BLOOD COULD COURT

By Vi Vi Hunt

Every day I wake and cauterize my gums.

I have this dream each night, wherein I open my mouth and my teeth are hanging from my gums by lengths of sewing thread and I pull them but they come apart onto the pillow and when I wake I must take breakfast like a baby,

Porridge and pudding

Right into my throat,

Slurped whole.

It’s iron on the way down.

My gums bubble and my saliva mixes with my blood all dark and viscous and fluid and too much to fit into my mouth too much to fit into my body too much to fit into all the space in the world.

I cauterize my gums in order not to spill out and engulf everything:The sink and the bathroom and the house and whole skyscrapers and cities and everyone I love.

I stuff my mouth with gauze,

And squirt saline where my incisors used to be.

Blood dribbles down my chin,

And stains my clothing and my floor.

I try to swab it off, swallow it down.

Every day is an attempt to quell the ruination that my blood could court,

To stymie the meaning and matter of myself.

My teeth are sharp and jagged,

So I turn them inward,

Sink them into my stomach so that they stop skewering other somebodies.

I go to bed buried in my own blood, wishing that when I wake, it will have washed away.

#darkpoetsclub