This Body is a Blooming Corpse Flower

Sugar skulls turn into embryos.
I shove them down my throat
in order to abort them again.

My womb is just a crawlspace
filled with little fake dick
and harry discharge instructions.

I walk around in circles, hissing
backwards soprano pick up lines
and watch the blood drip down

out of my lips, flooding another room
into a corpse vat. The shape of my mouth
was contorted, he used to tell me.

He wanted to explore it with his divining rod.
He didn’t understand how I could swallow it all
and spit the pieces out the other side,

watch the rotten meat cascade down
into the casket, before the stench escalated
and attacked more womanly flesh.

We are all born screaming until
we die gagging or dissolve inside
someone else’s solvent.

By Juliet Cook

Biography:

Juliet Cook’s poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines, including Arsenic Lobster, DIAGRAM, Diode, FLAPPERHOUSE, Hermeneutic Chaos, Menacing Hedge and Reality Beach. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including RED DEMOLITION (Shirt Pocket Press, 2014), a collaboration with Robert Cole called MUTANT NEURON CODEX SWARM (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015), and a collaboration with j/j hastain called Dive Back Down (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), with two more forthcoming. Cook’s first full-length individual poetry book, “Horrific Confection”, was published by BlazeVOX and her second full-length individual poetry book, “Malformed Confetti” is forthcoming from Crisis Chronicles Press. Her most recent full-length poetry book, “A Red Witch, Every Which Way”, is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.