LARA GLENUM
How to Discard
the Life You’ve Now Ruined
HOW TO DISCARD THE LIFE YOU’VE NOW RUINED
Sneak in to the
“shame hole”
Remove the
squirming pink sack from the gray pelt
& put a second
body inside
or hang the body from
a telegraph wire that transmits instructions
to those who’ve drowned
in an automatic wind
while choking on
state-licensed vision cloths
Hang the loose skin
in a weeping museum
Use the smallest
bones as buttons
Sew the buttons
onto your face & pose in several helmets
Or collect the
larger bones & make a stylish 4’ x 6’ cage
Plant the
nerve-cords in window-boxes
Let them trail down
like vines outside your new home
In the evenings
Use the spine as a
flute to play
the soft nationalistic
marches of the “bodies without organs” collective
Make tiny beasts
out of the teeth & strands of black hair
Sew the animals
into your stomach
Advertise your
crimes as “the failings of a zoo”
Tack the two legs
onto your own hips &
gallop through zones of
agony
Now you’re a
four-legged animal downed in the onslaught
You’re a weeping brute
clogging the light-hole
in the eye of the sun
OUT OF THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
The beasties rubbed
their matted, lice-ridden pelts across our tongues. They splayed their cruel
legs & flexed their sex-glands, populating the lacuna between us. The lagoon where the lacy tidewater teethes on the skull-littered
shore and the white pigs sport in the chinaberry grove. On the most
ordinary occasions, I wore your teeth, claws & hair, even in public. On the
most ordinary occasions, you wore your machine costume, colonizing me with
operatic sperm. It was love at first blight. You wrapped your eye-stalks around
my grey tongue, slipped your dynamo into my nuclear winter & I cried out
only once. We were grunting & oiling down their goat-like shanks for the
immanent sacrifice. As they slid into the ravine. As they clamored screeching into the gap. My
hands waving about like hooks as I slid down the membrane wall after them,
creaming in the spunklight.
QUEEN
BOX
Queen Box floats
high through the room
her tiny teeth
embedded in my cartilage
I lie on the floor
puking out fox hearts
So-and-so (a.k.a.
the Redeemer) reclines on the couch
one eye filled up with
damage
The vaginal sinus
sneaks out of its crinolines
& stalks the
house
on its palomino legs
looking for testicles of
salt
I will not go off
with anyone
with eight legs