Saints with Issues What is an insane asylum anyway? Is it a brain or is it a building?
Is it someone else's interpretation
of someone else? He said his dick was as long as
Pinocchio's nose. She said, "You can't throb
your way out of purgatory".
Then they started
climbing the army ropes
and crashing into
broken bridges.
Tokens started ejecting
out of garbage disposals
and turning into epistolary saints
and ants linked together
the only way they can survive floods.
They came close to diving in to the impossible, but
were able to hold hands instead.
Levitate themselves into their own realm.
They are kings and queens
of spice with long succulent tongues
frothing out pepper and then stinging.
The streetlights stretch into tarantulas and scorpions
and this is not a horticultural trend.
Nor is it a permaculture blend. It's something else. It permeates inside our heads, creates new
perms from insect legs.
Drugged Pig Treats My fingers smell like a combination of latex and skunk and it's my fault for trying on Halloween masks every day
and sipping hallucinogenic tea,
frothing evil tea leaves out of what used to be
my eyes. Am I scary or am I scared
of what lives underneath? I can't decide. What to do from
here? Cry out under fluorescent lights? Burn the candle at both ends?
I drip my emotions into a dark cave,
collect Dip 'N Dots once they have congealed
and fallen like Stalactites and Stalagmites.
I turn my own sediment into sludge,
create my next costume. A cross
between nurse and ice cream shop worker
with glittering orbs passing through history
books in the storage room spout
back out through the shower to show
unassuming males in the locker room a good time.
For a good time, nail my finger
to the neighbor's door,
a portent for torn-open pig
aortas. Apply one of my many pig masks
atop all of their yards' dying flowers.
A pig mask the size of a whole yard!
Use it as a model for a city wide piñata filled with bloody candy.
Let’s start the tradition this Halloween
to cannibalistically contort our own pig tails.
Broken Trellis Another strange blackout. We awaken with bright
red eyes. Creeping vines
quivering up our thighs,
growing into parasites.
Conch shells full of materials
for a questionable feast.
Pomegranate seeds spurt from trombones.
Coagulating pickup sticks
replace the drum sticks, crack open,
bleed all over an audience row.
The front row screams and dances,
everyone amok with gory
life like glue to hold us together
until the rafters explode.
Then the babies start crawling out
of our mouths like sharp instruments,
like estuaries of decay earning their way
by ramming misshaped cones
against the bare feet of parable
figures. Turning them into figurines,
broken and tossed into diaper bags
for the remainder of the flight.
Once mommy and me land
and step foot off
the plane, another plane of existence opens.
Eyes change color again, digits diverge
into enraptured talons. Sound
files sounding us into eternal
release of blood. The only fount,
the new fontanel, oozing out small fountains of ectoplasm
to develop new wings.
Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.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.