this is going to be rough (a draft)

The words. They don’t always come out clean and cooked in the middle. Oftentimes, they are too raw to move on. They are pink like beneath fingernails: part of the body that holds its breath the longest. Sometimes I want to lift up that tough keratin protein just to feel something new on my body. Untouched and perhaps a bit gooey.

I cooked a two and a half pound turkey breast yesterday with its bones removed. At farmer’s market on grand army plaza, I asked the farmer: how do you get all those bones out/ what do you do with them/ why do I feel so sad for its dismemberment?

At home, I marinated in garlic, parsley and olive oil rub. Massaged it like my mom would do every Thanksgiving to the designated turkey. Kind of made a show out of it. Lifted its thighs like a trained dancer. As a kid, this later led to a bout of vegetarianism. I realized, though, that this odd treatment goes beyond edible animals. We do this to humans. We taunt.

So my turkey came out raw in the middle and I started to wonder if it was trying to send me some message:

You may look all ready on the outside, but inside you are unedited with poisonous bacteria.

The words. Sometimes they come out screaming someone else’s name who you haven’t thought about in years or months or moments. Guilt drowns the semi-colons and suddenly you are dealing with way too many run-on sentences staging a revolt off the page.

What to do when suddenly your fingertips have more control than the rest of you does?

The words. Sometimes they repeat themselves like a mantra or obnoxious scratched record. I keep writing about the body and performing outside this body and each day it feels borrowed. Who can I explain this to? And let’s not mention gender. Let’s just focus on skin right now. I keep looking at this flesh that’s like pale, popped bubbles, leaking energy. This skin is muggy. Rust will come soon. Then mold. What arrives after the mold? We can talk about these parts being wrong and sometimes they are and sometimes they feel warm; and sometimes no one knows how to approach them and sometimes I don’t know how to approach them. But let’s not talk about parts either.

These bones feel out of order. Someone needs to take them out. Reorganize them. Maybe the turkey will know what to do.