My Scary Mother
Throne of Blood
by Cassandra Troyan
Solar Luxuriance, February 2013
90 pages / $13 Pre-order from Solar Luxiariance
Throne of Blood makes me believe Cassandra Troyan chews razorblades and has freezing skin and needles for fingers, but for some reason, I don’t feel like shying away as she comes closer. Maybe it’s because I sense a sort of hidden warmth she has for her demons. They’re like dozens of hands reaching out that scare you, but don’t mean to.
I wet myself over the thought of roses
of making love to a hospital bed.Declarations of sex to bags
filled with liquids substituting
organs now present as witnesses.Walking into the divide an abyss the possibility
of apathy calculations of sentimentality amiss.Ripped out my vein limbs
overgrown.
Love makes you grow.
Honey drips from a sloe-eyed doe.Get cocooned in the sickness
a sweetening sludge.When the IV tubes get sugar clogged
it is obviously because you are selfish
and I am dead.When weighted I materialize.
Let’s just hover until this distance retreats.
(From “YOU SEDUCE COLORFUL ANIMALS ABOVE THE SKY”)
of making love to a hospital bed.Declarations of sex to bags
filled with liquids substituting
organs now present as witnesses.Walking into the divide an abyss the possibility
of apathy calculations of sentimentality amiss.Ripped out my vein limbs
overgrown.
Love makes you grow.
Honey drips from a sloe-eyed doe.Get cocooned in the sickness
a sweetening sludge.When the IV tubes get sugar clogged
it is obviously because you are selfish
and I am dead.When weighted I materialize.
Let’s just hover until this distance retreats.
(From “YOU SEDUCE COLORFUL ANIMALS ABOVE THE SKY”)
When I first started reading fiction as a method of learning about writing, I was obsessed with the grotesque, but it feels like Troyan has leveled up the concept here. For roughly a third of the book, I read the speakers as being inhuman simply because they seemed so far removed from humanity that I refused to believe they could be like me (which sounds like a pretty fine accomplishment to me).
4 Comments
February 19th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
February 19th, 2013 / 12:00 pm