A birthday party for your general’s daughter, 13 years

old with silicone breasts, swine-butt lips, undocumented

male strippers.  We dig through your garbage for half-eaten

caviar, unopened champagne bottles, disposable

diapers to wash and reuse. Stick figure

models march down the runway, flash

bulbs popping like gun fire, fingers down their throats

to vomit, to scratch the inside of their mouths,

the applause is violent, addictive as oxycodone,

our doctors won’t refill the prescription. Graffiti

on playgrounds, well-fed alpacas in the palace garden,

mutated children, sleeping in discarded gift

boxes outside the nightclub. We begin to seep

through cracks, to find you, to claim

your fleshy sunburnt offspring for our final meal.

 

Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily. Her work has recently appeared in Quail Bell, Into the Void, Calamus Journal, By&By, Five:2:One, Barzakh, and others. Follow her on Twitter @bethgordonpoet.

 

 

 

 

Header Image: Creative Commons, Public Domain, modified.