Spent the night
absorbing
your requests,
now I feel
like a baby
who has just crawled out
of my own womb.
I feel wet
with my own amnion
is what I mean:
my clone dueling
the real me
for its apron
to the death.
(14)
Sometimes when
I’m giving head
I think about foie gras.
Goose who locks
her jaw around a goo-tube
gets the grease.
Goose whose beak got taped
agape on pipe.
In the bedroom
of the restaurant
everyone is swallowing:
me my bile, they
the bird, the restaurant
this decade
of my life. In the playhouse
of the restaurant
we loop a dinner scene
with papier-mâché
food. The actors drool
and molt while I collect
their droppings in a pail.
In the forest
of the restaurant I gambol
like a deer
among the chairs, looking
for a place
to foal my ache.
(16)
The epicure collapses
in a chair. Across
the world, a salmon
bullets wetly
through the air.
A farm-to-table
platelet is the figment
of a world where no one
holds their poultry close
against the doom.
Like Plath, a flesh
that mutates
in the oven
meets your mouth
with not a memory
of life left
in its bleb. I’m scared
to find the egg
I’m cracking open
is my own. I’m halfway
back to utero
with dread.
(17)
I commit a verbicide
of sorts
each time I fail to voice
my growing
wound. I’m not your daughter
though my wide
daughterly face
is yours for now.
I’m not your mom
and not the inverse
of your mom.
The kinematics
of my grin:
a muscle thickens
in a cheek.
An ember dies.
This is the civil land
civility forgot.
Our language
has no no in it.
No I.
(18)
The chophouse hocks
its work like luck.
I clock in and get abject.
Don’t think
affective labor can be quantified
like calories you’re wolfing
at my trough.
My shame is what’s for dinner
as I fawn over
a customer in tails.
The thing is, more domestic duties
wait for me at home,
and strangers still decide
my wage at work.
Don’t gobble down
the dream of meritocracy,
that fallacy where excellence
meets dividends
and negligence
means negligible tips.
There are too many fictions
of relationship. There are
too many creatures
in this myth.
Maggie Millner lives and writes in Central California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude Magazine, TYPO Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Sonora Review, Two Serious Ladies, and elsewhere.