Issue #3: The Human Body
Gutter Saint
Table of Contents
There are times that my legs look thin. Mostly from above. But other times— New and adolescent like a baby horse. But they never last, incarnated for only three stars. First stout then loose like warm water The floodgates to hell. I need will power and pale yellow sleep. There are times that my legs look Like sticky palpable dreams. Air thick enough to swim through. I had let him touch me because it was dark. Drunkenly pushed his hands onto my skin. I don’t remember what he tasted of or how his body spoke against mine. Just the wanting—the desire, urgent and reeling Stinking of vomit and sin. The repetition. The stale, stale air. And I’m empty again and desperate to be full. I want fingers pressed in the pink of my cuts White pain behind the lids of my eyes. Sore from use. Something below the creases of skin, Sharp and crawling.
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How could you live like that? With your jade eyes open. And me, tugging on blue jean belt loops as if I’m not already replacing your lips with lips, your breath with anyone’s breath in my hair. In the aftermath, you touch like a bruised dog. Rolled over on your side at the edge of bed, tracing my freckles from shoulder blade to wrist with your first finger. When my back sinks into the mattress pad and eyes find a spot on the ceiling, I see it: an image of red flecked curls arching toward a slammed door and my father splattered with spaghetti, sobbing into his wrinkled hands like a bloody newborn. Then I think, I could be this lonely forever because strangers who touch at love turn into helpless ghosts.
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Puréed and poured into a child’s bladder, I am pink piss. Always mentioned wearing a Disney Store crown
and Minnie Mouse tutu. Five pounds, seven ounces dumped out of 125. T.V. dinners dissected with scalpels. He talks tabloid bodies. For her, it’s always polaroids. I question the logistics of sawing off my hips. Perfect means prepubescent. Adult bulk oozes into a digital smear, a specific image contextualized through torsos. Course nap and spoiled pork. Ruddy and raw. I am salted in order to deter such a condition. I am stuffed into shakers and pinched with the granules. They’re poured down my throat like the Epson I gag so that my stomach can plop out for easy hip removal. The taste of chemical tears and whatever is being ousted. I hand myself over as toddler teeth, enamel rotted with effort. My name is the lineage of a mad woman. I must not become a woman. Instead I am asked to define myself into aviary bones.
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One Hundred The coat in my throat is wearing a velvet red tonight, fighting swallows and coughs, but that’s probably just as well. Maybe I’ll drown by fists and fingers a mouthful of hands, and yellow nails But still not empty enough -or better yet, the bones are hiding still and I’m watching the world in a permanent blur, flushed cheeks and dizzy spins tell the cow who’s the boss tonight. We plug my ears but it’s already made a nest in the cortex of my big pink brain empty plates laughing in hysterics, Mary says “take the fork and plunge it through your neck” (Lard would probably ooze out), and the black sandwhich ladies would be so - mad. I open my eyes at 9:32 and it’s on my mind pretty hips and pretty skin waiting patiently to stretch and form new mountains harboring waste - I am a waste of well. No Arizona prison cells for us this June. But does air have any calories? “If life is only breathing I have taken gulps” I want more than anything just to peal off each and every layer of my pale skin scoop out the muffins nestled in my back and drain the fluid from my thighs. Snickers bars and skittles, pretzels, sofas and sodas. Good and bad – bad, bad and bad! 4:33, I find myself in a sea of white tile and porcelain: Choking on a question no one seems to know the right answer to. “characteristically anger is what starves” pretty doodled flowers and names stare back from my notebook. Some deep yellow seed allows me to blossom into a concentration camp, mangled piles of bones with their fresh seared off. All I do know is what I can’t tell anyone my toilet enjoys twinkies and my lips love spit.
