[CN: mention of rape/assault]

Ravenous Bird Brain

He thinks you’re a rape magnet,
a strangled portal for revenge,
but you aren’t. Really you are
a ruptured dome filled with crows.

A dream moving through a book
held by a local pagan,
in which every bookmark can fly
and bite the lines of what tried to kill it.

If he thought he could ban us for life,
wait until he sees all the pages under his bed
at night, crawling up the ceiling and then
dive bombing his ears.

Revising his neckline
into a pathogenic birdbath.
The only real way to sleep. Do you believe
rainbows come from atlas? So do stars

but stars are dead. So is God.
What sort of constellation
will forgive him or form a concentric shape
that rains down upon men?

The kind that is living in the body of a woman.
Find a woman judge who rubs men
the wrong way by offering choice
to repent and change or else

be sentenced to death
by recurring bad dreams with sharp edges.
That’s what he’s inflicted upon us
by forcing himself into our nests.

∞

Over Expanding Paddle Boat Brain

Sometimes I wonder whose semi-secret shit list I’m on
and why. Maybe I’m just paranoid.
I have my own scars, my own forms

of damage control, but not quite enough
time to get it right or trust
my own impulses.

I want to watch hand models
smear nail polish all over the place,
as a sign of un-even positions.

To prove I am as even as the sunrise and sunset or sin.
Chocolate cake expanding my stomach into a moon
sized pregnancy scare. Inedible frosting nozzle.

Incredible frothing member
of an unnamed tribe of organs
played by organic mermaids.

As opposed to inorganic mermaids
whose nativity stems from
sea foam made out of screen shots.

Or open screen doors that still
somehow hold the moths in the house
and try to turn them into alien rainbows.

Then new shows on HBO can be written to accommodate
flying insects going extinct. Instinctual
buzz kill. I feel like my ribs are going to break
themselves into pieces.

Extinction of psychic toxins or other forms of soul debris.
Internal meteorites of metronomic doom.
Stanzas of psychotropic gloom trash compacted.

Turn on the dishwasher to try and drown out
Niagara falls and the pouring of
a fishbowl with a severed head
floating inside.

Try to resist throwing yourself
underwater, even though part of you wants to
become a living fish.

Even though part of you never gave up on
grade school studies of breast development
and teachers with paddles.

Now you are one yourself. How did this
happen? Such big breasts on a beetle?
They need to be paddled off
and replaced with new wings.

Wings on the underside of the body
of a specimen might bring it back
to life or create new jewelry that reflects
its strengths and weaknesses.

Do we want our secret powers to rise
or disappear into the void?
Out, damned spot!
In glorious light
reverse your own interior infrastructure.

∞

Triple XXXmas Martini with an Olive Shoved Into Me

My painkillers are killing me,
but I continue to take them
just like I continue to take myself
out to the local bar.
The thing is, I’m full
of negativity and need
to tone it down by drinking;
by brimming my intestines with unhealthy debris.

The alternative is drinking
too much tap water.
Tap dancing myself down the drain
and let’s get one thing straight.
I ain’t singing in the rain.
Rainbows abandoned me long ago.

Thunder applauds in my face
and I can’t tell
if it’s joking or serious.
Ditto for the giant pubic hair
unraveling at the bottom
of my tainted coffee cup.

I need a shower
and a good dose of depilatory cream
or creamer or half of my brain
baked into a cream puff
eaten by a turkey named misses clause.

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at JulietCook.weebly.com

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer, and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j hopes to make the god/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon.

Covert art credit: Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash