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the song spilling from your throat is splitting. cells dividing and mossing and molding over creamy silk. all of it. everything you say is going to live on its own. matriculate in parasitism and burgeon teeth on passerby arms. that’s right. cut it down and build a shrine that speaks back to you from a database of your own words. draw a bath of tattoo ink. laugh until your tongue rips out.

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maid of honor setting the table. staying pale and wilted. letting the blight take control and make my insides smooth. my hands roam like grace notes on a staff over the silverware. clicking from line to line and recording and spiraling down the mouth of the vinyl. wrong color. the plates should be white. my face should be the moon. only Monet could suspend our disbelief. calling him asshole and pill and prick and sack of shit. then kissing his feet. then his vomit wettening my scalp.

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folding cloth napkins into swans for the wedding. I ask why we have to live like animals. I get down on my hands and knees and ask is this how you want me. he arranges cocktail glasses in ordered rows. my stringy tail flicks insects away from my dirtied ass. fluorescence stings us both. he says it’s the closest we come to making it.

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but he doesn’t have my best interests in mind. my neck aches with the grind of my oar. the moan of the water. the sky above me is gray but the other side is invisible. behind me he is singing about beer bottles. the lake browns by the second or maybe it’s the sunlight migrating to warmer places. we all want to be where things like us are. I smash the glass container on the kayak. I make it. I smash my pelvis on the water. I make it mine. I smash a cloud on my crooked nose. I make it mean nothing. I smash my poem on the horizon. I make it quiet. I smash my nervous system on his ribs. I make it. I smash us on the treble clef. it’s beautiful. it sounds like a baby, sexless, crying.

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