Sleep Fissures (ROUND 7)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Nose Rest Day
*This is a poem about a woman who, reclaiming abuse the way some reclaim “nigger,” carved into her skin a portal back into the womb-wrecking ravages of a man with one hell of a toddler tooth.
*Worked on the end section. I think that, despite having leaps from each section that bring the atmosphere of a fever dream, it hits you like a makeshift prison blade right between the ribs—three solid stabs
Sleep Fissures
1
The mom—amoxicillin bottle four, baffled by what could keep doubling a toddler over
with olive discharge as foamy and fevered as her vomit—guts the home of all culprits:
scented soap, bubble bath; junk foods, synthetic panties too tight—all, save Mr. Malik.
2
Porn-pretzeled preschool self tatted below her tits (bald pussies converged, the overlap
plumb as his improv butt plug— her Gumby—and its plastic), now the real “Big Girl”
can feel—cervix pigging out on every avatar’s whimpering load—the child in the perp.
3
Inked cheeks in her care, claws dug past gush—she spatchcocked the butterfly purple,
bursting that spot where splay mattered most, and unmuzzled cruelties (“Spit on her!”)
until men got enough balls to snatch the baton (“Lil’ slut ain’t never havin’ no baby!”).
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
