Ofelia Hunt
I've only been murdered fifty-four times
This week
So I feel I can be honest
And kill every person you've met tomorrow
If you'll just provide me
With all pertinent contact information
Address e-mail phone
I promise
I'll spare one in three household pets
But the goldfish
Won't survive
I'm terribly sorry
For these spare fingers
I'm just not a confident jeweler
And my aim has deteriorated
From a distance
And my quadriceps watch me
I should ride my bicycle I think
But Kurt Vonnegut just died
So I walk into the parking lot
And rub the parking lot
I say to my neighbor "Kurt Vonnegut is dead"
I say "I just tore my quadriceps"
My neighbor shuts his door
I hug my neighbor's door
And feel his door against my chest
And there is a fern and I hug the fern
I hug each object I see
Because each object I see
Is an object
And I am an object
And every object
Must touch every other object
And open the refrigerator
I remove the milk and pour the milk
On the floor
I say to the floor "Be calm"
And I slide through the milk
The milk slides between my toes
My toes absorb the milk
And my bones absorb the milk
The little holes in my bones slowly disappear
I absorb so much milk
That I am milk
I think I might be bacteria
But I'm not bacteria
Or almost anything
Because I divide many times
And the refrigerator
Divides also and we continue
To divide many times
Until I am the refrigerator
Refrigerating things
And explode myself
With bone handles
And deliberately hide the fish-knife
In my cold abdominal compartment
Beneath my thorax
Which is rigid and segmented and similar
To your toy Lexus
And your daughter's little black rib-cage
Which I mounted with wall-anchors
In our all-marble dream-bathroom
Five-thousand years ago
I'm telling the truth
My breasts are twin caterpillars
Genetically modified and carefully bred
In computer-engineered sterile-pods
So you fondle my sterile-pods
Until they fuzzily self-destruct
Which was expected and planned
And why I'm cataloguing
All possible event-sequences
In my event-sequence diary
Before we lose our research-grants
To ethanol/pornographer/musicologists
Everything is so terribly darkly beautiful
That it hurts my dark dirty
My dark dirty here
And
I have a brain I have a body
I am a thing
Among things
In the jetliner over Portland
Each little person is a little cyborg
In a little car with a little plan
And each little cyborg is a little molecule
Inflating in my lungs
And my lungs are tiny and tight for it
So I hug each cyborg because each cyborg will die for a while
And I am evil and murderous
And
Everything it says on television
Is the truth probably
So I angrily destroy many objects
Because objects only scream tragically
Like the thing you thought was a very good thing
Until it broke
And saddened you terribly forever
__________
Ofelia Hunt currently lives in Portland and Seattle. Poems available online at Apocryphal Text and Dusie. Fiction chapbook titled My eventual bloodless coup on Bear Parade. Read work in progress at Elephant seals negate the tactile universe.