Poetry: Selections from Juliet Cook

Guttural Expansion Stuck Inside



Some walls hold in an influx of toxic mildew.

Grey/green rotten concrete

lurking inside me, an internal build up


as the doll turns middle-

aged then older, as the bad habits

bulge their way out of her belly button.


Unrendered

From stuck pig to stuffed pig.

The ongoing ugly gestures of my body's

impending Armageddon.



My mind can temporarily detach itself

from my own bad habits,

but my body keeps exposing



an abstract lullaby of gurgling internal

streams turning into screams.

It can be hard to separate

 

water from wine.

Fat from water retention.

It can feel impossible to tone myself

down. I used to be

 

a sort of voyeur

but now I don't want anyone to

look at what I'm doing to myself.

Contradictory Specimens

If you want to be kind to animals,


then you need to stop ignoring all this


animal slaughter. What kind of animal

do you think you are?


Your kitchen is stuffed

full of contradictions.

A flood of silly frothing blood

drenched globs of boneless wings.

 

Broken pig heads and nasty fucking

soufflés and me too. I've been filled with pigs

and contradictions for years

even though I hate moist ham

unless it's juxtaposed with eggs.


I love gazing upon live chicken wattles

and photographing their clucking faces,

but I'll still eat their legs.

I told you I need wings

to be boneless. I need birds to be dead

 

before I carry them inside my bedroom,

mount them on display with painted feathers,

position them on top a dusty shelf

beside a taxidermy fetus drenched in blue

formaldehyde wet dreams stored within

this tiny bottle that one day I will crack.

 

Maybe the only ones who care are those

directly surrounding the dying bodies,


putting them to sleep or killing them or

quickly swallowing down their hearts

until the gagging ends. Maybe nobody cares.

 

Suspended animation meets ablation

until tons of rooms brim with a surplus

of mutilated guts and malfunctioning brain waves

of filtered animal meat and drained blood.

Until we are all nothing but dead handfuls

of medicated corpses and ashes, ashes.

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in lots of print and online publications. She is the author of quite a few poetry chapbooks, recently including Another Set of Ripped-Out Bloody Pigtails (The Poet's Haven, 2019), The Rabbits with Red Eyes (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2020) and Histrionics Inside my Interior City (part of Ghost City Press's 2020 Summer Micro-Chapbook Series). Her most recent full-length poetry book, Malformed Confetti was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2018. She is brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions.