Serotonin Mountain
They will call you brave
but what they mean is scary.
Falling down the mountain
is so much harder than clawing up.
Summiting is not a verb I recognize.
You must not change your life.
When you change your life
you ruin someone else’s.
You are a rockslide of terror.
One look backward and
they will be where you are.
I am a hungry feeder root.
I pull them down, I catch their fears.
I tangle them in my long hair,
eternity-long, lawlessly long;
like a weapon it cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts.
The thin line of blood under the nail
is death’s finest margin, so it is very beautiful.
I am only here to tell you why this is so obvious.
Slut Roulette I
I have been better
at being a woman.
All this wasted divinity
in my quiet vagina
dimmed to a red glow.
In my benevolence
I shut down the mines.
Now the ruby eggs struggle
alone in their matrix: schist,
a word with a sound
viscous as a whisper.
Now the shafts echo and echo.
I jerk awake when I hear my name.
It is just the wind skirling
through the caves, shearing
my tender pink insides with a pain
that has no beginning.
Slut Roulette II
The womb has a memory.
It remembers everything
they ever did to make me sad.
It remembers everything
I never did to make them babies.
It holds onto everything,
their salves of semen
the ointment of despair.
Thermography, vibration
power quality: so many ways
to evaluate sexiness.
Which one am I today?
The one who fucks all the husbands.
No, the one who fucks all the friends.
No, the voracious one who fucks fire
out of the very air, a beast of consumption
created specifically to pain you.
Let’s lock eyes while I eat your life.
Lauren Ireland is the author of four books: So Below (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), FEELINGS (Trembling Pillow Press), The Arrow (Coconut Books), and Dear Lil Wayne (Magic Helicopter Press), as well as two chapbooks. She lives in Brooklyn.
Image: nj.com
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