If it was fire, I would be burned across my liver.
If it was water, I would be floating belly-up one hundred miles down stream.
If it was a daydream, I would have plummeted from the heaven’s and crushed by heavy streets below.
I’ve always known the thick romance of being lost, deep in black brain jungles, where tigers eat tigers to build their own stripes.
My birth brought it. It was my placenta. We were strong together and now I am separated from eternity.
I think I was never born.
My hands are a man’s whose body
escaped Vietnam, but whose
soul was eaten by a war.
I watch these hands dip
a rag in bleach to scrub away
a face of imperfections,
a face that is not mine,
but a man’s who was scalded
by the hot palms of a red-headed woman
who watched her husband
tie off his neck and give it to his son,
and now my daughter is not mine,
and her smile is not her own,
but of a woman who would have
drowned me in her breasts
had I been born,
and I watch her with
eyes that seem to be my own, but
crinkle like the skin of
a man who shrunk himself enough
to fit inside a bottle of Rum
and swim for forty years,
and I was not born, but I remember seeing
these hands wrapped around me,
and this face smiling,
and this blue eyes crinkling,
and all of these dying before
I could have been born.
We do not have friendship,
or handshake,
or hug,
or your banal Tupperware parties.
You do not pout your lips in
sympathy when thoughts
of
my china doll bite your cheeks.
We do not plan swing-slide
adventures
for little skinny
blonde boys
and girls.
I do not smile and nod
as silly intoxication drags
misery out of your voice anymore.
But, you are my friend, soberly watching
for Raccoon feces, while your
husband throws the TV at you.
Once, I watched with clean eyes, while his dirty
ones stabbed you
with a sharp
pint.
Your voice never drags that up when
you are sober,
you only speak about the Raccoon’s.
Oh My! They have been stitched back.
All my pieces have
been reassembled. It must have
been when the cooking
wine drove me to
blackness.
I was lying in a knot
in front of the oven, where
my stew had been cooking. I left, from
the kitchen, into this blackness.
When I awoke,
my pieces were positioned back to
their former posts!
They are not what they used to be, not
nearly as attractive. Nobody else would
ever choose these parts! But,
they are perfect to me! Exactly how I want them!
I’m still hurting, the pain is jabbing – bulging in and out
at the stitiches.
I do not mind though. For now, I scream, I writhe in
agony, I attempt sleep in discomfort. It will fade though and My pieces will
never work how they used to.
I am cut into pieces, boiling
in a stew. A quarter cup of the fingers have been
diced away along with
a chunk of the right breast,
both little toes,
the bones and muscle in the
right forearm, a kidney,
and the fallopian tubes.
Salt dances painfully on the wounds of
what remains of the body. I cry out for some relief!
There is nothing.
Anesthesia will not behave!
The stew boils about, my pieces
become soft and
flesh falls from bone. The crockpot screeches
with the heat – it knows!
But, I do not blame the crockpot. It
must perform it’s duty.
No choice for a hunk of metal!
I scream again! The pain! Where is comfort?
Where is solace?
Ah! Cooking wine!
Take care of my wounds.
Take the pain away…..
After some time, the alcohol performs it’s own duties.
I relax!
I hope the stew makes it to all those empty mouths!
maggiemaeijustsaythis 