Elegy for a Cannibal

by Andrew Millar
CW: body horror, gore, and cannibalism

I want to taste the drying blood around his mouth,
Flecked and pooled in mauvish patches on his lips
With slivers shorn off spindly supraspinatus
Draped on white incisors; dripping velvet curtains.
 
I want to feel his eyes on me when we eat,
As though he ate with mouth and gaze entwined,
Through greedy gulps of blood and sybaritic glances;
Prostrate at the altar of flesh.
 
If he asked I’d press my lips to crimson, streaked
And stretched from pointed chin to pearly navel;
I’d taste the roughish ferric glide of tongue on tongue,
Our fingers interlocked and webbed like sinew.
 
When my teeth tore through his pectoralis
I felt myself inside him, not he inside me;
He moaned and cried and kissed me hard--
He begged to eat more, eat more; bones and all.
 
In another life our bodies lie enwound,
Edenic on the Holy Plains of Flesh,
In a world that’s ours; where I am his--
Darling, I want you inside me forever.

Andrew Millar is an emerging writer based in Brisbane/Meanjin, studying literature and philosophy. He writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction essays. Some of his poems and non-fiction can be found in Jacaranda Journal and Exordium. His never-ending project is a quest for a poetics of embodiment that feels authentic to lived experience.