Got Diet?...
Got Diet?...
One dark and stormy night long ago, we asked for your poetry. After many cold, brutal nights, long-winded drafts, and pumpkin spice lattes…
We got it.
Get ready for the spooky, the scary, and the downright fantastic work of our winner: Stephanie Holden!
Scroll.
If you dare.
The Perfect Gentleman
The Perfect Gentleman
-- after Fakir Musafar
By Stephanie Holden
Hand against hook, hook against skin, how poetic that cadaver must do its own destruction / Grind boning into bone until savage body becomes owned / Fire is fire no
matter where it burns / Body is bastard and gets what it
earns / Flesh and fiber, fragile, fragment,
fall to nothing /
When
sword pierces
skin, turn injury to inkwell and press
fingertip to shaking lip / Iron fingerprint now lipstick on
point-filed fang / Burn of blood now poison on split tongue / After all,
there is nothing better than a battle scar for proof of ownership / You animal, you primitive, you -
the perfect gentleman.
Stephanie Holden (she/they) is a Halloween-loving queer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes poems about love, trauma, gore, and the self. Her interests are fantasy books, body modification, and the South. She has two cats, a bearded dragon, and deep love for frogs. Find her writing at The Journal of the Wooden O, The Kennesaw Tower, The B’K (forthcoming), Hearth & Coffin (forthcoming), and Bullshit Lit (forthcoming), her art at BEST SERVED COLD (forthcoming), or her narcissistic tweets at @smhxlden.