To enter the earth between my nails as it passes over my teeth, and taste the worms as they burrow and shit, following that passage of entrails, down and then out to rock, the earth between them, bitter, and full of menace, slowly spreading a disease across the tongue, and bits of living matter, too small to know, but they know enough themselves of the slime of it, or exist within that slime, and multiply, a garden, a hellscape, moist and full of menace, just one or two is enough, to burrow down, or be taken in, through each pore, to multiply in further recesses of wet potential, from which the surfaces draw, stretching upward from the death of the tongue, gone to waste by its own, and, in pieces, drawn into a new form, it had no need of the nails, the teeth and what they prised apart, since the tongue is nothing but a slave to the destruction of something else, fortunately, and will be replaced, no longer having anything else to destroy, and feed, something else, above the surface, which spreads, and eats its own, the tongue long gone, and the thing above bigger, less beholden, doing something the tongue can no longer suffer.

 

---

Ansgar Allen is the author of several books, including two novellas, Wretch (Schism) and The Sick List (Boiler House Press, forthcoming).

Emile Bojesen is a musician and sound artist and the author of Forms of Education, his most recent musical release is Scrape on LINE.

Image courtesy of Ansgar Allen & Emile Bojesen.