young meat

As usual, I start out underwater. Fingertips on muscles taught how to work by the midday sun, no kiss is as exciting as the dead dreams I can't remember. I use the lake to process, to shrink into. At midnight it's dead quiet, the dark sky gulping light in all but a few points. Bullfrogs send out low baleful croaks as I try to float my heavy limbs across the sun distilled surface. The soft rushing and muffled voices, if I close my eyes I could be at home in the bathtub waiting for some serial killer to creak open the door. In the light of the clouded moon my body is less than the sum of its soft and milky parts and it feels put together wrong, attached only by thin plastic bags or paper lanterns skimming the water tension between my bones.

When standing two bodies pressed in the water I feel both like a child and an ancient and exhausted old man. Do you do this to every city girl that finds herself awash in the heavy Carolinian heat? I never thought I could find skinning a dead rooster sexy but I guess I was missing out. All that flesh and feathers. I haven't eaten meat for over a year but the yellow fat nodules stretch across my fingers and each organ is bright and perfect in your wiry hands, contained to size and purpose. You didn't mean to, but you learned me things about the smell of a cooking chicken: how it smells good until you know the stench of the freshly dead. Irrevocably, it smells not of supper but of dark aggressive animal, and though I am accomplice I still do not touch tonight's soup.