Cook Hastain — Ghost Proposal

Juliet Cook & j/j hastain

Broken Burial

Questing
longevity
as we peruse aisle after aisle of
unusual makeup
make me compose
a different
me.

Surrogate position
several
meat hooks hanging
from the edge.
Let them grow
their own meat.

Birth their own
dangling symphony.
Polyphonic ganglia.
Recombinant system. There are
good crimes. At least we thought
there were, but then

my so-called partner starts
eating them before they’re ready.
It feels like every time I eat
it pulps out immediately,
it explodes itself inside me
instead of growing all the way.

I’m starting to hate my body.
The only way I can control it is if I starve,
stop planting, stop hanging
my art on my own hooked walls.

Maybe hating the hooks
is a better approach. Then I can keep
my body in the hidden
nook, but who
will I give my torn down hooks to
not to mention my broken down body?

Should I keep them all for myself,
split one more rib and bury it
in the dirt, find out what might grow?
Should I offer it to myself,
the bloody heap before
me a surprising deifying of me?
I am tired of doing all the work
myself. A long time ago I thought a lover
was real, but it was

just another corn husk doll
with blood sewn into
one socket, with faux boldness
steering the rocket.
No wonder it keeps bursting into tears.

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a small multitude of literary publications, recently including Arsenic Lobster, Diode,ILK, Menacing Hedge, and Tarpaulin Sky Press. She is the author of more than thirteen published poetry chapbooks, most recently including POISONOUS BEAUTYSKULL LOLLIPOP (Grey Book Press, 2013), RED DEMOLITION (Shirt Pocket Press, 2014) and a new collaborative chapbook with Robert Cole, MUTANT NEURON CODEX SWARM (Hyacinth Girl Press, January 2015). Another new collaborative chapbook by Juliet Cook and j/j hastain, Dive Back Down, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press later in 2015. Cook's first full-length poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

j/j hastain is the inventor of The Mystical Sentence Projects and is author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), The Non-Novels (forthcoming, Spuyten Duyvil) and The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance of Experimental Realisms. j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin, Aufgabe and Tarpaulin Sky.