HORRIFIC CONFECTION by Juliet Cook - BlazeVOX

Nori, Shiny Side Down
I can’t consume myself today.
I’m so tainted. Day old
sashimi on a bed
of gray rice. Rice alcohol slugging
through mercurial veins
and I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel
like the artfully assembled
spicy tuna roll w/ avocado nestled,
a perfect creamy puzzle piece.
I’ve come un-cylindered. Small seeds scattershot across…
Flat sheets of nori. Reams & reams &
reams of unwritten surfaces, words,
exotic sauces to be stirred
and I waste myself. I serve myself
as palatable display. Bright as a candy-stripe
shrimp to be de-veined, to be peeled & eaten, to be skewered
in a row with the little-mouthed others and the matching carapace.
Cherry tomato–me–pearl onion–me
with a saturating stab through the core;
with a gaping, drooling maw where my mouth should be.
Lips a sluice box, pinned up at the corners.
Pearl sac ripped open; blisters burst under the tongue.
A blastospheric spill of fermented wine.
Nacre slivered, spread, rolled into
spiked roe. Eschew the garnish; strew with shrapnel.
Wet-knifed cucumber strips striped
across shut eyes. Eat off the lids.
The sockets brim w/ baroque pearls nestled
in pickled pink ginger petals. From the fishy depths,
rhizomes thrust up to impale unsuspecting voyeurs.
From the raw and juicy depths, a tuberosity projects
to explode the spider roll, the dynamite roll;
to garishly slick the stiff seaweed.
43