Clockwise Cat Strikes Back

trust, pegged me villain before
I could prove him wrong, he
expected a volcano, a punch
in the jaw, shattered dishes.
When someone expects you to
crack, it is inevitable.
Sometimes, I miss his teeth, lies
he buried inside of me, how
he always needed me to prove him
right.
Rabid
The hunters stopped searching the
frozen wood for remains.
Having built a home from the limbs of her
sacrifices.
The foundation solidnot
mortar, not brick, but tusks.
Walls built of femur,
tibia, and fibula.
Peppered with ventricles, and arteries.
A roof, stretched thickpermanent,
wholly protected
by the styloid process.
Her mouth, full of pennies,
teeth a fortune in railroad spikes.
Tongue ulcer’d, saliva-acidic.
Her tentacles wave and writhe,
massaging her esophagus when
the boys come, when the sour
adamantly wishes to slip into
her sweet belly.
When the skin breaks, the teeth
are sharpened-jagged on the rusted
steel of shipwrecks.
Slow-floating in quietly dangerous
swamplands.
She feeds on the disingenuous,
the bitter, and the soft struggle of hearts who choose
to keep beating.
The hunger subsides in daylight,
then the noise is at its highest point,
it idles, she grows emaciated at the lack of silence.