"Beyond Stitchable" is a poem about a specific and disturbing form of erotic fixation — one organized not around conventional sexual pleasure but around the involuntary physiological responses of neonatal bodies to sexual violation, specifically the cardiac response: the heart's unbroken squeeze in the milking gallop of ecstasy. Its nine lines move through three tercets with the compression of clinical observation rendered in the register of obsession, the speaker cataloguing what hooks her with the precision of a researcher and the investment of an addict.

The title names the poem's governing category before the first line begins. "Beyond stitchable" names the degree of damage the speaker's fixation concerns — not injury that can be repaired but injury that exceeds repair, the body opened past the threshold of closure. The clinical register of "stitchable" is the poem's formal key: the speaker approaches her obsession with the vocabulary of medicine, of damage assessment, of the body as a system whose tolerances can be measured.

"She cannot stop corralling / reports of neonatal cock sleeves" opens on the speaker's compulsive information-gathering — "corralling" naming the activity as herding, organizing, containing a proliferation that keeps escaping its enclosures. "Neonatal cock sleeves" is the poem's most deliberately clinical grotesque — the infant body rendered as a receptacle in the coldest possible vocabulary.

"What hooks her, hole ruin / just the tip" isolates the specific element of the fixation. "Hole ruin" and "just the tip" are in tension: the diminutive of "just the tip" placed against the absoluteness of "ruin," the minimization of the act set against the totality of its consequence.

"Are the thoracic / creampies, how even the tiniest / plum heart will squeeze" is the poem's central image. "Thoracic creampies" is the poem's most audacious compound — the slang of pornography applied to the thoracic cavity. What hooks the speaker is the cardiac response: the heart's involuntary squeeze at the moment of violation. "The tiniest / plum heart" renders the neonatal heart with a fragile sweetness that makes the image most disturbing.

"Unbroken, unlike beheaded / cloaca" is the poem's crux and requires its specific context to land fully. The beheaded goose cloaca is a known sexual practice: the goose is decapitated so that the cloaca spasms and contracts around the man during his climax. But those spasms are broken, irregular, convulsive — the twitching of a severed nervous system. The infant heart, by contrast, remains unbroken even as everything around it is destroyed beyond stitching. It does not spasm. It squeezes in its natural milking rhythm, steady and complete. The speaker's fixation is precisely on this — the heart that keeps its unbroken beat, that maintains the exact rhythm humans crave in ecstasy, persisting through total violation with a terrible fidelity to its own nature.

"In that milking gallop / humans in ecstasy demand" closes the poem on its most philosophically disturbing formulation. "Milking gallop" names the cardiac rhythm as simultaneously agricultural, mechanical, and erotic. "Humans in ecstasy demand" extends this to the species: the cardiac squeeze the speaker is fixated on is not aberrant — it is the same physiological rhythm that organizes all human sexual ecstasy. The poem closes on the suggestion that what separates the speaker's fixation from ordinary desire is not the rhythm itself but its location and context. The heart squeezes in ecstasy. Here it squeezes in violation. The distance between these two events is left as the reader's problem.

Meta Description

A nine-line poem rendering a speaker's compulsive fixation on neonatal cardiac response to sexual violation — the heart's unbroken milking gallop contrasted against the broken spasms of a beheaded goose cloaca, the specific object of obsession rendered through the collision of clinical anatomical vocabulary and pornographic slang.

Keywords

Beyond Stitchable, neonatal fixation, cardiac response, thoracic creampie, plum heart, milking gallop, hole ruin, beheaded cloaca, clinical grotesque, obsessive speaker, contemporary American poetry, tercet form, ecstasy and violation

"Bulletproof Vow" is a poem about the specific failure mode of magical thinking under combat conditions — specifically, about the soldier whose private bargain with the cosmos remains not merely intact but actively strengthened by the carnage surrounding him, the evidence of mass death feeding rather than challenging his belief in his own protection. Its nine lines move through three tercets with the compression of a poem that knows the joke is on the dead man, and treats this knowledge with neither contempt nor sentimentality but with exact, dry precision.

The title establishes the central irony before the first line begins. "Bulletproof" names the soldier's belief in his own protection — the vow as armor, the promise as ballistic material. "Vow" names the instrument of that belief: a solemn promise carrying the weight of the sacred in a context where the sacred is the only available protection. The compound names both the aspiration and its failure simultaneously — the vow was supposed to be bulletproof, and the soldier never knew it wasn't, because the belief held all the way through.

