Fish with no eyes
swim toward me anyway
and I swim toward them
the same way.

No point in double standards
or a fishing pole.
These fishnets are making my
brain feel weird
like I’m pole dancing underwater,
can’t see my audience or if
I even have one.
Can I be my own

audience participation
more than two hands
more than fins
covered in lace skin
from head to toe.

*

A blow up doll
stuck inside
a fish gizzard,
grinding for hours,

until the clocks and surrounding cocks
revolt,
become decor
aiming to question
standard decorum
by ejaculating on pretty pearls
of so-called wisdom.

Suckers expand,
pucker out fangs.
The blow up doll breasts become eyes
for the undeveloped fish
and swim away

off the table,
into the potholes lit
by alley lights,
dancing for all the giant rats
with eyes aglow.

*

Chancing for literal giants.
Chanting for the expansion of moray eel
heads rising above massive doll bodies,
ripping baby doll dresses asunder.

Preposterous land of plunder.
Fertile fodder from which all fables
emerged as page’s underlined, crossed off,
ripped out, pitched. Endless revision
and dismissal until calcification
leads to amputation of every word.


All that remains are hacked off fingers,
dry nail polish flaking down,
and each lay gutted in the snowfall,
surrounded by all the dead stars.

Secretaries shampooing
the latest hair style,
then cutting it,
burning it,
sticking bits of burnt hair as bookmarks
in between the crumbling pages
that have been tearing themselves apart
with every turn.

Pages like peeled mammal,
extracted from mammary gland transgressions
in the swallowed up Cosmos
swimming inside another
Cosmopolitan monopoly.

Always drowning in one way
or another. Another pretty little straight jacket
inside another shot glass,
that evolves into an ongoing Martini,
leading closer to an underwater body bag.

 

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.

Juliet Cook is 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 www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Image: collage by Joan Pope