Juliet Cook

Stop Motion Lamb Figurine

Little porcelain lamb totters on dinette table.

Tiny jukebox, torn sugar packet, pink paint

chipped off high gloss cheeks. This song recollects a dreamy scene

in which she is life-size and flocked with real fur.

(Prettily trammeled lamb and the beguiling tines

of her lashes. The spindly twitch of limbs entwined

with Silver Brocade & Licorice Vine. Sweetly fettered. Softly fleeced.

He denudes her baby pear shaped paws and dresses the bruised spots

with bits of white gauze, candy buttons, silver beads.

Her eyes could be anise stars transmuting into slivers

as she quivers and prays she doesn’t break like jagged glass;

as she wishes to melt into anisette cordial, gently contained

in white chocolate shell. She doesn’t want him to cut his tongue

on her sweet debris.  This song recollects a dreamy scene

in which he gently tends to her wounds; spends hours

osculating her fragrant tears and extracting burrs…)

That song ends and she crashes off the laminated edge.
Miniscule hoof shards in the dust pan, small severed head

in a beveled dish of pillow mints. (In the unfinished dream,

Stachys byzantine strains towards a cracked hand figurine.)

Self Portrait as Little Edie

My prized antique brooch is a makeshift clasp.

My latest headdress is amazing. My eyeliner bold flourishes;

a special look I like to call Ramshackle Ivy (League)

or Bossy Bossa Nova.  I devised it and revised it by myself.

Look at my eyes.  I call this my Supervisorial Languor Gaze.

Mother will try to corroborate by singing off key

in her ravaged voice.  She thinks she sounds so pretty,

but she’s croaking, broken canes, 1000 bags of garbage.

Her lungs are deflated party balloons inside an abandoned attic.

She can’t even climb these stairs. Liked us better when we were beautiful

and rich. Fails to realize I am still beautiful in my own way.

Not the runway. Not the stock photo in another flat catalog.

I’m more like a one-woman flag corps, enacting the secret formations

of my own design. This song is called, ‘How do you do? I do:

cat spray, old department store perfume, whole sheaves of stale

wonder bread emptied into the framework of a haunted upstairs. I do

gallant oddments and fake pate.’ I call this dance The Socialite Breaststroke

on Dry Land, but I’m not afraid of the ocean.  If you think I’m crazy,

it is just another hot little spurn, a small shot of lemon juice

to the back of my throat and watch how stylishly I gurgle.

I do my marching in place lemon juice gurgling dance. I twirl

my imaginary batons.  I’ll admit it isn’t all plum pudding.

Sometimes the raccoons are eating me

from the inside out. I hide the dark circles

with creamy makeup. I do my cold under old sheets

creamy makeup application dance.  I rejoice that at least

I don’t have mother’s ruined voice.

She sounds like a mangy old raccoon

balding, rabid, pinning her threadbare demands on me.

I call this piece my Raconteur Cape.  Isn’t it luxe

with my special brand of pizzazz?  All the boys look at me

and wish I would sing them their own original ditties,

but I’m busy.  I’m in demand.  The broken sugar cane taps

my wig-head, scratches my sequined tap shoes, makes me move

my feet.  The scrappy raccoons scream for fresh bread.

If I ribbon up my latest bright head wrap fancily enough,

what it sounds like is, ‘Encore, encore, encore…’

Juliet Cook is a poet and the editor of Blood Pudding Press. A few of her recent publication credits include ‘DIAGRAM’, ‘OCTOPUS’, ’WOMB’, ‘Sein Und Werden’,  ‘little red leaves’, and ‘Prick of the Spindle’.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and currently has a poem representing in Sundress Publications Best of the Net 2007 Anthology. A selection of new poetry is also available as the first edition of Volume #2 of COMBATIVES, a single author zine series affiliated with H_NGM_N.  Her latest chapbook, ‘Planchette’, can be procured from Blood Pudding Press at www.BloodPuddingPress.etsy.com.   More chapbooks and a full-length are sweetly slinking around, mewling and hissing and seeking homes…