OWL-LIGHT

"The owls are not what they seem."   The Giant

Oh how it swoops in her mind;
a blind fling into the wrought iron spires.
She sometimes thinks she’d rather be impaled
instead of this waiting on tenterhooks;
instead of this wondering, ‘Who, who, who?’

She knows it’s a raptor.
She knows it doesn’t have bright feathers for her
to clutch onto.  It’s not that kind of bird.

It flies by night.
It flies by street lamp light
reflected off the zippers
of smiling body bags. She can’t unzip
her own skin and the cruel talons
have already dug in to the back of her neck.

At least when seized as prey, she’ll get to fly
for a few minutes.  At least she can imagine
being dropped.  Falling

			falling

				falling

in love with the dark spikes.


(from ‘The Laura Poems’, published by Blood Pudding Press, 2006)

girl gang #6

Bananas Flambé fusses with her cuticles, prepares
her bubble bath and fumes.

She smells like caramelized bananas and she is sizzling
mad because Bananas Foster is trying to supplant her

as CandyDishDoom’s best confidante and love bunny du jour
and furthermore, Bananas Foster is a man!  She sucks a deep breath

through the gap in her teeth, sips from her flask, singes
her ring finger on the curling iron and pitches

her shimmer eye kit across the room.  Hues of under ripe green
and bright yellow powder white squares

like some lurid variety of nose candy. She chops
her nails into dagger-shapes.  She calls him drippy,

vanilla.  CandyDishDoom sighs.  Her two Bananas
have so much in common; if only they’d give each other half a chance.

Bananas Foster might have some vanilla tendencies,
but there’s no denying his dark rum; the sexual thrum

of his guns of steel and the alluring way he wields a knife
to cut bananas lengthwise, whereas the reckless Ms. Flambé

slices them into uneven chunks.  Which is not to say she isn’t
mondo-foxy in her own way.  She haphazardly splashes brandy;

seethes with volatility and zesty pizzazz, but so what
if The Doom desires a new kind of banana in her candy dish;

a new va va voom ignition in her ice cream bowl. It’s like a small explosion.
Smoldering, Flambé considers changing her gang name

to something that implies a cherry bomb inside a cream puff
or a pineapple upside down cake soaked through with high proof whiskey,

but first she’ll douse herself in banana liqueur-
scented bubbles; try to drown the little green monster.


(from ‘girl gang’, published by Blood Pudding Press, 2007)

girl gang #7

The Spiked Pineapple nurses new wounds;
applies an ice cold lamb chop to one eye,
voluminous quantities of black liner to the other.

Priscilla blinks smoky lids; twists frosty lips
into a wry little grin because she’s due for a shift
at the donut shop and she’s sick of puff pastry,

of a cream stick oozing its granulated lard
until it’s a deflated sticky mess
collapsed on a silver specimen tray.

Her eyes glaze like she’s a stoned charm school dropout
as she smoothes the same old wrinkles out of the same old pink dress.
Cute, short, tight, and just slutty enough

for a few extra tips under the table, but
first she has to face the gauntlet of jelly donuts
with blood seeping out of their holes.  Junior high euphemism

for embarrassing female trouble.  Pregnancy scares, swizzle sticks,
swivel stools, stirrups.  She rips open a small pastel packet
as the piped-in doo wop fluff pumps

into her head.  She shakes it into Styrofoam; makes fake
goo goo eyes at the pimply-faced juvie across the counter.
She slides him a misshapen cruller

and tries not to gag when he calls her Little Debbie,
probably fantasizing about a hand job in the back room.
The goopy custard, the vat of hot grease, a delirium of sprinkles.

Priscilla’s pretty hair is smooshed beneath a pink snood
and she can still smell it. Despite all the sweet treats surrounding her.
Despite all the men who want to make out with her.

She is a product.  She has an expiration date.
A secret undesirability bubbles under her tongue
until the smell of spoiling milk and singed sugar rises up.

‘Come on in,’ she invites the next customer
and opens her mouth, the part that isn’t frosted,
the grease-spattered door to the back room,

the dirty, burbly, bottomless scalding vat.


(from ‘girl gang’, published by Blood Pudding Press, 2007)

The Angel of Death

Some of us are intimately acquainted with matching knee socks.
Some of us are intimately acquainted with each crease on our pleated skirts.
Some of us are intimately acquainted with words
like hosanna and host      like curettage and desecration.
I was catholic, I know what lurks beneath the frilly shrouds.
An amorphous squiggle under the girls’ Eucharistic veils—
bleeding, bleating, beseeching
‘Oh my God, I am heartily sorry
for having offended thee.’
This tin of lamb tongues
is my sacrificial offering.
Do you want me to confess?

I remember the red fetal fingers wiggling through lace
like baby snakes in the wrong place.
They said snap shut your white pocketbook
or else sins might slither out—
coiled innards, stubs, nubs, tiny tails.
They might plop, glop, slop, stain the holy cards
of your bare knees.  Pull up your socks, young lady!
Smooth down your skirt, smurfette!

