| Some Explanations for Fainting Goats by Juliet Cook Because of a spooky rose-breasted grosbeak who trills dark omens into goat ear until goat legs go quite weak. Because of the harbingers hidden in discolored blades of grass, in thorny weeds, in bitten lockets. Because they suddenly glimpse their own innards-- organ meat on a silver tray. Quivering. Because of evil dwarf queens with riding crops, with arachnid pets, with modified metal braces to take the place of spindly limbs. Because of mounting desire to hybridize goat milk with sticky strands of spider silk. Tampered draglines twisting into nooses. Because of obscenely swollen tongues, the result of self-induced disease so nobody will view them as a delicacy, but soon there will be new breeds of stuttering fainting goats, of silent fainting goats whose distended tongues shall be fetishized i.e. “Behold the stunning marbleization of The Mute Exotique”. Because of strange forceps and sinister instructions from the yellowed page of a Victorian medical text in between the page for bloodletting & blistering and the page for amputation & silk suturing. Because of recurring visions of goat-sized gurneys with hoof restraints. Malevolent milking devices squiggling towards hapless udders. The ghost of a rose-breasted grosbeak bearing a foreboding beakful of parasitic worms to implant into inner ears; to deposit into rotten nests of cavernous sockets. Because they are going to die. They are practicing. They are foreshadowing. They are performing a stiff-legged medical text illustration. Their forelimbs will never transform into wings. |
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