Sarah Crucilla

Red Butter
After Truck Darling

Isn’t it crazy that last night I lost my steak
virginity, Cherenkov lapped up uranium
from a nascent G-Star & we sip pineapple
juice to keep our fluids clean? Known
to most as barcoding the atom,
I’m making boy yogurt for
a low-budget porno called “That Night I Lost
Enola’s Cargo.” A doll’s past
tense dwells in the tenderness. You laugh
at the worst purées. Orgasms
are all explainable by the principle of Chekhov’s gun,
but I’m the solo member of the Clean-Up-On-Aisle-Four
fan club, atomizing deflated pool floaties. Gnawingly,
cud lulls me into a false sense
of wavelength dependence. Knowingly,
I perform kegels in the protonated dialect
of the veal Morse code. 1 flicker = 1 like & I like
the way it feels when you slap charred watermelon
onto my B-29 Superfortress. I’m in need of a vitamin facial—
that is to say, I’m crystallizing into girl potash, but the whole
planet’s already been colonized.

Regressive Entanglement

We must reproduce

On a slide

Watching bodies

Particulate

Bodies cannot

Particulate

On a slide

Cannot ghost

Thru platelets

Cannot hunt

Ghosts

Thru platelets

Thru abdomen

The flies

Come out

Pickled

& exchange

Rubber knees

Exchange

Coverslips

& slides

Skinned knees

Down slides

Frozen peas

On cuts

Cuts into pea bag

A fragmentation

Of bag

Cannot birth bag

Cannot fragmentate 

Bag

Cannot fragmentate

Unplantable pea

The youngness of pea

The frozenness of pea

Pea as face

On the apple of cheek

An orchid on the apple of cheek

Gastalt

The pixies are left to dance on waning snowfolds

& everyone is so into cigarettes these days.

I can’t stop thinking about

cumulonimbusness

in memory & the dregs of radio-aluminium

slithering through

bodies—everything rooting decay.

Somebody’s potted plant continuously

metallabolizes granny

off the clock. On the clock, iron is

virga, a container of petroleum jelly &

that time a coyote reconfigured your geese.

You laughed, but I am the gut watercolor,

sublimating from the cloudtendrils,

every drop of my fossilized blood,

smoke never to hit ground.

Carcinization

& other B-52s

Over shoulder—

Everyone’s part ruminant

Everyone’s physiognomy is hemmed in the Eating Room

I am a four-quadrant stomach,

Gastric mill processing the carcinogen;

Who let me bomb in my sleep?

Smear fingers across my eyes like kohl?

Reflective compact,

Worrisome as the pelvis on my tongue,

The widening of each identical rib

Inside the malice box

The malice birth

Abstracted from my carapace

& cervix north—

Entombed thing,

Feel the America sewn into your shell,

Heartbeat’s drive to unmake the crab

Within each munition

Sarah Crucilla (she/her/hers) is a poet and postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University studying the origin of life and astrobiology. Her poetry explores the strange intersections of science, bodies, and the natural world. Her poems have appeared in The Yellow Couch and The Graduate Review.