Juliet Cook
Thorns Stuck Inside My Left Foot
I fell down on a Sunday.
Better to fall than to bow.
I fell down in a restaurant,
landed on my knees with my feet bent backwards,
almost automatically bruised, as if
to teach me a lesson for walking by myself.
My left foot looked like a strange stigmata
with the blood stuck inside, growing dark.
The blood eventually disappeared,
but the foot remained swollen.
The swelling kept changing its shape and position
like impending signs of my shifting sins that deserved
to be punished. It's my fault. I'm going to Hell
even though I don't believe in Hell.
My hysterical foot keeps expanding
into an increasingly uncomfortable land of the unknown.
My first X-Ray results in an overly casual phone call
from an unknown man who tells me I'm not fractured.
My second X-Ray informs me that I'm not dislocated,
but am injured with a major sprain, a degenerative change
in the first head. High systolic blood pressure.
Pressure in my arteries.
Massive panic attack.
Tingling on the brink of a seizure, I imagine
breaking my own ribs with falling crutches.
Then my third X-Ray reveals a broken bone
which appears to be healing on its own, but
still not getting rid of the blasphemous swelling,
the superficial fluid, the hell pit inferno,
escalating splinters or poisonous spiders or
bloody thorns or snakes hiding inside my skin garden.
My life is not an embryonic petting zoo.
I don't want my foot transfixed inside a caged door.
My internal wine glasses start flying inside churches, hissing
at everyone who thinks they deserve to tell me what to do.
Knocked Out
Correlative black mold lives inside
this maniacal show choir. Drools out
of the members mouths as they make up
new nursery rhymes, wake up with unknown
vocal cords spawning with reverse sound effects.
Screaming breadcrumbs leap into the void.
The tambourine gags and spits blood.
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. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. Her two most recently published poetry chapbooks are red flames burning out (Grey Book Press, April 2023) and Contorted Doom Conveyor (Gutter Snob Books, July 2023). She has another new poetry chapbook manuscript, Your Mouth is Moving Backwards, forthcoming from Ethel Zine & Micro Press in October 2023. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.