} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:
The body always seems hesitant to talk itself, and I am the type of creature who switches off the television when there is any talk of sickness. I’m too fascinated and disturbed by it. I’m too composed of sickness myself.
When I do think about myself, I think about a history of bodies. I think about the small histories of my own body, the histories inside each organ, each gonad. I think about the way we animals treat we animals, and I think myself an animal, a body amid bodies contorting some ideas into and out of texts.
A stone amid stones speaking.
Each stone a gonad pulsing.
Each gonad a fruit at the bottom of the river that is never the same river twice.
And when I try to interrogate my selves from above the river my cells grows scales and feathers and under those dead things grows rot. The pores putrefy. Some organ in the gut is traumatic. Some gonad is confused. When I see labels tattooed into every pore of my flesh speak the word, “hermaphroditic,” I see not a label, but an inextricable etymology of entomology. A metamorphosis of designators and suffocated categories that are sutured into every inch of the flesh, irremovable, clacking out of a bug mouth. They spread from the room through body and back out into the room, many legged. To rip the word out of these selves is to contort in a way that I cannot, I’d rather lie outwards and spread my bug slime on the floor. The goop inside of me that tastes like the nothing leaking out of the back of an iridescent dung beetle. The ripped out organ flopped in the slime scream-bleeds out through the patterns of walls and windows and wires. The body of my creature pumps its gills in its sac, such slick liquids. My body breathes fluid out into your body, Herculine. My body breathes your breath through your memoirs. We who are intersexed leak-breathe through our animal pores such articulating slime. We consume and are consumed.
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} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:
This ecology makes queer, animalistic love with the reader it cannot touch. Herculine, you are the reader it cannot touch. I am the reader it cannot touch. We are too close to the tattooed ideas. The ecology of ideas addresses that reader directly and penetrates their pores with vomit-flood. I give this landscape out of the landscape to beasts and they love how it penetrates in unexpectedly. These things that we learn are our feeder fetish, and I eats them in a room with beasts who eats them.
Sometimes at a distance.
Our throat-pores fat with cake dough and meat slop.
I misread beasts as breasts and we watch ourselves feed ourselves with ourselves. Mouthfuls of tit and all of the saliva-skin that gleams. The feeder fetish of the food chain that composes us. We are animals with weird genitals rubbing on animals, eating animals.
Roaring.
Digesting.
Sexing.
Vomiting.
Shitting.
Eating.
This queer ecology that surpasses me.
This text that appropriates and refigures a hermaphrodite so that I might describe, poorly, myself. In the process I learn that the hermaphrodite appropriates me. Such strange elements of cannibalism in the act of seeking out another body like one’s own. What is one’s own? What is all this except for grotesque show business? The gleam of slime eating slime, an unaware cream contortion.
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} ATROPHIED PRESCRIPT:
The action between us that occurs in the letters is disgusting and beautiful. Our papered tits leak phosphorescence, it pumps out as clay. Our bodies leak implicitly a flood of polychromatic substance. The fluid leaking has the menstrual texture of fig flesh as it slides down our many throats its many seeds. We swallow from tit, semen and ovum. We drink gonad flux through our yellow teeth, gripping into the skin with flaking nails. A mass of blood leaks from the moon edge of the nail into the moon edge of the lips. The action is disgusting and beautiful. The flesh tears out and in to the hand from the throat like a pump. All of our bodies are indiscrete, flooding. All of our fingers in our tongues, feeling. Monstrous. The action of this description that I am as I write a letter to you, as you letter your weeding vegetable self into me animalistic. The fluid grows in our bellies and cums out as words half-formed. A little undercooked beastly climbing out the throat wet with acid and spit howls.
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Aaron Apps holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota and is currently attending Brown University for a PhD in English Literature. His first book of poetry Compos(t) Mentis came out from Blazevox [Books] in 2012, and his second book Intersex is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Caliban, PANK, Caketrain, Sleepingfish, and elsewhere. He is also currently co-editing An Anthology of Posthuman Poetry with Feng Sun Chen.