May 27, 2024 Poetry

Party

Party Artwork by Nerys Schmetterling
  

Ketamine kisses douse a blazing girl with the sick tang of gasoline, heartthrob, dementia 
She droops, star splayed and eager in her drowsiness, sped by the rhyme of the crowd and 
I pray at the chapel of her gooey snot, yolk runny, chalked up figure etched from cheap stone 
“When it's over tell me, won't you” she whispers, and when i smile its reptilian, hideous. 

We pick shells from the grooves of her back, sand back layers from a earnest ribcage until Blood smears her chest red, mincing a spine ridged with terror, we stick slick hands into her glossy innards, Arctic Monkeys rattling as her jawbone comes away with the grainy folds of Her flesh, we dress ourself in the meat of her legs, cursive in the eloquent lilt of someone else's skin 

Higher than we've ever been, and i swear my heart stopped when hers did, heaving, serrated 
We carve tattoos into her breasts, heart-star-moon squirting cranberry juice until we 
Blind ourselves drunken, switchblade massages a femur, collateral earthquake, c’mon and 
Whisper lyrics the shade of these mangled evenings in a cleft of ear, words spilling like wine 
“What do you know, oh you know nothing” and plucking teeth like apples, someone 
Loosens her eyes and swallows, grimacing. 

We take shots over the dismembered segments of her soul. 
Licking the glue of her veins, sniffing perfume from ashen stumps then crawling to the bathtub, vomiting and drooling and maybe we paint the walls with her intestinal tissue 
And wash dishes in her blitzed oesophagus, or drag her peroxide curls over the tv screen, making sandwiches with cucumber and cheese and her slender fingers looped with cheap butterfly rings. 
stars are the only witness as we knock down beer bottles with her severed head, fingers squelch into sockets and a toothless mouth 
Sometime, the moon sets and the constellations in our eyes get so bright we all put on sunglasses and sit in the bathtub, afraid and 

Later, we’ll come downstairs to the stench of decay, find mashed clumps of a lifespan  
Draped around the room, lounging, and maybe we’ll cry for a while, then return to the comfortable numbness, bury her hair and teeth in the soft mud of our pockets.