"Beguiled by belief / in a just cosmos that strikes bargains" opens on the soldier's theological position with precision that is also a diagnosis. "Beguiled" names him not as stupid or delusional but as seduced, charmed, taken in by something appealing that turns out to be false. The just cosmos is appealing precisely because it operates by rules, honors agreements, can be negotiated with. "Strikes bargains" names the transactional theology organizing his thinking: if he does x, the cosmos will do y. The bargain has the structure of a contract, and the beguiled mind experiences contracts as enforceable.

"Dried brain on his canteen / less bother than bolster" is the poem's most formally compressed and most psychologically precise image. The dried brain on the canteen is the material evidence of what combat does to the people around the soldier — the physical residue of a fellow human being's death, carried on the object the soldier drinks from daily. And this evidence does not bother the belief. It bolsters it. This is the poem's central and most disturbing psychological claim: that the need for the vow to be true intensifies in direct proportion to the death surrounding him. The carnage is not a challenge to magical thinking but its fuel. The more desperate the conditions, the more desperately the vow must be believed, and the more desperately it must be believed, the more impervious it becomes to anything that might threaten it. The belief does not survive despite the horror. It survives because of it, the dried brain on the canteen becoming not a warning but evidence of how necessary the vow is.

"Ecce homo: yet another butchered / in battle after having sworn" — "ecce homo," Pilate's presentation of the condemned Christ, arrives as the poem's darkest formal joke. "Behold the man" — and the man is yet another soldier killed while believing his vow would protect him. The Latin invokes the tradition of sacred sacrifice while immediately deflating it: this is not martyrdom but the common fate of the man who thought his private bargain with the universe was enforceable. "Yet another" is the poem's most devastating qualifier — the soldier is not exceptional, not the first, the vow is not original, the error is repeated across the history of combat with terrible consistency. The cosmos has not been keeping its side.

"To deliver — hand deliver, / not cock — squadmate letters, / if need be, to cobwebbed wives" reveals the vow's actual terms and the moral architecture the soldier has constructed around them. He swore to deliver his squadmates' letters to their wives if they were killed — and specifically to do so without sexual opportunism, the "hand deliver, / not cock" distinction naming the temptation the vow forecloses. The cobwebbed wives are waiting, their marriages long-distance and neglected, the cobwebs naming the sexual deprivation of prolonged separation. The soldier's vow specifically forecloses taking advantage of that vulnerability. He is going to do this right, and doing it right is the currency of the bargain he believes the cosmos is honoring.

The poem closes on these terms — on the vow as it was conceived, the letters, the wives, the distinction between hand and cock — rather than on the manner of the soldier's death, which has already been named earlier as butchery in battle. This formal choice is the poem's most precise: the soldier's last defined act is the vow itself, the belief in its terms, the moral seriousness with which he took the bargain. He dies having kept his side. The cosmos, as always, was never keeping its side at all. The vow was bulletproof in the only sense that mattered to the universe: it held until there was no longer anyone to hold it.

What "Bulletproof Vow" refuses is both elegy and contempt. The soldier is genuinely moral — the vow to hand-deliver rather than exploit is a real ethical commitment. The belief in its protective power is the error, but the error is beguiling rather than foolish, seductive rather than stupid. And the carnage that should have opened the belief to doubt instead sealed it further, each death making the need more acute, the need making the belief more necessary, the belief becoming more impervious precisely because the evidence against it was everywhere. The dried brain on the canteen is the poem's governing image because it names this mechanism without explaining it away — the horror that the most devastating evidence becomes the most powerful confirmation of what the desperate mind needs to believe.

Meta Description

A nine-line poem about a soldier whose belief in a protective cosmic bargain is bolstered rather than challenged by the carnage surrounding him — the dried brain on his canteen less bother than bolster, the need for the vow to be true intensifying with every death, until he is butchered in battle having kept his side of an agreement the cosmos was never keeping, the poem closing on the vow's terms rather than the death, the belief held all the way through.

