okay, winter by Noreia Rain

The Great Unseen Maw

poetry by Michael Gallagher

It was like walking into the jaws of the great unseen maw disguised as a city knowing you would skip over the canines gracefully with a fractal of teeth dangling from your frayed shoestrings.

It was like driving through the infected molars of your home town and trudging through the grey saliva of the Target parking lot and seeing the white drug-snot dried onto red bandanas.

It was like feeding the bottomless stomach we call the public, the unending orders, the tickets and yellow dupes spilling out of the machine until the entire kitchen drowned in demands.

It was like practicing alchemy – turning the unused pieces, discarded guts, pitched brains, nasty bits, losers and leftovers into a wonderful “wow that’s really fucking good!”

It was like you letting the good times roll until you were a flattened beverage pretending to be carbonated, served anyway, and even the one drinking it didn’t mind because it was still poison.

It was like living a hand-to-mouth existence, tramping around medium raw, nearly too rare to consume, certainly too bloody to be universally usual, but delicacy to the annoyed and initiated.

It was like a cycle of slaughter: a poem: the great unseen maw: people at brunch: chef putting in meat order: butcher slicing hog: me slicing black forest bacon: hog devouring corn: corn gulping water.

It was like walking down the street holding your hand as the world fell apart around us, like a jewel frozen in time glimmering on the necklace of the one who chose to spit it back into their mouths.

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