Sierra Hixon

To Be a Cannibal with a Minimum Wage Job

Until the body is clothed with unspeaking ghosts of mouths, the body an absence bearing absences”

-Bob Hicok

You: eaten with hunger, always aching for red
meat, sucking sinew off
a broken bracelet charm, tucked neatly

in reverie, folded in a cheek, snug between these
sourdough slices. Religion is often housed in the mouth. Always another
skin cell series, suckled from bone, bisect this butter

from toast until things could make sense again—remember:
every palm folding aluminum foil, every latex

glove ripped at the wrist leaves scattered skin bits, lap them up—of course,
the nuggets are chicken
, but we are not—we can only unzip

so far. My muscle and soft tissue are kept next to the lettuce and cheese (never
on the top shelf),
always in easy reach, but especially for no drip,

drip, drip, other than what’s left
over. I can sliver your skin into sentences, words, and you will
be diced into difference, embody a place in my fingerprints, cells, mouth—

just to keep infesting these veins, lipid-like, nest
inside this canula, could cooking be any closer
to alchemy than surgery, or poetry?

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Sierra Hixon has poems published or upcoming in journals including Slipstream, Harpur Palate, the Scarab and more. She is currently a student at Salisbury University.