HORRIFIC CONFECTION by Juliet Cook - BlazeVOX

Fete
White wafers shimmy in this heat.
Blue snow cone stain between the legs
of my first communion dress. I saved
these spiders in a chalice. I saved
this writhing handful of maggots in a baby food jar.
I didn’t save the fizz from my soda pop.
It’s a shimmer of dark red residuum in a glass bottle.
It’s a sticky syrup between these fingers.
My hands are webbed. If I pull
up my dress, the pale skin is crawling
with a new breed of hirsute tattoos.
Beneath that, the flesh is not flesh.
It’s rubber on bone bound to wild
chicken wire. It’s raw funnel cake.
I pilfered my latest husband from the wax museum.
I brushed his stiff handlebar moustache.
I posed him for our holy card tete a tete.
I pried out his tongue and placed a spider
like it was a host. We kissed in the burnt out ferris wheel.
His hands were all over me. Dry ice plumed out my mouth.
First his lips were froze, then he melted between my thighs.
We made a baby, paddling sweetly in its formaldehyde jar.
Its little flippers will burst into flame flickers the first time
it burbles my name. My burning spawn. My changeling.
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