Juliet Cook

How Many Holes Can You Handle?

1. Too many holes might turn you
into a black lagoon with poison
swimming inside you. What if he tells you
he's thinking about your tits,
you in a witch hat, going down
into a lake that keeps sinking?

2. At the bottom, pearl sacs rip open,
blisters burst under the tongue. A blustering
blastosphere spell of passion might shoot out
of the water at a breakneck pace, but oddly twisted.
It will rip flesh off the bottom of your legs.

3. You're a waitress dress with skull legs affixed.
Red spiders crawl up and down your thighs.
Half and half, slightly sweetened coffee
or black? Is it sugar or poison drip drip
dripping out your eyes? Is it an iris
or a multicolored wormhole?

SEQUINS TURNED INTO BLOOD

i was swerving up & down, around & around inside
my aching circles. I was locked inside one cup
board with scissor blades hovering above
the shelves, my shut eyes blinking red.

my mommy couldn't handle my sick insides she said
I was drenched in unclean. I was turning obscene,
growing red cloudbursts, too unstable to understand
my own innards, the curse of blood.

The red discharge wouldn't stop and they flung
pads at my head and I screamed bloody murder
AM I DYING? AM I DYING? WHY
are they laughing as I'm bleeding to death?

then i was a bright corsage glowing on stage
with sequins and smiling waves

until I found out the truth

in between revolting evil eyes
I used to be a stuck pig begging to be cut

and now I am pig blood oozing in & out, exploding dark red
eruptions into every prom star. I used to be a tiny protostar
until my core contracted from dripping eye candy to hate.
I will turn every star into a blood drenched maroon body bag.

I am hideous waves of volcanic scissor blades firing
down & down & down onto nothing
but banged displays of female sin-
ful sacks. My bloody black hole will rip out

eyeholes like inbred pig breeding queens. I will spew
lava force fields of tainted magma. I will breed more
stinking pig guts. I was a shrunken violet, wailing inside
a fake vase until I was doused with my own frenetic pig blood hail storm

hell mouth blood orgy venom entrails OINK OINK OINK
I AM HUGE. I AM A SHRIEKING VIOLENT EVILUTION.

EVACUATION

1.
You and your eloquent recitations of caring and love and lust. They pour out so easily they must be unsealed. They shoot out so quickly, they must be uncontained. Whispered in my ears, on the back of my neck, all over my thighs and then spritzed inside. Sometimes it's Angel food cake and sometimes it's Devil's food. Sometimes we both sink our teeth in and get stuck in the stickiness of our own hot, twisted deluge. Soon I'll be longing for more Red Velvet.

The surface was rippling and the stones wouldn't form a bridge. Our bodies sank and rose, ground against the turbulent currents. I liked the look of bones more than I liked the look of your body, but I liked the way it felt like an out of control snake. I kept letting your murky liquid snake into me, despite tiring of your repetitive hissing. If your murky liquid snaked into your own lungs, would I give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or would I just watch you go down? I closed my eyes and visualized two poisonous snakes eating each other out.

You tried to create a shifty dream-house. I devised a ridiculous character that kept climbing up and down until the plastic skin started peeling away and we didn't know what to do with all my raw ingredients, misshapen batter, expiration dates, red nail polish congealing inside receptacles. You were still trying to frost me. You can't turn somebody else into a dessert product made for you and I'm not going to bake myself into your fantasy. You can't turn my blood into icing sugar.

I think you were hooked to the end of your dick, reeling it in and out of whoever you could convince to spread for you. I started out way too receptive at first. Open to a new combination of sweet dirty words to try to saturate me. Maybe part of me was sponge cake with glossy glaze. Maybe I had some uncharted vessels that you could temporarily dip into and fill. Maybe part of me was a vacant hole that could be poured into and didn't know you were only pretending to pull out, when you were really trying to cement yourself inside me forever.

I could only absorb so much before I started to feel heavy, but then it was too late. The pregnancy test was positive and I was drenched in shifting eddies; sluggish with changing tides. An undertow rising like nausea; the sour tang of regurgitation. You thought you still had me hooked to the tip of your penis. I decided to rip every last bit of you out of me.

2.
Inside the abortion clinic waiting room, I sat silently but couldn't stop myself from thinking as I skimmed through an issue of a poetry magazine. The girl sitting across from me couldn't have been more than twelve and couldn't stop giggling. I couldn't figure out if she was hysterical or naïve. The magazine was guest edited by Jorie Graham and I began to feel enraged by her poetry selections – brimming with ideological quandaries and clever word-play. I wanted some emotional imagery to submerge myself inside. I had chosen the wrong magazine. I took a break from those words and gazed into the vaginal folds of a Georgia O' Keefe flower print. It was pretty and pastel pink and had absolutely nothing to do with me. It had nothing to do with nausea, my rising gorge of rage, my desire to back track in time and get myself out of this mess, but then it was too late They called my name.

3.
At first I just told you about the waiting room. I tried to keep the rest of it benign for you. We had exchanged too much already and now I was paying the exchange rate. You had made your deposit; now you could get the fuck away from my vault. You kept trying to extract more from me, invading my space until it felt like a debris field; poking and prodding, even though I'd had more than enough of that. You want to keep ransacking tainted seeds? You want to digest the gore swelling inside me? I finally stopped skipping stones across the seething surface and sliced deep into the red tumescent core. I spewed it.

