November
2006
Being a Child
She was eating it
because he wasn’t,
the baby octopus
with its arms strained
against her lips
like a tired child
desperately clambering
out of a rocky diving hole
at the end of that first stretched evening
of a holiday,
as the blood sun
drowned to the tune
of a chirping dusk.
Gum bedded blades of coral
graze its pinched egg head
as it spasms rhythmically,
stung by oily spice residue
and the tongue’s warmth.
It had fallen over itself
like a wheel of muscle
repeatedly rolling in circles
bounded by the edge of the dish,
it was burned by the air,
by the strip light’s
sodium glare, the smoke
of untipped cigarettes
and what oven heat was
still retained by
the earthenware.
And although her incisors
had invaded the rubber body
and met inside its tiny coil
of nerves, it still pulsed
and bulged itself as rings
of muscle squeezed,
pushed, relaxed, squeezed,
pushed and relaxed, while
across the table
her drunk father gagged.
was it your drunk father?
Like the slap of that last line, The way it makes the episode immediate and physical, or at least that’s how it was for me. x