Some of us are intimately acquainted with matching knee socks.
Some of us are intimately acquainted with each crease on our pleated skirts.
Some of us are intimately acquainted with words
like hosanna and host like curettage and desecration.
I was catholic, I know what lurks beneath the frilly shrouds.
An amorphous squiggle under the girls’ Eucharistic veils—
bleeding, bleating, beseeching
‘Oh my God, I am heartily sorry
for having offended thee.’
This tin of lamb tongues
is my sacrificial offering.
Do you want me to confess?
I remember the red fetal fingers wiggling through lace
like baby snakes in the wrong place.
They said snap shut your white pocketbook
or else sins might slither out—
coiled innards, stubs, nubs, tiny tails.
They might plop, glop, slop, stain the holy cards
of your bare knees. Pull up your socks, young lady!
Smooth down your skirt, smurfette!
I remember taking my socks off to play in the yard.
The dark mud squished between my toes.
The snake squiggled under my naked foot,
but it didn’t bite me. Instead of running away,
I decided to try something new.
I made friends with the snake.
I made imitations of the snake
out of blue play dough. They taught me
in Sunday school the smurfs were satanic
with that vicious pussy named Azrael.
I named MY pussy Azrael and it began to purr…
It started off so soft and small,
but my hell-mouth meow grew
into a spiky, slimy caterwaul
that was downright cthulhu-esque.
Blasphemous as pissing on my First Communion dress
when they taught me dead baby parts
were used as fertilizer, in shampoo, severed infant limbs in dumpsters…
On the make-believe private property
of a perverted doctor’s lawn, spread slick
with placenta, I wantonly flexed my thighs.
I revved up for my monster confession.
Before I spit it out, why don’t you
stick one finger into the other side
of the grating that separates us in this booth?
Vroom vroom, my pussy sounds like such a chopper.
I’d better snap it shut.
My womb is a real troublemaker,
but aren’t they all? Some might even call me a
filthy little reprobate when I listen to those evil voices
in the heavy metal music. Some might even call me a
doom cake, a urinal cake, one of those girls
who deserves to be raped
because she was wearing her catholic schoolgirl skirt the wrong way.
My womb is a real muckraker
and half the congregation’s dirty fingers are stuck inside.
Some of them are trying to get me off;
some of them are trying to turn me off,
but my motorized blades are still whirring furiously.
You see, in MY visceral guide to uterine occupation,
the vagina dentata myth is true.
I’ve cued the seizure-inducing lights
and the spew of slashed babymakers.
Bang your head to the strains of this heretic cunt.
*
My aborted baby has been salted away
inside an old cigar box
with a handful of blue crayons—
(the bad seed blues, the misfit blues,
the irregular blues, the unborn blues with demon pigments leaking through)
waxing, pointing, waiting to color…
Your wings are made of tithes and invective.
My wings are made of torn lace and metal stirrups
and the rough little tongue of a death angel cat
who laps my cold toes.
