Cornelia Worm

Angel Baby or the Art of Being a Loser

1.
Smoking apricot peels, my neck bent like a peacock’s wings

Untying the lemonade pink ribbon from my blazing inner thigh
Carving out thorns with my overgrown wilderness nails on the place it had been

Angel-baby, angel-whore, I’ll go to heaven even if I don’t belong

Untangling my brain from the knot you meticulously fingered
It’ll be lemonade pink but soft until I kneel on the bare tiles again—

2.
(Angel-baby, baby-angel, I am nothing but my father’s cut-up wings
And my mother’s cherry knees)
Innocent and small, a thing to be protected, a kitschy antique doll

With my knees on the bare tiles, crying during sex
My tears stream over your dick, ants crawl up my asshole to search for meaning

Remember that I did it all for love, or something

Like

It

I trim my pubes and cut my nails.

Would Carrie Bradshaw fuck Edward Cullen?

i. I pick my lovers like I eat cherries with worm holes. I’m a naïve whore with a sweet tooth.
a. If I don’t employ my life akin an excel sheet it’ll slouch towards a cautionary Powerpoint
shown to high schoolers throughout the without Honor Patria. Long live!

ii. I rewatch that episode where Carrie Bradshaw goes to therapy at least twice a month.
b. As lonely as a button on an opened jacket. I read somewhere that everyone has a
biological basal happiness level that they return to. Stockholm syndrome.

iii. The difference between me and her is that one lives in Manhattan and one lives in a Balkan
small town. You can only whore yourself out so much until you make a circle.
c. Talking about graphs, I once sent a guy our town on Queering the Map. Didn’t have much
to pin.

iv. The single’s favorite hobby is periodically checking if their favorite couples broke up. It’s less
about actually caring; and more about knowing the breakup is imminent, solely by the act of
rechecking—
d. That everyone will be ultimately just as miserable as you.

v. The road will be my great summer love. But even the roads are rocky in this country.
Somewhere the skies are filled with bombs instead of stars, and there’s a child watching over the
borders peeking at the skyscrapers ahead.
e. I love humans. I love when they insist on sitting next to each other on buses just to not
talk the whole road.

vi. Was Carrie Bradshaw ever happy? Was she doomed? Was Manhattan her blood and poison?
f. Yeah, I think she would. She’d fuck Edward Cullen.

Hortus Conclusus

In the enclosed garden, I scrape the epidermis off my knee

Are you born a whore or do you become?
I ask because they derive paradise from pairideaza.

They ask of me pureness / Thus, I sit here in this maze / With my sisters, their lang lard-smeared
hair / We wonder about fire, how it must taste / To burn, to tongue sugary ash.

In the enclosed garden, I engrave my name on the wall
Are you me? You might be, you might
The fountain’s water is thicker than my blood, thick like tick’s belly.

Nothing is more biblical than my beauty, nothing / More biblical than my ugliness / Do you still
want to fuck me? / I told you too much, oh no no no / You know that I plotted murder, that / I
twisted a rabbit by its neck and rivered it / Oh you don’t mind, oh okay I smily dumbly you do /
Idiot bitch idiot, you’ll leave me in this garden / Again, to rot wolf bitch.

In the enclosed garden, my belly is swollen but it is holy
Do you love me, now that I’m a saint?
I suffer for thee, I suffer to be whole but oh how I am not.

My womb is an ovule for holiness / Suffering the pollen for my redemption / The cedar tree’s
roots are stronger than my nails / Olives fattier than my brain / Shall I unveil? Or am I too free of
pustules? / Shall I get a scratch, a cut before I am beautiful presentable / A woman worth love?

In the enclosed garden, my babe is born dead
Is this pain biblical or dirty, I cannot tell, please tell me, please?
I cannot create if I am not created.

Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee / Is what he would’ve said if I wasn’t stained /
As my hand reaches into my pants and I siren the demons / I wonder how long it is before he
casts me out / I’ll womb a beautiful thing / A thing God could never egg, something amniotic / A
thing so drenched in embryonic cells it implodes / Yolky, medlar sweet when rotten like me /
Crossed in blood, chess-fingered like me.

In the enclosed garden, I know it is time to go
As the wall rimmed with weeds fractures before me
I am entropy, I am pleasure, I am whore, I am mother, I am womb, I am the step I take into the
darkness.