Cassandra, smoking in the walk-in freezer

Poetry by Isabel Yacura

In honor of pulling my teeth out:

Letting them clink on the linoleum floor, piano keys, ivory all the way down.

--for their song/Is not of blessing.

(pearls, each, lovely and distinct and disparate, each a soap bubble.

Easily digestible. Swallowed one by one, seeds for the next.)

A series of clicking rosary beads, shattered ceramics as the brakes struggle to catch

To be cleft in twain by two-edged brand

the hand around your angle i cannot seem to stop grasping at--

Something to explode the lungs--? my heart cannot be so fragile.

Not at this juncture, with endless centuries of digging graves for god, of craving calcifying the chambers--

The click of bones, again. Of ice to teeth. Of my fingernails on the black, staring sightlessly.

Disrobing here his prophetess/conducts me to his dark ending--

As cried of Phoebus.

On a platter, the fridge door hanging open.

Tough tendons. Dark meat. Organ meat isn't really the rage these days.

Left-out to spoil. Tis like a charnel room--

The mildew the heart grows as it lays abandoned, pushed to the back, in search of newer and tastier things.

Long look. Turn away.

Vomiting it up over your hands, those pearls shining amid the rot, the putrefaction, their surfaces eaten away and etched with stomach acid, there needs no prophet here, ruined, ruined, ruined.

Maybe both, at the end,

The way the toothless dog chews on rotting meat, the block, the bloody knife/the hot blow that ends the sacrifice, the way it’s the only thing left,

The way we’ll take what we can get.

BIO: Isabel Yacura is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, New York. She has been featured in Kelp Journal, Zoetic Press, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, and other publications. She's currently represented by Haley Casey at CMA Literary, and can be found @isabelyacura on Twitter.