Juliet Cook & jj hastain

Myth Owls Targeted At Evil

1.

A burlap sack filled with bloody fur.
A red whisk
used the wrong way inside
a tortuous dream scene.

This interrogation
had better pick up speed. I’m
getting bored of violent backdrops
and the color red.

The purple backdrop suits me today,
but other days I don't fit inside it. It alternates
between bluish purple varicose veins, bruises,
and beautiful flowers with insects biting
or sucking the juices to get a buzz.

2.

This could be a trap or a ravenous rap tap
tapping at a cellar door party
filled with perky breasts, percolating
cups brewing more Percocet

which is to say take me
back to the seniority I felt
when I was in the sorority
and did the most pills to reduce
my weight and wore the shortest skirt

but for who and where did that lead me?
Back to this dungeon full of contests and judgments.
In this chamber, the scores are based on body types
and weight equating to life and death.

I never even liked the fucking
Hairy Buffalo with all kinds of alcohol stirred together
and shoved down throats, but I drank it anyway.
Why oh who did I drink it?
The answer is in “who”.

3.

In this dream scene, Alice in Wonderland turns herself in
to a screeching owl ready to strike.
She also walks to soften.
She wobbles inside her head.

One side of her wants to help
every owlet grow non-predatory
and the other side of her wants
to rip someone’s head off.

That takes us back to the beginning.
Torn open skin and blood gushing red
and when will this finally become a metamorphosis
instead of an animal contest
filled with meat cut into pieces.

4.

Sometimes we buy into the buy out
in a form of pantomime
that literally ends with breaking open
every door and saving those who are being held down.

We save them by first saving ourselves.
But we do it in a way where we are not
differentiated. We hide under the bed
until the lights in the room come on.

Then we make the lights explode and we run
all the way home to the farm where the artichokes are
growing mouths with teeth. Vagina dentata
might be a myth or might be a body part
you'd better not approach without permission.

5.

In this superstition, the persimmons are so overused
they've grown fangs. They've become killers,
blotting every cadaver, applying face
make up. Wake up and drink this.

It has been your dream all along. Not all
lightning feels like light. Some of it feels like a stab wound.
Open the heart locket with a pick axe of lighting
and turn yourself in to something new
like a turn on happening inside of tone.

Go up to the attic,
press your ear against the wall
and try to hear someone else's music.
Then learn how to call it your own. Stravinsky
or Mahler might be dead, but their music lives on,
plays inside other people's brains and helps them escape
from hell to heaven in the blink
of a metronome expanding into its own instrument.
A trombone playing monotone curves through space.
A high-pitched flute weaves its way through a rat race,
turns the rats into new creatures who can fly.

6.

Do we end the poem like every one prior?
Or do me keep making different creatures fly out
of cake pans and hide inside Jello Pudding
shaped body bags? Those pudding commercials
should switch themselves off and on,
start killing the rapists rather than the victims' lives.

Flash in the eyes of unassuming participants,
children caught in landlocked states,
forced to learn to swim in public swimming pools
where one of the teachers holds them underwater.
Forced to lie down in instructors' bedrooms
and act out old war re-enactments,
cannonballs and all. Will this bad dream ever end?

Will an opened door ever close?
We have to put the hinges back on it first.

 

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.

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression and her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.