if the leeches drank from me they’d turn gay or die:
my womanhood is crooked, my womb became a sieve
Mother, I’m saturated with psychic data
Mother, I was never supposed to know these many thoughts
Mother, a daughter is a kind of poltergeist, a nuisance ready to haunt you
embarrassing the living with scarred arms and psych ward stories but
I survive because I choose to, not because you like it.
at what point did I consent to misery? you carried me
in your grief waters, then spat me out tangled and wrong
or maybe I blew in from Stupid Town,
holy fool and cosmic victim that I am.
I run the rosary, I run the bath, I run to Starbucks
with my little victim tote bag falling down my arm,
speaking the language of victimhood like
“Can you please add a splash of oatmilk to that? Thank you.”
the vulva is a terminal for chaos and goo and
I’m to be some conduit for primordial magick, but where is it?
I was just a silly girl, telling stories and laughing
at the wrong parts and now what?
here it is, here it is:
My vile slick
My bitch heat
My dog heart
My swamp sex
My failed fauna
My ovum blight
Daliah Angelique is a queer writer and poet concerned with the grotesque, whimsical and visceral. She is the author of the chapbook Spider Rodeo (Bottlecap Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in Driftwood Press, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Oyster River Pages, and Sunday Mornings at the River Press, among others. She lives in Olympia, Washington with her wife and chihuahua.