Becoming Human

I don’t know why but I find dried mango gingerbread houses in every crevice of my body, creating me like I’m a piranha straight out of the womb and off the edge of a cliff. I am often reborn a fledgling bird on the cartilage ring of a goddess, screaming and eating the flesh of my eternal damnation, fed chicken soup made of human intestine. Ha! My cervix can pick up a muscle car! Ha! My cervix can hold 27 chocolate chips! Ha! My cervix can be used as lip gloss or a carving knife! Ha! My cervix!

But this poem is not about my cervix, so let’s talk about your cervix. But then again, you died of syphilis from consuming a raccoon’s tail in 1673, so it’s really about my cervix, or about me, they’re quite interchangeable. I am beautiful in my polarity (the raven is coming), I inject glowstick mercury into each of the spaces between my toes and I begin to vibrate like a sinner (THE RAVEN IS COMING), I tease up my hair and milk severed thumbs around 17 basins of holy water THE RAVEN IS COMING. I swallow empty bottles of alcohol with the crook of my elbow and then, I die THE RAVEN IS COMING. My body lays on top of my grave, sunflower fireworks shooting from each of my pore and ants emerging through the flesh of each of my goosebumps THE RAVEN IS COMING. Can you find Waldo? THE RAVEN IS COMING. No you can’t, we burned him alive. THE RAVEN IS COMING! THE RAVEN IS COMING! THE RAVEN IS COMING! THE RAVEN IS COMING! THE RAVEN IS COMING! THE RAVEN IS COMING!

There’s nicer headphones on the other side of the lake, if you’re willing to swim through lakes of your enemy’s blood. This is guerilla warfare! The enemy has yellow fungus growing out of their eyes and you have a lukewarm chai latte made of diseased monkey pulp. This is guerilla warfare! Look at how I wrap dismembered chicken heads around the sun and scream, look how I pretend to be a vampire in my Cadillac made of veins I ripped out of screaming geese, look, a cult! This is guerilla warfare, and it may only be performed in Christmas footie pajamas. 

Behold, a lollipop made of the corpse of André Breton that I shredded with my own teeth and a single, pointed acrylic nail. Behold, a faceless monkey elected mayor! Behold, a cat! I’ll set the scene for you: a woman in a pink winter coat sits in a car holding a silver pistol, the car is driving itself, the car is not moving, she calls down a plague on humanity, it only attacks wildly popular fictional character James Bond, all is well. The moon comes through the TV remote, the mother screams and becomes an ice cream cone made of Nefertiti’s blood, all is well.

The only time I feel fear is when I wear that orange dress made of safety cones and malware protection software. You want to know my secret? In the privacy of my bones, I have secretly been replacing each of my limbs with whiskers. My yellow booties are a result of my 4,745 unread emails. My blue eyes are a result of the wrought iron naked angel statues I keep in individual glass boxes in individual glass basements.

Hear me when I say that none of this is true. Hear me when I say the only true thing in this poem is that I want to become human. Please let me become human.

Caroline Sasso (she/they) is a poet, playwright, director, and actor. She is interested in reclaiming and democratizing exclusionary traditions in literature and the performing arts, particularly surrealism, poetic form, and Shakespeare. They believe in the value of shock and obscenity in art, and her pieces often include elements of body horror, camp, gore, horror cinema, and the grotesque. They are currently developing an adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, set 100 years post-zombie-apocalypse. She is the author of the one act play Spaceships and Stardust and the chapbook Five Trains of Thought and an Apple Slice (Ugly Duckling Presse). They attend Stanford University and are working towards a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing (Poetry) and Theater and Performance Studies on the Theater Making track. She is a YALDA Web Editor.