a body that will not behave

one. dinnertimedinnertimedinnertime

i remember the first time they made me (not me) eat
meat. they (them) sat around, their teeth gone
orange in the candlelight (it was my fifth birthday).
i knew they were monsters who
wanted to peel my skin off
like a grape and pop me into the pink
flesh of their mouths.
i did not like to chew. i only liked
to swallow small spoonfuls of strawberry
yoghurt.
(my great-great grandmother
tore at her own flesh and ate herself
in the moonlight, howling. (was she me?)
every piece that ripped through my
throat was like a part of her. chunks
of red flesh in a warm copper soup.)
i don’t remember my birth, but i know that they plucked me (inside out)
from my cradle and replaced me with
a baby whose mouth was a red seam.
they carried me through the hedges
by the scruff, like a rabbit.
my (real) mother eats nuts and
raspberries. my m(other) eats
(me) in small spoonfuls,
the way i ate yoghurt.

1. (to be wanted and to be eaten are one verb in their language.)

two. brushyourteeth

the house had no mirrors. one night
i was alone, picking stringy bits of meat out
from between my molars. (her (my) fangs had not grown in yet.
she (i) could feel them there,
undescended, the tip of one canine slicing at soft, tender gums.)

i think i was ten. i spat dark brown
blood onto the porcelain of the sink
(it was my first time) and caught a
glimpse of myself in the shine
of the faucet.

(my great-grandmother liked to eat chalk
and bugs and paper. i remember the
small dry sound of a
page going
down.
when they
asked her why she said it
wasn't her who was hungry.)
(was it me?)

yes, there were eyes, and a mouth
and a nose; i had known those. but
there was also white dust in the creases of my
lips, a line like a red thread that had been pulled
and pulled,
and the orange of their teeth, just a glint of it.

2. (in old english, fang meant to prey, plunder; a thing seized)

i am thirteen.
i run my hands through my hair and
search for the perfect strand. it is coarse, thick,
and feels wiry as i run in between my fingers. i climb
towards my scalp and feel it again,
from root to tip
from top to bottom
bottom to top
from tip to root.
i give it a gentle tug, feeling the follicle pull at the
soft skin of my cranium. i pluck it out
hard, leaving a tiny, unnoticeable hole in my head.

(my grandmother liked to sit by the fire and sew. once, she took red thread and sewed a rose into her thigh. i remember the small, wet sound of the blood dripping against the floorboards. she kept going until no flesh was left.)

i run it through my lips, and feel the bumps in my
keratin against my tongue. the tiny white bulb
at the root comes off between my index and thumb.
i scrape it off with my fang.
it is not the right hair, but it is close.
i wrap the hair round and round my fingers, knotting
it into a ball, and then i swallow it down
like a cat.

(m)other purrs and takes my hand in hers. she
presses my palm to the cold baldness of her scalp
and holds it there. there is movement
underneath. (she wants me to
open her up and climb
inside.)

i start again.

(by fourteen i will be smooth all over)
3. they do not grow hair. the follicles never erupt from the skin.

four. mayibeexcused

one night, after dinner (we ate lamb with our hands)
my father stepped out of the room and did
not come back. we searched, knowing
the boundary between outside and in.
i think the house might have
swallowed him whole.
(we have gone through too many cats;
the animal shelter has blacklisted us.)

the house grew quieter. the walls were
warm and a little damp, like the
inside of a cheek. i traced my hand along it
until I found the lips, and with all my strength
i tried to part them. they did not
part. they only tightened.

above me, the ceiling began to grind.

i remember that it started small.
like tiny milk teeth
hailing from the sky, rattling on the roof tiles.
each tooth was one i had not grown.
then,
the stones came.
as big
as a fist
as
big as
a my
(her)
mouth
e

the roof opened up like a jaw, and i was the tongue
and the stones tasted like chalk and ice and weather
and the sun, the sun, which i had only been told about,
stood in the kitchen like a guest. she smiled and gathered
up the teeth in greedy handfuls.

