HORRIFIC CONFECTION by Juliet Cook - BlazeVOX

Abscess
This charm school is a crumb cake
held together with rubber cement
and bitchy fragments of soap.
Black stitches fasten her rotten
eyeteeth in place. Chocolate lava
seeps in between. Arm in a sling
of the decorative bent. Drooping.
What used to be foxy modus operandi
is now another dirty wolf girl
with a wolfhound for a father.
Should she hunt herself to gain his approval?
Instead she pops out bon bons,
watches the tube, watches the blood crust
after the gum graft procedure. Frankengums.
But she doesn’t want her fangs back.
She doesn’t want to know what she does want.
She only wants to know why her bon bons won’t behave.
No matter how dutifully she plucks them,
they try to grow hairy paws and run away.
With no real consistency, they harden and soften
from candied cherry to diseased cow udder;
milk ducts dried up or uncontrollably leaky.
They shift to the bottom of the bowl like melting witches.
This couch is an empty black dress
stinking of wet dog and coarse sugar.
The rotgut. The episodic whatnots.
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