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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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[Guts]

By Mackenzie Cook

The pig’s exposed organs sepulchered our only scalpel:

a rusted thing.

My fingers are covered in guts

‘cause no one else would dig in.

Abi called us “nasty”

me and the boy, laughing as we dodged

squirting juices from the bloated fetus on our black lab table.

The pig’s exposed organs sepulchered our only scalpel:

After class, the ammonia smell chased me

down the biology hallway to my

baby blue locker,

a rusted thing.

I guess, as kids, we’re almost always running

from unspoken somethings. Our class was never truly

separate- always a collective organism -until I whispered,

“my fingers are covered in guts.”

No one wants to hang out

with a twelve year old cannibal

so I was alone in my painful excavations

‘cause no one else would dig in.

 

Mackenzie Cook is a high school junior currently attending Cy Fair High School. She is head editor of the literary magazine there, Voices in Ink, and also actively participates in the WITS Houston youth advisory council as vice president. When not writing, she loves to look at birds.

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Issue Ten

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