Sarah Sgro
Body as a Plant Expanding
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Everyone’s baring fangs that I don’t have. These teeth inverted like a yawn inside the womb, breath aerating supple gums. Look how sleek my throat and tongue. Who does not love wet pink skin, fragrant innards of a pork chop, all these fragrant innards that I offer up. Yes I love the violence of flesh the word connoting something gnawed but I no longer want to be a monster. Just today I hated everything with foolish rage and simply jumped in place, admiring the symmetry of springing breasts. Listen I have tried my hardest to be gruesome. Consumed the romance of what’s decomposed. Clogged my toilet and saved photos of the bowl brimming tall with piss, bundled webs of brown cloth, every piece of me you’ve never seen. Dreamt about my fingernails decaying dreamt about my stomach dredged in egg wash and filleted. It’s hard to be aroused by anything but dirt. Disfiguring my own frame. When I first came in tenth grade my boyfriend laughed like yes I should feel gross shame. All he did was rub his leg against the wishbone of my jeans and I trembled like a baby deer. I closed my eyes and wished to be a spear, something that could pierce. I loved my filth like a weapon. I thought that I could scream instead of come. I feared my skin, would not even stick a finger in. Forget about what I have soiled, every dream of being cast in mud. I am donning tiny shorts and running to reclaim my legs, slick and luscious like a seal. Sculpting my butt like sculpting my world. Shaving every vagrant hair. It’s easier to touch myself when I am soft. My soul like fur my pussy furless. Sometimes when I’m almost there I still feel ill, tiny pulses pulling me apart. I swear I want to bloom. Watch me posing wildly in my bedroom mirror. Singing into every abyss sighing open like a fucking flower. Every pore an orifice and light flooding through. I’m opening I’m opening I’m opening for you.
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SARAH SGRO currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. She is from New York, where she previously worked as an editorial assistant for Guernica. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in TYPO, Horse Less Review, Deluge, the minnesota review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Word Riot.
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