Sawing Through

Lap dance underwater with

sharks.

Limbs tossed into 
bleeding mosh pits.

Those still alive are uniform,

guns, glass, hate.
Won’t stop shooting,
biting, spitting out

splintered heads they don’t want
to swallow.

Lacerated tongues which

can no longer speak.

Stuffed animal lair only

allows meat eating breeds

filled with contracting, contractual,
expanding killer teeth.

Dialect of smashed windows 

dragging you away.

Intrusive Obsession 

Hiding in the background,
then quietly limping to the side

of my peripheral vision,
then suddenly racing towards my headspace.


Screaming internally then constricting

my throat with heaves and gasps and

compulsions, every membrane screaming

obsessive images about how men are looking

at creampie dripping down 
younger women’s thighs 
and I’m a boring middle
aged woman his age

 
with saggy breasts and a heart
instead of just an opening

aimed to explode in his face.

Like a Ouija board strobe light inside

my brain, this obsession won’t stop

until my head splatters.

Invisible Ink

Possible poem lines emerge in bed,

in the midst of what seems like a semi-dream/

semi-reality state, followed by internal glitch

in which a semi-truck aims to run over

my new lines or my entire head. 


I thought I had managed

to temporarily sit up and 

write down my impending words, but

the first pen was devoid of ink. 

The second pen spit a thin drizzle

of almost invisible blood,

which soon disappeared. 

When I awoke, nothing new

was on the page. Had my words ever been there

at all? I could no longer remember the words
which had felt like they were writing themselves

inside my semi-invisible brain.

Perhaps it was just an illusion.

The bedside table was loaded

with hundreds of sheets of paper,

repetitive to-do lists. But no poetry. 

My new lines must have been 
thrown away or swallowed or 
trapped inside the dream or else 

never fully existed. 

I re-entered real life,

viewed the latest news,
saw death, murder, evil

worse than nightmares.
Part of me wished I was still stuck
in a dream. If I look away, am I acting
like another dead body is invisible ink? 

Juliet Cook doesn’t fit inside an Easy-Bake Oven and rarely cooks. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including “red flames burning out” (Grey Book Press, 2023), “Contorted Doom Conveyor” (Gutter Snob Books, 2023), “Your Mouth is Moving Backwards” (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2023), “REVOLTING” (Cul-de-sac of Blood, 2024), and “Blue Stingers Instead of Wings” (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025). Her most recent full-length poetry book, “Malformed Confetti” was published by Crisis Chronicles Press. You can find out more at https://julietcook.weebly.com/.