Visualize dentist office implements. You're stuck in an uncomfortable chair. The bright office light looks un-real and has nothing to do with the sun. It hangs above the cavity of your widened mouth, but not the mouth you speak from. An uncomfortable sense of exposure as a stranger leans in closer. Do you close your eyes or do you stare down the silver tray of sharp implements in clinical line ups? You're opened so wide, your thigh muscles ache. Is liquid pooling in the gaping hole? Is a nozzle going to suction out your slime mold? Is a long syringe going to prick into the pink like a triple-X horror movie Novocain shot until every word that tries to take shape is numb and dead before delivery? This is just the wading pool. Are you ready for the deep end?

GET UNDRESSED BELOW THE WAIST. The adjustable chair is now a hard metal table. The toothpaste tubes are tubes of KY Jelly that have nothing to do with consensual sex. You're spread legged on disposable paper, feet splayed in metal stirrups. The top of you is absurdly draped with more disposable paper, as if you're supposed to care about the privacy of your pubic hair when your vagina is gaping open in front of a stranger's face and is about to be spread even wider. Maybe you're a sick present, about to be torn open from the inside out. Maybe you're on a human sized dissection tray. Maybe this is a pornographic horror movie spread shot. The huge Novocain needle is a silver shock stabbed into your cunt.

GET UNDRESSED BELOW THE WAIST. You can keep your socks on. Try to keep your brain together even though you can't keep your legs together, you stupid fucking cunt. Why did you let this happen, you careless little cake hole? You probably don't smell so sweet down there now. But try to revert back in time and think about glittery ruby shoes instead of blood. Pretend your socks are girly slippers. Pretend you're slipping and sliding around and that's what's creating the vacuum cleaner sound. When it gets too intense for red glitter, then try to pretend the burning suction is a head banging heavy metal sound track playing inside you. High volume. Extreme. Head banging like crazy as the strangers hand inserts a metal can opener inside you. You don't think you can be cranked open much deeper. You don't think you're numb enough for this. Obscene sensation of burning combined with cold pressure. Dilation and evacuation.

Have you ever looked up close at a speculum? Have you ever analyzed a diagram of female anatomy? I'm not talking about a kinky magazine. I'm not envisioning ANY magazine, but you are in a waiting room with the men, looking at a Glamour Magazine. I'm lying on a hard table, on top of disposable paper, with disposable paper on top of my stomach so I can't look down and see the progressively larger metal rods inserted and withdrawn from my cervix. You're in a waiting room with the men, flipping through a flossy spread. I'm staring down the vacuum apparatus; its thick nozzle and heavy receptacle. It feels like there's a fist inside me. I'm starting to whimper inside my head. My cervix. Your fashion magazine. My cervix. A tightly shut muscle opened wide.

KEEP YOUR HANDS AT YOUR SIDE says the stranger. I'm clenching my fingers tightly and starting to whimper out loud as the series of metal rods dilate my cervix even more. My hole has to be wide open for that vacuum hose. I'm paying for my mistake. I hate myself. You're waiting for me and casually wading through glossy imagery and shallow text. I hate you. We're done. I'm finally done getting vacuumed out.

VAGINAL BLEEDING MAY LAST FROM ONE DAY TO THREE WEEKS. I'm supposed to avoid strenuous activity like heavy lifting; like trying to explain how it felt to have the inside of my body vacuumed out when the debris was clinging to internal walls. Afterwards, my consolation prize is a pair of ugly panties, a huge sanitary pad, and a pale blue sheet of discharge instructions. I'm seated on a La-Z-Boy chair next to a terrified looking girl in a wheelchair and I'm given a questionnaire about costumer service. While I'm filling out that paperwork, the wheelchair girl is getting IV sedation, crying the whole time and unable to walk. I finally walk across the room to turn in my questionnaire and a nurse gives me my prescription pills inside tiny envelopes. I finally make me way back downstairs, where you're still in the men's waiting room, still in the same seat, still holding the same magazine.

Did you ever pull yourself away from the vacuous faces on glossy pages and picture me spread wide and bleeding?

4.
Do you want to hear me vomit? Do you want to watch me dispose of misshapen clots of bloody residue? I'm sitting on the toilet for extended times with big red blobs falling out of me. Becoming detached from my own body, like a mixed breed zombie robot. I'd rather just shut down instead of try to fall asleep, subjected to another sickbed dream with you lying next to me. My nightmare soundtrack a growling vacuum; mutilated meat clogging the disposal. The sickly sweet stench rots inside me until I am rancid in the aftermath.

You still want to lie beside me, pressing your body against mine, like more dead weight. I want you to go away. I want to cut open your cactus painting and drain the bright insides or drip dark red paint on top of it, in contorted cherry shapes that look like blood clots. If you open my medicine cabinet, you'll see I've replaced my perfume and nail polish with bottles of Syrup of Ipecac. Why don't you drain one of those bottles down your throat and then hack every trace of me from your insides. I don't want you inside me anymore and I don't want to be inside you.

Finally the zombiefied blood clots end and the robot starts to take over. I'm feeling dehydrated, unnaturally metallic. I'm starting to gloss things, but my gloss is not a gloss attached to smiling lips. It's more like a broken down, glazed septic tank. Sediment, inlet, surface scum, hatching out nubs of dark red fetal dreams.

➥ Bio