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Peppered on the pizza place staircase, you exposed your masochist veins. Hurt as a hobby. Can I please hammer your kneecaps, break you in my jaw? They call me Nosferatu Norfleet. My black knee high legs bent, feet arched to the ceiling of your car and my slutty elbow on your armrest. Occupy. Slash/slit. A feel good flay. A good time gash. I want to gasp God. Muscle gape. I’m a gore gore girl. There’s just a peephole flash of your arms. Just your arms. No, it’s your fingers in cardigan buttonholes. Your arms off. Tangled canary yellow. It’s your spasm cracked neck. My Atlantis catacombs. Grate me great. Gorge in gore.
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Disorder fetish. A laundered t-shirt to wipe the cum off my cheek. Jaws. My devastatingly young arms clutching sheets to my chest as I call my mother to tell her I won’t be home until morning. Your boyish dirty honest smile in my mouth. My tongue in your grin. Bear trap teeth. That unopened condom sitting on sticker horses humping. The world is surreal when you’re powerless. A clipped life worded world becomes worlds when a trembling atom contracts and moans inaudible in what universe means. Macrocosmed microcosm. I want to gasp God with a developing syrup-pink mouth unaware that God is tiny and tingling
and terrifying and of the flesh.
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Ars Poetica (Driving to Managua) “We have to stop,” the driver says. Knee pressed to knee in the back seat, Proud Mary lost in your mouth. You have no choice smells like trash burning and neck heat strained foreword and what is this? Shhh, you have no choice. Bushels of lipstick hemmed skirts and bare feet fill the muddied road, eyes set ahead like proud elephants. You take a piece of each body as it glides to and past the open window. Heart, a skin, some veins. Grandmothers clutching mothers clutching children. Crowfeet, damp cotton, and molasses stains but jesus what is this? You won’t know until the end: a coffin raised on the tops of five shoulders and so you take that too but even then what exactly do you take? A coconut box – take more something buried, you had no choice.
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What Do You Think about this new concept? The self-indulgent lust behind throwing away health, had before... Why not try to feel better, if it kills sooner? The toxins only build and build, strong and far-flung into the mind which receives, as if thirsty for self-destruction. Too much, too much, threatening to overload, and so mind and body merely must be separated; throw up a wall to hold in poison while dying thighs are wrapped around and used with no heed. What does it feel like to fuck with gritty ssstomped-on powder floods cascading through that skull? Did the body go numb when the alcohol got to be too much, or did the fingering tendrils of mindless touch continue to grope, even as the paling rag-doll emptied its stomach into the sink, voracious kiss between reflexive purging? Chemotherapy is new hedonism. Don’ t say this is news to you, or else explain the way with which you let numbness consume the mind it grew up in. The abused child never gets justice, because it is either abuse and sustenance or neglect and no father.
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Hand Me Downs from My Father When he died he was sliced into body parts, pale, packaged and drained of their blood, dimples dissolved into canvas stretched flesh. Disposed of with the pollen off the sidewalks, and the urine from the walls. He was a bag of bones, a compost lot, let the birds pick at his flesh like key lime pie or molded bread, Laced his nostrils with packaging string, handed over the reigns and whinnied “Getty-up.” In the autopsy they pealed back white blocks of glue to find no bones, no organs, no chin. Rolled his fat between their palms and fingers, splattered him onto the linoleum floor. But, hurrah, hurray! The truth was set free, They took toasts of champagne from each finger and thumb. Sung his funeral hymn in a procession of burps. In an honest will, he’d have left me his scale and coffee pot. Filled a cardboard box with a collection of empty beer bottles, the square of sand in his garden where petunias had failed to bloom, instructions to burn his surfboards, suits and ties, the Polaroid of girls in braids and the ink sketch of his boat. He’d of invited me to take what he could not hold in his arms, what he had scratched at until his fingers were red and stunk of skin —my mother’s handwritten love letters on the backs of old calendars, folded in the pages of his books on grief and regret. A signed confession that he would have rather hid in the open grave beneath the coast’s stone wall, rather cut arm and leg holes and worn his camping tent, rather left each of my baby teeth in a row on the wire fence, for the dogs to eat, Than send me a father with plush velvet walls and a delicate golden lock stocked full of letters, half finished poems and slips of paper with “I loved you” and “do not forget”. 15
Where the Word Meets Body Break Break Break Gestate the fragments contingent to finding yourself in all the impure shavings of my own dry bones, my embodiment, my mortal enemy, he will not free you from bondage he will bind you to ugly free things: shit, sex, unquiet death, gnaw at every beautiful thing he sees with teeth covered with the plaque of vowels and consonants, light a fire for someone else, bleed for someone else. Isn't it good? Isn't it good? Now is a good time for a Christ Figure--Nevermind. There is no center anymore, only seven billion leaking spheres, a few hundred thousand of which are sharing nightmares at any given hour. And as for you, breaking thing, my humanity stained into your fingers, this is what I want my words to do to you this is how I w ant my name to taste on your lips.
