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The Hiss Quarterly Vol. 5 ~ Issue 1 Fourth Annual NC17 Issue Naughty Bits |
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Postpartum Vampires Teethe me with the tongue of my numbness, my oneness my bittersweet meatness. Meet me later behind that door and we’ll grind it up together, rip it apart with our hands, just like the steak we ate while the television sputtered in the foreground of the baby that was nursing and nursing and nursing. Teething all those nights that bite as he finally bit my breasts and bled, screaming while the teeth came in, he went red and wouldn’t sleep. We kept dreaming of dreaming and cutting into one another. We were the slippery melon of long hanging light. We sucked past tongues, down throats of midnight jokes about dozing, while the baby continued to cry. Teethed and teased into tortuous night of never sleeping on the meat we couldn’t bring to the table. We knew we wanted the taste of our own bodies, even the milk that came and kept coming and dripped all over the couch and that skirt you loved to see me in. These days it’s the grip of those days I remember. The absolute middle where we drowned and were sure we’d never come back up. |
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What they told her was family What does the father do? Collects doves in green cages made from dental floss and strung against the bare backs of raunchy women who prefer domination. What does the grandfather do? Sits by the window, singing Spanish poems about girls that were never his wife. The girl runs from her grandfather’s hands full of coins to the corner store where she buys a chicken. It is heavy but she carries it all the way back to her mother, waiting motionless, speechless, lifeless in the kitchen where her mother immediately lops off the head and reaches in to steal its guts. In the backyard, the father is a big stone. The girl lets the back door slap fine shut and climbs him until she sits at the top. She runs her hands down the sides of his impenetrably gray slopes. The dog comes over to pee against him. Her grandfather’s roses are in full bloom. The girl watches the shadowy ghost of her grandmother finish a cigarette in the back corner of the cement yard. A rooster struts by. The ghost pours kerosene over the garage and flicks her cigarette up on the roof. The girl peels off her dress and turns to flames. |
