Butthole Butthole Butthole Butthole

oh putrid rose. oh floral gift from some dead god
i buried alive only to excavate and find, still fresh.

oh myriad sweet sounds i make with it: trumpet,
trombone, tornado, goblin. oh mouth

that gapes and swallows. oh mouth that hungers
for new tongue. oh stomach that rests so far from

the colon but still calls him cousin. oh come, oh old
world magic, oh small hungry prince, oh great equalizer.

how many octaves can you tuba? how many eloquent
speeches come right from the gut? what countless

phallic shapes have you named husband? what knuckle
tucked into you a dyke holding up all this stale water.

sweet you who birthed iron when i took too many
women’s multivitamins claiming there’s no such thing

as gender. praise, how you expand and shrink like
a house’s water pipes from winter into its heat. praise

how when you bleed you’re always trying to tell me
something. praise you, tiny gymnast, beast                       

with a breathing halo, gold band that weds my strange
body to this strange strange earth


by Sam Sax

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Sam Sax is an MFA candidate at the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the two-time Oakland Grand Slam Champion and the two-time Bay Area Unified Grand Slam Champion.Sam is a recipient of The 2013 Acker Award for Poetry and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the co-founder of the New Sh!t Show, a reading series currently running in San Francisco, Boston, Austin, and Minneapolis. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Anti-, The Boxcar Poetry Review, The Journal, Rattle, The Evergreen Review, Gertrude, Muzzle, PANK, and other journals. His new chapbook A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters will be released through Button Poetry this year.