I remember taking my socks off to play in the yard.
The dark mud squished between my toes.
The snake squiggled under my naked foot,
but it didn’t bite me.  Instead of running away,
I decided to try something new.
I made friends with the snake.
I made imitations of the snake
out of blue play dough.  They taught me
in Sunday school the smurfs were satanic
with that vicious pussy named Azrael.
I named MY pussy Azrael and it began to purr…

It started off so soft and small,
but my hell-mouth meow grew
into a spiky, slimy caterwaul
that was downright cthulhu-esque.
Blasphemous as pissing on my First Communion dress
when they taught me dead baby parts
were used as fertilizer, in shampoo, severed infant limbs in dumpsters…
On the make-believe private property
of a perverted doctor’s lawn, spread slick
with placenta, I wantonly flexed my thighs.
I revved up for my monster confession.

Before I spit it out, why don’t you
stick one finger into the other side
of the grating that separates us in this booth?
Vroom vroom, my pussy sounds like such a chopper.
I’d better snap it shut.

My womb is a real troublemaker,
but aren’t they all?  Some might even call me a
filthy little reprobate when I listen to those evil voices
in the heavy metal music. Some might even call me a
doom cake, a urinal cake, one of those girls
who deserves to be raped
because she was wearing her catholic schoolgirl skirt the wrong way.

My womb is a real muckraker
and half the congregation’s dirty fingers are stuck inside.
Some of them are trying to get me off;
some of them are trying to turn me off,
but my motorized blades are still whirring furiously.
You see, in MY visceral guide to uterine occupation,
the vagina dentata myth is true.
I’ve cued the seizure-inducing lights
and the spew of slashed babymakers.
Bang your head to the strains of this heretic cunt.


*


My aborted baby has been salted away
inside an old cigar box
with a handful of blue crayons—
(the bad seed blues, the misfit blues,
the irregular blues, the unborn blues with demon pigments leaking through)
waxing, pointing, waiting to color…

Your wings are made of tithes and invective.
My wings are made of torn lace and metal stirrups
and the rough little tongue of a death angel cat
who laps my cold toes.


(from [GROWLING SOFTLY], published by Blood Pudding Press, 2007)

sensationalia

~fine print~

the possibility of hidden love
letters, dirty whorls, itty notes
scrawled into margins (a),
then rubbed off. pink debris
of discarded characters
(a scratched out i, heart-dotted).
a spring loaded lancet on p. 13
drips its dark bead of temptation.

i stole that sanguine candy-striped
text from the church library
slid under my little girl dress (b).
easter egg cover and bloody inside.
sensationalistic technicolor vibe
of martyrs so hot they boiled alive.
molten lead cauldrons. plucked-out
saint eyes in sharp-edged silver vessels.
flailing limbs fettered to mean, frothy steeds.
petit fours. pieces of naked ladies.
the gawkers, the voyeurs, the close readers of
fine print inside eviscerated innards (c).

i rooted around for musty missives
in once-strangers’ dank basements,
brimful of forbidden loot. morsel by morsel,
illicit thrills ignited behind my eyes,
inside my panties. i ripped off
a book jacket; devoured.
long words. short breaths. hot sentence
like precision-designed teeth to the lobe
then a mouthful of blister pearls.
my tongue burned into sweet mutation (d).

you know you want to slither deep inside
this cave filled with silver dragee stars (e).

~footnotes~

(a)  when i stroked the secret marginalia,
the residuum formed edible filaments

(b) i inserted a finger between the lines,
the quivering cake-like caesura

(c) i swallowed throbbing syllables
sibilants of whip-lash squid
ink sacs inside blown sugar

(d) paper cuts like gills
or tiny rifts for butterfly bandages’
sticky wings to fly away
and let me bleed
then froth me,
cream me,
emulsify me

(e) some might dredge me if they dare,
some might try to icing comb me,
some might submit to a temptation
to draw and quarter my poetry

Juliet Cook is a poet and the editor of Blood Pudding Press, which specializes in poetry and ‘artsy little misfit offerings’. 

The latest offerings are available via BloodPuddingPress.etsy.com.-and currently include ‘The Laura Poems’, a series of ten poems that revolve around Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks-‘girl gang’, a series of ten poems that revolve around sex, violence, petite dessert products, and warped pussycentrism-and [GROWLING SOFTLY], a poetry magazine that stars the work of 27 other delectable poets, too-with more offerings coming soon.

A few of Juliet’s recent publication credits include ‘WOMB’, ‘Sein Und Werden’, ‘Otoliths’, ‘Death Metal Poetry’, ‘Prick of the Spindle’ and ‘DIAGRAM’. 

Her personal/poetry blog is called CandyDishDoom.