Keywords

Bulletproof Vow, combat magical thinking, just cosmos, transactional theology, ecce homo, cobwebbed wives, hand deliver not cock, dried brain canteen, bolstered belief, carnage and magical thinking, squadmate letters, beguiled belief, belief and need, contemporary American poetry, nine-line poem, tercet form, war poetry, irony and death, vow and protection, cosmos and contract, elegy refused

"Quikrete" is an exceptionally transgressive, structurally lean polemic that uses extreme imagery to launch an indictment of pathologically self-serving domesticity. Operating at the intersection of body horror, social satire, and forensic crime, the poem targets a nightmare inversion of parental responsibility: a dynamic where adoption becomes an engine for ego, competitive status, and objectification. Rather than depicting a calculated murder, the poem tracks the tragic, accidental outcome of long-term sadism—two adoptive fathers who view a child as a prized personal commodity, only to accidentally break that "toy" through reckless, competitive abuse. The title functions as the poem’s grim, material resolution: Quikrete—an industrial, fast-drying concrete mix—is invoked not to signify domestic construction, but rather swift forensic concealment: the fast-curing cement rushed in to encase a corpse, seal a grave, and preserve a suburban facade.

The poem opens by laying bare the psychological and social pretense that precedes the violence:

The adoptive gays, one-upmanship

revving waiting-list edging

into trichotillomania,

Here, the poem dissects the administrative gauntlet of modern adoption—a system reliant on socioeconomic auditing and moral vetting. By fusing "waiting-list edging" with "trichotillomania" (the compulsive, neurotic pulling out of one's own hair), the poem characterizes the prospective parents as driven to a state of self-cannibalizing fixation. However, this agonizing process does not yield nurturing readiness; instead, it fosters an entitled, competitive hunger for ownership. The desire for parenthood is transformed into a high-stakes game of "one-upmanship," where the child is conceptualized prior to arrival not as a human subject requiring care, but as a long-sought trophy acquired through endurance.

The shift into the execution of the assault highlights the complete moral detachment with which the perpetrators operate:

tag team a fatality (“Finish Him!”

skinned in synonym), colonic torsion neither dad—

Crucially, the parenthetical reference to Mortal Kombat’s iconic directive, “Finish Him!”, is explicitly noted as being "skinned in synonym." The text establishes that "Finish Him!" is not spoken dialogue; rather, the arcade framework serves as a conceptual blueprint that has been re-clothed—or "skinned"—in their own sadistic, real-world vernacular. By mapping the mechanics of a fighting-game fatality onto a physical assault, the perpetrators trivialize real-world harm as a competitive sport. The phrase "skinned in synonym" operates as a double entendre: it denotes the cosmetic "skins" of video game avatars while describing how language itself has been flayed to disguise severe abuse as collaborative play.

The second stanza introduces the poem's central tragedy and structural pivot:

whirler, impaler—meant

to bloody the kiddo creampie: “Fuck yeah! Spin that lil

prick!”

The critical phrase "neither dad... meant" provides the dark thematic core of the narrative. The catastrophic internal injury—"colonic torsion"—was not a calculated, premeditated execution. Having waited years on a waiting list to secure a human possession for long-term exploitation, the fathers did not intend to destroy what they had acquired. Instead, in their manic, competitive enthusiasm—acting as specialized instruments of torture ("whirler, impaler")—they push the assault past the physical threshold of human endurance. The sickening juxtaposition of diminutive affection ("kiddo") with crude predatory slang ("creampie") reveals their complete reification of the child.

The dialogue—““Fuck yeah! Spin that lil prick!””—captures the actual spoken commands into which the "Finish Him!" archetype was re-skinned. Mechanically, the open-vowel roar of "Fuck yeah!" maintains the breathless, uninhibited adrenaline of the act, while "Spin that lil prick!" acts as a sharp double entendre referencing both physical rotation and severe degradation. It represents the height of their unrepentant frenzy, captured mere seconds before the fatal collapse is realized.

When the physical rupture occurs, the frantic kinetic energy of the assault instantly vanishes, replaced by the cold, logistical imperative of the poem's title. "Quikrete" is the emergency solution to a broken possession. The poem leaves the reader at the exact threshold where sadistic play ends and forensic management begins: the realization that the long-sought commodity has been permanently ruined, requiring bags of fast-setting concrete to entomb the evidence beneath a slab before the outside world notices.

Meta Description

An exceptionally transgressive poem tracking two adoptive fathers whose ego-driven waiting-list one-upmanship culminates in an accidental, fatal colonic rupture of their child, leading directly to the industrial quick-dry concrete disposal of the body.

Keywords

Quikrete, literary analysis, contemporary poetry, transgressive poetry, child abuse, body disposal, adoption vetting, objectification, colonic torsion, whirler impaler, skinned in synonym, social critique, close reading.