Special Needs
1. Hold me like hospital hands, squared-eyed and cubist in the cranium. It all happens and happens and— Sorry, I just need to do your obs for the night. His talcum phlegm chalks yesterday’s sneeze, chokes me with a slap of latex. Clip my supervised toenails. Don’t forget your socks. Bare feet are dangerous, but you’re safe. So safe here. 2. No, I’m not offended. We can discuss it all: —each pair of shoes I can’t grow into, —the toys I don’t grow out of, —these things I won’t become. No, my parents aren’t disappointed. They have no other choice. No, no! I’m really not offended! … Have no other choice. 3. Cut your throat from the inside out. Eggshelled oesophagus, soggy and perforated and perfect as you. Let me build a nest from polio death like the bones of a treehouse carried by its still-blossomed brother. I’ve got a fucking birdlike appetite and by this, I mean I pick at carcasses and swoop your bleach-breathed children until they’re down the hatch and vomiting a splinter. Rotten eggs vaccinated only with your fear of me. 4. A snowcone upturned on the sidewalk, I cannot reach inside until I melt. Melt. I need help. Bleeding blue raspberry in Ramadan, through the blacked-out windows of Howl’s Moving Casbah. Seven types of sand, did you know? Does it matter? I buy Frankenstein and fried rice in the absence of all else. Ten years of howling into melted dust, but what will come first— my echo or the end? 5. Bodies of blisters, bowlegged, so topical I rub them into broken skin. My pieces are missing because I ate them in the womb. A mother’s bile regurgitated, varicose veins in a venus trap, genetic flaws: my only life to live. And I’d eat you too.
