Juliet Cook and j/j hastain


Alternative Malformations

The doll head affixed to the headless mannequin
corrodes.  Her chemical eyeballs will be sold
to the blind to turn them into more life sized
dolls. They won't be simple ornaments.
They will be sutured implants with a plan
of attack. The modus operandi is causing everyone
in the surrounding neighborhoods to get unexplainable
headaches and lose their real hair.

When I brought my black flower inside, there were bunches
of human hair hanging from the petals. At first, I wasn't sure
where they had come from. Then I realized 
of course they came from me. But I wasn't sure
if they would destroy the flowers or help them grow
into something new. Part of me felt that the more they grew, 
the more my peripheral vision would be altered.

Upon letting that sink in I could see 
how contradictory my visions were 
to begin with. Leading towards the ending 
roots reflections. Wrestled lengths of hair 
work their way out from under cobwebs
and other ravenous strands, aim towards
extraterrestrial space in which all presidents present
the New Age as an integrity of poetics.

You Don't Own Me

Don Juan likes to act like he knows 
everyone's else's special pie recipe 
but this kitchen counter is unspeaking isolation
and skeletal decay.

Too many birds hit the window,
knocked themselves down.
Too much fruit withered away. 
Then ringworms danced in circles until 
the sun renamed its primary 
partner. Bird bone soufflé 
with one eye. Hijacked 

reams of old pages of books
in Akashic libraries 
where special insects dangle
upon ceiling fans, fall down
onto librarian heads,
crawl inside librarian ears
and become the new librarian song. 

Joined forces now take over the world 
and “who” has taken over 
has what "they" are calling 
a divine plan 
of dismantled balance
beam dismounts 
and chaotic outdated 
letters of remorse.

I mean I might be sorry
I stung you or I might not
want to stop replacing your wings
with tooth marks and gangrene.
With withering codes 
of so-called love.

Calling out for reformation of outdated identities 
because everyone's phases change.

Grandmother's Evolution

1.

When you lock a door you don't usually lock
and then it won't unlock from either side,
do you crack it open or shatter it?

Do you pull the entire frame off
and turn it into a sea?
If your hair becomes seaweed,
your mind is surely the right size 
for the test
of what locked doors can become
beyond
a polarity of open or shut.

Keys made of mermaid tails,
floating lines.
The stamina to swim inside
gingerbread underwater
and re-charge moldy gills.

This witch is a shark.
The cage is open
and she is cackling
cake chunks out of a deep funk
she is calling her treasure 
chest. Her pet grackle can smell blood
and knows how to dive in.

2.

That was an autocorrect
of her cackling 
pelt which spits out a gaggle
of dead human rats
and evil pet rabbits
and re-charges them too. 
Her other pets are expandable
stink bugs who own a perfume counter
in the woods. 

Grandmother's house
never had its own boundaries
until she broke those doors down
to reveal the bones of the animals
once in Noah’s arc.
Then ice poured out of the sky
and created new tails
from long frozen pages
in a concept book.

The bibliography was in a strange position
with conceptual dance moves
inside a giant freezer filled with cold bibliophiles
who danced to warm their hearts,
sweat out clichés and grow new horns
which were used to make directives
in the new world order. 

3.

Everyone is in charge
of their own peculiar rowboats,
what colors of fabric are used on the tiny flags
to cause taste buds to grow into stars with teeth
on movie stars come back from the grave.

A phantom our minds rose up, an ongoing stream
of reincarnation to help us rewrite ourselves
into a new form of conscious existence.

Our Grandmothers say 
we all need more teeth
for our homemade wolves
with feathers and wings,
with expanding gills. Never ending
tales and whatever else we choose to create.

Learn more about these poems>>


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. 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.