4. (it is rude to leave before the bones are clean.)

five. trickortreat

we don’t carve pumpkins in october; all pumpkins rot eventually.
i had a friend whose mother had ten children. each child got to
cut a face into orange flesh and ate pumpkin pie and soup and
spat seeds out onto the playing field for months afterwards.
the seeds were hard to chew.
i would collect them off the frozen ground, and
my (m)other would grind them into dust.

we don’t hang decorations up on halloween; all decorations come down eventually.
i had a friend whose mother spent thousands of pounds on realistic
animatronics to adorn the front garden. they sprang to life when motion
was detected. the neighbourhood kids were too scared to approach
the house and the sweets were left
untouched.
the morning after, i would sneak in unseen by
plastic faces and scoop up all the candy and shove
it down my throat by the fistful.

we don't trick-or-treat on halloween; all children come home eventually.
i had a friend whose mother let her take her younger brother and they
knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and no one saw him again.

the year i was sixteen, (m)other let me go.

(my mother, my real mother, lived in a big house that had
no room for me. she worked in a bar and drank
stolen sips of whiskey when no one was looking and ate the bowl nuts and the
raspberries off the cocktail sticks. she had a daughter
who looked just like me, but inside out. every night,
she had to mop up a bloody trail from the cot
to the hedge. she always
left the back door unlocked.)

i went out at dusk with a pillowcase over my bald head.
i did not know which house was hers. to me, they all looked the same.
i knocked on every door with a light on, held the pillowcase open, and waited to be welcomed home.

people said i had a cool costume. who was i dressed as?
i was wearing myself.

the last house i knocked upon did not answer, but i knew it was
the one by the hole in the hedge, the size of a baby.
my real mother stood in the kitchen and rolled up her
sleeves. on the table lay the inside-out daughter,
bright as the flesh of a plum.
my mother took her by the cuffs, the way you turn a wet sock,
and eased her over her own head, an inch at a time.
there was a small wet sound. she hummed like
it was a household chore.
where once had been the grey meat of a brain, there was now
a luscious head of thick hair.

when it was done, she fed her raspberries, one at a time, into the new mouth, then
she turned and locked the door.

5. (a child taken on halloween is replaced by morning. nobody notices, except the mother.)

Oh my goodness rev, your thread has absolutely blown me away.

The imagery is so vivid and brutal that it makes me grit my teeth and grin in excitement at the same time. Everything in here is described in such a way that it feels like something that really happened and I keep finding myself being lured into the fantasy only to be chewed up and spit back out at lines like "above me, the ceiling began to grind." I also love your use of red letters, parentheses, and footnotes to add extra meanings to each poem. Reading this thread is such a horrifying but gripping experience that I can't look up from!

six. wastenotwantnot

i am eighteen.

i have ate(teen) years.

i have spent the last two years picking bits of myself
up off the floor. when i stand up, dried skin peels off me in
reams and sticks to the chair. when i shower, the drain clogs
up with pink matter. when i towel myself dry, i am rubbing
against wet bone. when i sleep, my face is imprinted in
my silk pillowcase by morning. when i sneeze, there
is a piece of my brain in the
tissue. when i blink, the whites of my eyes
drip onto my cheeks. when i try to sew, pieces
of my fingers end up stitched into fabric.
when i eat, my teeth break apart in my
mouth as i chew. i spit them out into the bowl and
show them to m(other).

(my m(other) liked to paint. sometimes she would cover herself in it.
once i came home
and she had tried to paint her insides.
she had chosen the wrong colour. her
kisses still taste like turpentine.)

she takes the bowl from me, her hands warm but shaking. there is a
bright sound as the teeth rattle against the silver spoon. she
sprinkles the pumpkin seed dust on top, then mixes it up
with a pot of strawberry yoghurt. she sits beside me as i peel
back the skin on my hands like a glove. underneath, i am bright as the flesh
of a plum: the colour she was trying to paint.

she eats what i have shed.

6. (she believes this is the only way to keep me.)