Pink Bird - Juliet Cook
It's hard for me to clip the creepy/yummy spin -
poisonous frosting seeping out from under fingernails.
I trim the crusts then wish to shellack them blue-black;
hone them into shiny daggers, spiked nonpareils
because I don't want my hands to look like the hands
of a child. I don't want to show them my disheveled cuticle,
scratched knee caps, the woeful way I really look
like a wide-eyed paint-by-number girl, trying to pose
as an adult. I'm wearing strappy, unsensible shoes.
I'm thinking, "They're Saying Mean Things About You".
Shame sublimates into inappropriate giggles;
guilt sublimates into twisted approximations of insouciance.
I curve my own lips. I'd rather look coy
than cry while I whelp another misfit litter.
This litter would consist of three patchy gray kittens
with tongues like desolate pink tendrils,
mewling from beneath a dilapidated back porch,
thinking, "Nobody Likes you Here".
I would gather the raggedy strays. Wield a misplaced bray
to crush the whimpers. Paint blue-black shellack over my shame
until I collapse into a messy muculent mass of something
that looks like red algae. Red algae doesn't purr.
Red algae doesn't scrabble up my arms, towards
my lips. Red algae just sits there cold and limp.
Decapitated. Red algae doesn't make a good paper weight.
"I'm Sorry I killed You".
Because I don't want my hands to look like the hands
of a perverted pastry chef, I'm sorry I used the gray fur
to line my black cherry tart. Maybe if they took a bigger bite,
they'd find out how soft it is inside. As my pages fly
loose, flaky, scattered haphazardly in a magpie's nest.
Underneath the sharp, shiny things,
adjacent to a tiny broken compass.
Underneath the mask of a dark, glossy corvine,
my words have their mouths gaping open
like pink baby birds.
Sometimes I'm lonely. Sometimes I have an invisible friend.
Sometimes my invisible friend embodies herself into poetry
with fine teeth, with small feathers between.
With a hiss that sounds like a slick pink tendril whip.
That kitten looked pathetic until it pounced.
(This poem was inspired by the paintings of Kendra Binney. The title of the poem and the three lines enclosed in quotation marks are titles of four of her paintings.)
