Lauren Kalstad
ON ALL THE HORROR FILMS I WATCHED WHILE PREGNANT
it was the scaled beast, the slack-jawed zombies struck back to animation,
the corpse, the ghost hunter, the scrambled mind of a killer, the slow pan
of a room & eyes burning at the windows, eyes in the woods, eyes tucked
into the leaves of a squat holly bush. little devils pressed to the other side
of a screen and even the animal of my own body lumbers through rooms
water-heavy & beating me from the inside – but forget about this tangled
core. the stomach’s migration slow as a glacier arriving at once to join the
wine-red heart. I’m pieced together à la Frankenstein, blinded by my belly
the world shadowed in the wake of this ever-expanding woman, and who
could fear the ripping of labia when the doe-eyed virgin is pinned straight
through like a butterfly to a shadow box, how could this life curled inside
swimming, swimming, shock me with the whitehot panic of motherhood
while ghosts wear their shifting blues and drag themselves along the floor
singing their loneliest notes. I can only swallow all of this terror like a pill
& get so high on horror that I am no longer broken – not by the creature
that watches me and not by the creature that is me down to my quivering
depths. so when the credits roll I’ll fold myself into the dark tomb of our
bed and feast on the sweet flesh of my dreams – the deep & hungry sleep
of a monster I can’t name