grotesque

Egg

I had a dream which featured two eggs. One egg when I cracked it, was more mature than I had anticipated. Out of it came a grey-feathered chick, and I registered surprise as it emerged tentatively, awkwardly from its confinement, very much alive.

Doll

It was already a few days back that I dreamed this: a doll made of flesh. It stood statuesquely in a clearing, out of doors. It was too big, not just for interiors to accommodate, but to really be a doll — a thing that would serve a child for play. I saw it like one does a tree that stands above the others, or an outcropping of rocks emerging lifeless from a verdant canopy.

Supernumerary

My first encounter with the word was in the dentist's office. My brother had an extra tooth. Its surgical removal was painful and grotesque, as was the small bit of bone extracted from his jaw. It made sense to me in some way, that this disgusting bit of flesh was a part of my brother, whom, for “psychological” reasons, I suppose, I had already associated with deformity.

Break

A pin falling from the sky hits me in the chest, and like I was a balloon, explodes the membrane of my skin—excited neurons return to space like streamers of gas pulling the bits of me from my form. But it wasn't the heavens that split me. The source is a particular thing. It hits at an angle so slight, so perfect, so aligned, and so wrong, that it unlocks the pieces. What was seamless separates, stretches out, and tilts away just enough for a rush of air to fill tiny fissures and shadows to appear between parts.

Malcontent

Incarcerated as the cud of that ill-digesting cow that is the world, what else am I to be but bad. Whatever I chew has been chewed before and made sour by that bovine sluice. Therefore, inside I am bad. I am taken in. Take me out with the trash.

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