Prune Juice (a postscript)

Sucked the sticky pulp out of a plum.
Ended the succulent plum(p)ness.  Hacked the symbiosis code.
This dark purple deflated shape is your ineffectual rage.
Shriveled ovary.  Balloon animal
with its stomach pumped.  With its sputtering interface:
pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp

With its ravaged pucker,
a prune walks into a bar.
No a prune waddles on white-powdered legs,
fashioned from rubber tubing affixed to the bottom
of a glass specimen jar filled with an unidentified liquid.

So a prune waddles into a bar, asks,
“Is this preservation or exhibitionism?”
The bartender replies, “I guess that depends
on what you’re soaking in.”
The prune says, “Remember Hairy Buffalo?”

The prune has a speech impediment,
a celluloid lilt infecting its inflection.
The bartender hears, ‘Dismember Hairy Buffalo!’
The bartender hears a hybrid of “garnish” and “garish”.
The bartender pours another sipper shot to the pop cult
horror movie background noise of microwave popcorn popping: ppp

This is the glass-muffled plosion of withering
purple lips struggling to say something.
This is the cockled witch-cackle
of balloon animals who unravel and shrink,
of breast implants who leak formaldehyde,
of little old ladies who have concave chests and taxidermied pets.

This is a hairy specimen jar diorama.
This is ovarian alcohol poisoning.
This is fruit corpse. Wattles into a jar.
This is ineffectual anti-wrinkle cream.
This is rubber witch pricked. White-powdered pop cult
dismemberment. A speech impediment walks into a breast implant.  

Juliet Cook is a poet and the editor of Blood Pudding Press. A few of her recent publication credits include DIAGRAM, Octopus, Sein Und Werden, ditch, and Prick of the Spindle.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and currently has a poem representing in Sundress Publications Best of the Net 2007 Anthology. Her first e-chapbook, Projectile Vomit, will be published soon by Scantily Clad Press. Another print chapbook, Gingerbread Girl, is forthcoming from Trainwreck Press. “Prunce Juice (a postscript)” is part of a poetry series in progress called MONDO CRAMPO that Cook plans to publish in chapbook format this fall through the dusie kollektiv 3.