Evan J. Peterson

Give me all your garbage—all the useless ganglia,
     fingernails, and jowls,
your rattling sacks of milk teeth,
     your honey-colored crusts,
your vivisected hummingbirds, cracked rubies,
     orchids rotten in the pots,

all your diced-down starfish, all your broken water,
     all your salty stillborn,
all your hot-twitch-forceps, buzzloads,
     knives browning in the snow,
all your mutton knuckles, all your broken beakers,
     blown fuses, lightning rods.

I want all your spent scalpels, sunken into bone
     and snapped off, all your tickled ribs,
all your tubes and bottles, ground beetle aphrodisiacs,
     your tiger penis soup,
all your pulled weeds, beheaded dandelions,
     all your thistle snips,

all your blackened timbers, all your failing
     windmills, all your fisted fate,
all your tumbling Towers, all your Tarot omens,
     ripped up Lovers, Hanging Men,
all your plugs and sutures, all your infinite futures,
     your shards of crystal balls.

Give me all your oxides, give me all your horse hides,
     all your luminescent mold,
all your mighty torches, everything that scorches,
     all your spitting villagers, their daughters
steeped in lake, all your brass collection plates,
     all your expedition crates,

your crumpled maps and hatchets, your mummified
     remains, all your wet barometers,
posterior thermometers, all your bloody piss,
     all your parts and members, your work
reduced to embers, all that you deserve–
     all your gorgeous garbage—

     give it everything you've got.

Posted 06/29/10

Here's another piece in the voice of Frankenstein's monster, again from the as-yet-unpublished The Cutting Room Floor. "All Your Gorgeous Garbage" was published in Issue 2 of specs journal.