Poetry: Big Need by Julie Alden Cullinane

Big Need

 

I see the sound of big need on my face

mirrored in the sleek black glass window

 

It’s sicklewings spreading

belt-buckle divot pressed into my forehead

 

Like the pink half-moons of my thumb flesh

Sis is a furnace

 

I'm sluicing anguish

Greased up guts

 

Taste acid and horrible sour

The slightest slight shatters me

 

250 dollars an hour

Three-degree therapist

 

My words a soupy, half-formed egg yolk

Ashamed of how wet they sound when I speak them

 

She chews - neutralizes them and spits them back to me 

In slime-soaked beige

 

Now a signature, not a thumbprint

When bad things happen

 

Before bones and organs are finished

It’s too late, they fossilize

 

Then pay pay pay for careful extraction

Without knicking an artery

 

She’s a pixelated glitch in an armchair

A color with no smell

 

The radiator is a kettle that cant come.

It stirs my blood.

 

You are terrifying in your happiness

Beautiful and awful

 

Amongst all these unbearable bodies

A chemical hurt bubbles up at once, chokes me.

 

A sneak of a flame.

I swallow it, scribble yellow pad

 

I want to vomit out the window and have it boomerang back into my throat

Clean.

 

Your promise was a lid 

I gladly lived under

Breathed through holes in the cardboard

Big eyes examining me

A shrinking violet

A pharaoh once.

Julie Alden Cullinane is a poet and writer from Boston. She has published several poems, short stories, and CNF in various literary magazines. More of her works will be published in late 2023. She loves being alone with her family and her dog on a Sunday morning more than anything else in the world. She is currently knee-deep in a mid-life crisis. It takes up most of her time.