Worms in Our Mouth
La la la. I spoke of silver linings to the cans of soup, and they fell apart in my hands. I’m sorry I rusted all the surfaces in the shower with my growing collection of weeping tin. I think sometimes hunger bounces around from stomach to spine. And when I was on my walk today, the one that keeps my thoughts loose inside my eyes, I saw a finger that had been left to dissolve in the endless wet. It belonged to a heroin addict sitting on the curb until I looked to my right and saw him bent over a wall puking up something strange and medicinal. Too bad. It’s raining a fine thing, rough mist that coats the tongue. Soaked from head to toe but not really soaked at all.
Of course, it was also the bones of a rat.
Poor judgement. Someone took the tail and held the thing inverted and peeled it clean off from ass to whisker. Didn’t even know the spine and tail were in agreement like that. Just left it to be devoured by the moss. I think that’s a proper return.
Cleaner than being squished by a rubber tire that pushes everything out onto the pavement/I walk past it every day and it’s starting to smell/so I have to walk on the other side now/where the crackheads line up along the benches like checkers/and it’s a fucking miracle/I’m like tall reeds blending in/I’m like God smite me too please.
Nature intends for its bodies to be in constant friction. She presents her love in green.
After he was inside me, I felt like that squished out rat, and it was actually weirdly good. But now I want a cigarette, and they cost more than three bottles of medium cheap wine. I like thinking of earth as not a round marble or a flat disk but pewter scales. Sometimes you gotta weigh the options. With my first paycheck I will buy poultry from the butcher’s, Lucky Charms, and maybe a gun.
For now, it’s just roaming these same two aisles. I put cardboard boxes in my basket and they multiply, but when I look, there is nothing there. The boxes fit in the palm of my hand—light blue, beige, and hot coco. The contents are waterlogged. They don’t make the right sound when I shake them. I keep going up and down. He grabs my wrist and shoves my sleeve up. Mistakes me for the checker pieces. My basket is empty. I go to refill it. The same fucking boxes with their cutesy, sugary names. I’ve been itching in my sleep. Pretending to be a miracle. These lines mean nothing other than the fact that I’m alive. He tells me he can see into my veins. Points to the injection site. Points again and again. And points again and again.
Nobody even notices when I put his cock in my mouth and pull the trigger.
I sometimes try making cakes at home.
Using the remains the day has left behind.
I don’t need food coloring. It bleeds itself red.
Intestines, raw pieces of flesh…
I am almost already part of it.
This greasy world -
blood and guts crawling inside my chest,
making me want to vomit my own entrails.
The cakes are red.
They are me, they are the streets, they are everything
that dies and never leaves.
I stir.
I fold.
And somewhere, my own body whispers back,
a hollow echo of human carnage.