Juliet Cook
Maybe you didn't want to bloom where you were planted.
Maybe you wanted to escape from where you were planted,
create your own individual space that doesn't leave you
stuck in the same position,
nailed into the same cross-shaped ground.
And so from the ground up and down, you elongate
into different circle shapes. You expand and grow
your own fairy tale pie filled with maggots
that will choke to death or drown in between
the red filling unless they learn to fly.
The red filling sometimes fills the whole room,
sometimes drips from the ceiling.
When I was a teenager
When I was a teenager, I was worried about falling heart-first into the blade.
More mental insects
More mental insects
crawling under ashes
until they burn
or drown
or fade into nothing.
Nothing lasts forever,
but some things last longer than others.
Longer than I want them to,
like panic attacks.
My mood swings.
Almost constant bloating.
A cups turn into B movies but
don't bulge out as much as my stomach.
Every pair of pants is too tight
and drenched in blood until
it all dissolves.
Nobody loves me anymore
and it's all my fault because of
my increasing lack of sex drive,
my lack of anything profound.
The dull percolation inside my gut,
moves up to
the upper abdomen,
closer to destruction
of my heart.
A phone call Without Caller ID
A phone call Without Caller ID
woke me
from another dream
in which I was offering my ex-husband
a platter filled with
all sorts of food from inside me,
but it was all expired.
He did tell me
he thought it was easier if your wife died young
rather than if you got divorced
from someone still alive.
He did tell me
he was tired of hearing about my poetry.