Juliet Cook

Thirteen Mice

1.

Some blood is the color of canned cranberry sauce;
other blood is darker inside
and keeps on growing into its own color.
How many hearts will fit into this pie?
How many chortling demons do you think
have been trapped in that freezer?

I can try to dissolve their flesh
into a tasteless, lifeless mess,
but that doesn't smoothly eliminate
all the toxic ghosts hiding inside
what used to be their eyes.

Icy frosting expands then
grows into a small red volcano.
The pie crust pins itself
adjacent to a dead butterfly
mounted on the suddenly shaking wall.

2.

The next time you assume
that I worship the same way as you,
all the wall hangings will violently crash,
all the splayed remnants will come back to life
in different incarnations.  Thirteen mice

you killed without thinking twice
will emerge from my mouth, convulsing,
convoluted, hurling into screaming incantations,
their tiny skulls temporarily paralyzing you,
so that you can't keep on ignoring me.

3.

When I disagree, you launch
into a vanishing act
until I change my mind
or make my own thoughts disappear,
but I have my own brain waves, brimming with mice

 

slithering out, descending limbs, disfigured stumps
transfigured into wings
with their own inflections.

The more you try to force me to see what you see,
the darker I will become until I am
saturated in the real me,
ascending into reverse abandonment.

 

Fifty Mice

My home is immersed with poetry,
art, chapbooks, books, memories, years worth
of tons of repetitive paper brain waves, loss,
re-writing my own thoughts, feelings, words,
and to-do lists again and again.

I am me and my words
and my own interpretation of my past
and present.  I have my own
memories, but I don't hold on
to my past in person. I hold on to my past in paper,
in poems, inside my brain, in dreams and nightmares.

Maybe there's something wrong with me
for not feeling as if I have fifty genuine friends
now that I'm fifty. Maybe I question the sincerity of others
too much, but I have my own reasons.

To me, too many people seem fake
or like people pleasers
instead of trying to be themselves
and please themselves.

I write out my own feelings and emotions.
I forget and I re-write.
I stress-out and I re-write.
I freak-out and I re-write.
Sometimes I re-evaluate.
Sometimes I change my mind.

If I hid my own thoughts,
then I wouldn't be me.
If I threw away my poetry
then I wouldn't exist anymore.

 

Juliet Cook and j/j hastain

Eating Subconscious Species Alive

The red envelope expands
into a red water balloon.
When the balloon breaks,
your teeth fall out          
and blood splatters the bedroom wall.

The water bed is stained with red Kool-Aid
as insubstantial evidence of drowning;
a relief from so much taking over 
or talking down to 
fire and ice.

If we extricate the algae from the burning pit,
an otherworldly species of women
can roam free.
If we all bloomed where we were planted,
then nobody would ever grow
into who they really wanted to be.

Existential dancers with expansive routines
of controversial movements derived from their own
memories. Proportionate with the sea
eating subconscious species alive
like brain wave piranhas.

 

 

Juliet Cook is brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. 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.