Juliet Cook
Little Death Decadent Cabaret Sequence
x. I can’t stop giggling as he mashes his bananas into my hair and then breaks out the gasoline; carries on about dousing this whole mess, painting up my face for the adoption agency. Our décor includes bunches of bananas and grapes, rust-flecked silver batons, gobs of used tissue, and ripped open partially-used bags of flour, bleached. Spilling out of a ripped open plastic trash bag, ‘free undergarments for women, size fourteen’, due to my mother’s death. An elastic tangle of B-sized brassieres, too, bleached flour stuffing the cups. I can’t stop giggling as he cuts holes for my nipples to stick through. I’m all sticky. He dips his finger into what sifts out of my mouth and then draws it across the underside of an uncooked chicken; plucks out six cold hearts. xx. As I strut around like an uncooked chicken human, clucking and plucking used feathers out of ill-sized panties, he can’t stop giggling. Even though this bird skeleton stinks. Bits of meat still cling to bones, a rotting strawberry stuffed in one eye-hole, a peeled and sugared grape inside the other. Any more bleach would compromise the structure of our imagining this bird as a filthy scavenger, something like a syphilitic pigeon. Due to her death, we have a plastic trash bag filled with partially-used bottles of cellulite cream. We have an attic that reeks of fermenting fruit, a festering indecision about whether to hang stained stockings or undeveloped film of our own lewd sex acts. We compromised our imagining into warped rafters, splitting under the weight of a meat piñata. Like some kind of flesh-colored trash bag. I can’t stop giggling like some kind of hysterical hyena human. Too bony for my own good or his. He says we should fatten me up. He has a hankering for some more succulent thigh. xxx. He chastises me for trimming the fat, for cutting my toenails too short. He wants them to curl luxuriously over the plump piggies. He wants my spit to sizzle, my apple doll parings to burn. Now is the time to douse this whole mess in her trial-sized bottles of expired grape bubble bath. As soon as we wrench open the crusty lids. We pretend we went shopping at a skanky estate sale. The sticky riff raff and rank of rotting dresses. We agree to give up on all safe words. Chicken vein is just of our many new pet names. It used to be gristle. Now it’s costume jewelry. xxxx. He prepares our bath for a dumpster dive; littered with chicken bones and goldfish we stole from a carnival and then poured out of their safe plastic bags and into artificially grape hot water. I wiggle my fattened up piggys. I can’t stop giggling as I take a bite of my own burning flesh. He unpeels a banana, sticks three hearts in the microwave, which may or may not be busted. Either way, my toenails grow into electric carving knives.
Juliet Cook’s poetry has appeared in Diode, Diagram, Octopus, Robot Melon, WOMB, and many other fine online and print sources. She is the editor of Blood Pudding Press. For more information, please feel free to visit her website at www.JulietCook.weebly.com
