two poems, by Ennis Rook Bashe

Written after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

self-portrait as snowfall

Winter, my intestines frozen. 

My broken body starves

and that fascinates me.

I’m like the boy in the opening flashback who went out clutching his cousin’s hand as they foraged for bones in upscale garbage 

wearing cashmere hand-me-downs. He saw a man ripping out handfuls of his maidservant’s ribs 

like the frozen street was a barbecue. For the rest of his life nothing could satiate him. 

He shivered in velvet. Even held out to the funeral pyres 

his hands still shook. The screams echoed 

overstuffed. Couldn’t keep betrayal down.

I’d rip my family open too:

whenever someone eats in front of me, I want to unhinge my jaw like a snake.

Self-Portrait as Songbird

I have been going through some High Biology. Formaldehyde jacuzzi, lab coat ombré with blood. Are you being stabbed, crushed, or pulverized? Map it on your body  

snake rainbow of bruises. 

Put your poems in the locker, breathe in and wait to be gutted, tell me where it hurts. 

I am sitting against the wall of a cage in an underground lab complex waiting to see if they’ll vivisect me 

or if they’ll just try to kill me again. 

When I get hungry, poison marches me to silence. When I get ravenous 

I make up songs so I can eat my words. 

The good news is 

they let me keep my boots on when they took my petticoats. Dust still coats the insteps. 

If the white walls stop spinning I think I could run.

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Ennis Rook Bashe is an Elgin and Rhysling Award-nominated poet and Lesfic Bard Award-winning romance novelist, whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cricket, and Liminality Magazine. Their recent chapbook Beautiful Malady (from Interstellar Flight Press) includes work nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find more of their writing at https://linktr.ee/ennisrookbashe.