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Aug 2013
Sometimes I imagine that you could use a flat blade knife and separate parts of my body.
Like an anatomical model, an arm in half, a wrist entirely off.
An outmoded coloured wax model. Perhaps, a very old one. A decorated one with human or horse hair, closed eyelids and uncomfortable lips, and like those ancient roman ones, thinning sheens of paint on top.
The blade would slip through neatly, perhaps catching friction as it passes the block of soap texture, and leaves grimy residue on the knife.
You can see the vessels.
They are not clean.
Like my soul there are very nearly translucent scrapes and patches of liquid. Some days the liquid spills out.
Some days I just want to clean out. I want to purge, but I know I will just melt and the mistakes will be just as visible. You will see the marks that look like mouse's claws or pincers where I have pulled apart the skin trying to work out what went wrong. Doing some kind of surgery. Inside tying double sided sticky tape and chips of plastic, driving them in deep and forgetting about them.

When you say those things I can't be big anymore. If I'm tired you make me cry. Salt crisps up my intestines.
You make me imagine what it would be like to plunge a knife into my stomach.
I bet it would be satisfying like the braking of chocolate. Cracking of value bars.
But I have to remember that you are the organs thrown out at the end of the day, sloshing around in the bucket and I deserve to be preserved and anything that had been cried over or crafted is better than a remote controlled car. Stop telling me that it's not.
It's not as if I'm trying to be a petal or a fragment of netting fallen off a ballerina's skirt.
I've chosen to hover above the blades. I am nothing so frivolous. Feeling at home in a web of metal coated in paisley oven gloves. I am safe here. In fact I'm glad that thick haze separates us. You will never be able to find somewhere so tranquil. It makes me happy that there is no possibility that we can meet in the middle. It just makes it easier to keep the space, without the concern of some congealing platelets tethering to a surface which was never there.
R K Hodge
Written by
R K Hodge
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   Nat Lipstadt, JAK AL TARBS, Skye Fall and g
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