Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Here is my brain:
WET FLESH, PINK AS PORK FAT
Here are my hands after sitting at my desk for eights hours straight, struggling to write the words that haunt me in my sleep:
WET FLESH, PINK AS PORK FAT
(That’s called ‘symmetry’)
There is some blood WET
And where there is no blood the skin is PINK AS PORK FAT
My skin FLESH on the gray linoleum floor of my apartment like little white stars jeering at me—
And I jeer back.
Because I’m the one in control, the executioner, the dirty cop, the traitor,
Treating parts of myself as less significant than other parts of myself,
Knowing, with a sadistic certainty, that those little white shreds of me, aspects of me, pieces of me, will end up in the trash,
Swept up by floor four’s community broom and released into the garbage chute, Fluttering down
Down
Down
Into hellfire and chaos and the brutal, overwhelming, stink of rotting meat and an unwashed ear piercing
Where the best view is of a swollen tampon lying fallow on a box of curdled oat milk, and the second best is an assortment of toenail clippings submerging slowly in a pool of shaving foam
Where the intellectuals are tossed copies of The Odyssey and The Iliad, covered in ketchup and mustard like two fat Fourth of July hotdogs
Where two rats gyrating on the empty plastic wrappings of a package of string cheese is ironic brilliance
Where the peak of modern art is the mesmerizing agglomeration of gum splotches everywhere: green spearmint, pink bubble gum, and red cinnamon apple, or better yet, a dead rat with its entrails exposed wearing a little aluminum crown—
Rat Jesus dying for everyone’s sins and stinks
All of this
so human,
so undeniably, painstakingly human.
Those little pieces of me fluttering down down down, then adjusting to their new lives, seeking hospitality in Apartment 402’s dumpster bin, being expunged of their old responsibilities and given new ones, like all the plastic waste in a liberal community, once a Sprite bottle and now the armrest of a reusable, reducible, recyclable chair.
Yes, those little pieces of me clinging to it all, the stink, the darkness, the death, the way snow sticks to eyelashes, and I stick to pick-pick-picking and doing everything else but what I should be doing.
I have come to the conclusion that my brain and the thick calloused skin on (and off) my fingers aren’t so different.
Yes, my brain is a necessary part of me
And, no, the skin on my fingers is not,
But, inevitably, vis-à-vis the circle of life, that most reliable function of human experience,
Flesh will reunite flesh, and I will forfeit control
To Death, that infamous bastard,
Who will take me away to places I’d loathe to see
(a place of hellfire and chaos)
Reducing my body to WET FLESH, PINK AS PORK FAT
Slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes
Praying to Jesus, and Rat Jesus too just in case,
With little to no choice but to go along for the ride.
Tayler Bakotic is a senior at New York University double majoring in English and Philosophy with a double minor in Creative Writing and Religious Studies. Her work has been published in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood and Greene St. Review.