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Art Class Girl, you smell good like art class. You got me feeling like Vincent Van Gogh except I don’t want to paint nothing I just want to lick your ass. Your ass could teach yoga to the characters on the Andy Griffith Show. Your ass makes a stock market cracker sit back and smoke a blunt. Your ass makes a thug killa buy flowers for himself. I used to be evil and my life reflected it. I wanted power, money, and dirty heart whore sex. My main goal was to be the embodiment of fear. I built buildings with the hopes of chaining slaves to them. I met women with the hopes of draining their pure energy. But then I saw your ass and now I understand the power of creation. I praise God! I praise everything! I praise your ass!
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Letters from Kansas My veins were post war, my collarbone a ruined city. You called me, “complicated.” I was 9/11 PTSD and brought shadows with me when I held your hand. How they thickened between our molded skin, made you heavy like tomato soup. I said goodbye each morning, lips at your temple as if it were the last time. I didn’t know about July. I didn’t know that she’d cradle you in a rusty swing set at the battery and her sweat would smell like waves, hair like beach reeds and freedom. I scribbled poems about first love and ache while you tickled her palm under the shade of a mossy oak. And when you left for Kansas, you left me to watch her body drain itself, like mine did. Do you send her letters, now? Do you think of her like I thought of you?
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Your warm tongue caresses my nipple, swollen, with longing, swollen with love, swollen with joy. Swollen with life, death, birthdays, orgasms, Worthlessness, peanut butter jelly sandwiches, epiphanies on acid... Consciousness is now Created, mouth on nipple, sucking and kissing Theses sweet fountains of life. Your head and hands navigate from my fleshy hills, across my fertile plain towards the pillars that fall apart as your supple mouth begins to split the petals of my wombA budding flower that glistens from nectar Excreted with every throb emanating from my core. Throbbing aches that Crescendo and Crest with every lap, that you, handsome lion, take from my Nile. The Nile that beckoned you with its promise of rejuvenation and reciprocity of beautiful love.
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A Blindness That Touches Perfection When I was 7, I flopped in a toy store and won an ambulance ride and a shot in the heel.In second grade, I dropped to the fuzzy classroom carpet and was rewarded with an overnight visit. They gunked tabs onto my skin , giving me light-bright visions. They slid me into a dome, made transparencies underneath my skull. I’ve always known how to abandon my body on demand. I devoured Jello pudding snacks sprinkled with chalky capsulized beads, working my way up to small swallows. By December I could glug horse pills if I had to (10 years later I could swamp whole horses without gagging). His black lungs were removed from my ovaries. Or placed in the lobes. I could be perverted or possessed as ergot. Seizing or seized, I am not of my own. I was cured by twenty. No disorder of emporers and scholars. Not even connected to Ian seizing in his noose. Fading when empty, at the thought of an inflamed esophagus, or after watching Alice Paul be gagged by metal, violated with chow. I know Technicolor nothing. I am a sage trapped in the veins of a stupid girl.
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Back Cover Illustrated by Natasha Gehlhausen Cover Art by Bryan Olson 34
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