Deeper deeper deeper, I’m dripping into those silver-lined glistening eyes.
Crab eyes. They watch me in the hundreds from the corners of my blood red house.
Measuring my little scars, pincers: clickity-clack.
Those pesky little foreign scars like the Indian in my thigh or the Chilean in my breast,
The European in my earlobe, the American in my tongue.
The crabs like my foreign scars,
and at night when I sleep they scuttle across my sheets and pillow
to stroke them gently with their little soft satin claws.
Once I woke up to find them all wearing velvet gloves, they looked at me, eyes bulging and then vanished back between the cracks.
I once wondered how we could live in the same bleeding house, me and these cold, moist, cerise creatures of shallow water and changing skin.
It’s an easy question of bathing my wounds with fish scales,
Smearing myself to draw their attention.
It keeps them away from my eyes.
I also have a deep red cherry, which sits on my kitchen table. Bulbous.
It watches me through to the bedroom, but it’s cruelly undistracted.
It likes to scrape away my skin.
‘Every moment’ it tells me, ‘all that life has accumulated on you. It’s all a scar.’
I would scream but then it would control my mouth as well.
I hate that cherry.
Its vanity and innocence eating away, like I chose for this to happen.
Pretending I asked to live with small claws, that only care at night.
I would burn the cherry,
But my mouth decided I would wait.
And when it ripens I can eat it.
Pop my teeth into it and then with red juice streaming down my cheek I can dye yet another part of my house a deeper red.
No comments:
Post a Comment