tongue the rusted silver like frigid serpents.
We peeled divinity from our hands in bitter rinds,
constantly scraping our callouses off the scale
so our bodies wouldn’t interfere with weighing the produce.
I still hear the hissing gossip of granny smiths
bathed in rich oxygen and false blessings.
What sour little devils. In the mornings,
I wear new prayers like a uniform crinkling its brow.
I drink my roles in a mimosa of tinnitus.
I’m still viscous. You’re sticky with sweat.
We’re dusted in expired confectioner’s sugar.
There’s a brain on the banana hook.
I core the apples and prepare the sheets
as pharaohs removed their organs for the afterlife.
I was once tilled from the maternal copper
of pulled pork gone cold and damp paper bags.
Maybe you have a little bit of maternity left
over in that pigsty of a skeleton, still tinny
like old pipes. Do I linger in your bones?
Perhaps I could just improvise tomorrow
and try on botanical globes like rotting testicles,
as if I’d finally be willing to bear your worlds.
As if any of them were actually mine.
