Page 51 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #6

Cannibal
Once I was so hungry, I tore the skin in strips from my feet and ate it - a masseuse asked if I was burned?
There was protein there. I ate stories too,
tales of survival in the shell of planes.
People are said to taste like pork,
the Polynesians called white folk long pigs -
Did you know we’d all taste ourselves
all day long, if we could; that’s what poems are for.
I’d never eat a child.
I’d sooner die than eat a sibling.
Pork meat is white, fatty, fibrous
with the same strings that animate human days.
I’d like to think I could stay alive
on rain and my own dermis, beads of breast milk, crusts of wax. My heart quietly consuming itself, cardiac walls breaking down.
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