Salon assistant – by Sophia Krause
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
I swallowed small, circular magnets when I was hired
so my stomach constantly suctions into the blackhole basin.
I scrub dandruff, blonde-bleach and artificial brunettes off hundreds of scalps,
each shampoo and conditioner wash molts skin layers off my hands.
They’re skeletal and pale, nerves extinct from watery heat,
buzzcut nails and vaporised cuticles for digital dollars
accruing systematically in electric safehouses.
I monologue political affairs and grandiloquent liaisons
with their floating heads and scarab teeth,
soliloquising my global qualms and feminist discretions
against a mutual distrust of moustached men with sparkling tan lines
they vociferously accredit to hate.
Keeping safe within those equalising boundaries
provided a fatality to my think-speak. Momentous impulsivity
propelling comfortably in disregarding a secondary equilibrium
supporting an oppositional pull abreast
a similar morality line defied against mine.
An emulsifying automaton, I began to speak on the violence happening
in the warzone that starts with G. You fell so quiet,
siding with neutrality’s beneficiary, that I heard the pigeons squeak.
Scrubbing your hairline, I saw a radical cross using junior’s nails to scratch itself
out of your forehead’s cellular blanket. Its metal stamen drools oily poison,
evaporating cruor midges tasked to chomp and replace that USB stick,
labelled alliance, plugged into my aorta.
I found a sparkplug out of an old Ute. I want to swallow it and digest
its iridium, copper, and nickel as a generative battery, activating
a powerhouse charged with hundreds of kilometres,
delivering boxed, vibrational shouts from my boot.
Ripping its parchment, I’ll inhale its paper smoke,
bite your earlobe and screech about the babe extermination,
how big, bold, beautiful imperialism has a new, thorned crown,
stolen from Christ’s head and lacquered red with his Palestinian protoplasm,
money mound-diggers drink wine fermented with serf thumbs, oil displaces snow,
birds and turtles have a plastic diet, homo sapiens are downloadable,
dirt is the new blood, you can see it high from the satellites.
But if I eat it, the magnets will defecate electrical currents,
targeting the iridium, copper, and nickel’s electrons into a nauseating buzz.
Using my stomach acid as lube, I’ll puke the sparkplug out
so those magnets can resume suction back into the blackhole basin. ▼
Image: David Underland - Pexels
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