Amy Condren

Blushed, scorched and puckered.

You’re a long shower kind of girl.

You love to purge;

To shuck and to be shucked.

Bloat your membrane like a sponge,

Swollen as the dregs of being trickle

Down—Out.

Soap, brine and blade.

I always knew you were meek.

Cluster by cluster, scraping

Barnacles; little eyes,

They cling and make you dirty;

A bioaccumulation.

Disfigured, dilated and inauthentic.

You’re wasteful—tasteless as the sand.

A lamprey latched to an earthen visage;

She spins to loosen limpets;

Polyps on her mottled rind.

At least you get to shower,

Consume, deprive and devour.

You’re late for girls’ night, hurry!

Or stay until your skin peels.

Emerge anew—hairless

Immaculate; inhuman delicacy,

Poreless in the midnight air.

Saliva, barbs and pearls.

For once, impress me;

This is a bathroom not an exoskeleton.

Let your fingers prune:

Transform

To lick and scourge the parched soil

With the fatal crack of your footsteps—

Forget yourself.

Elegant, torrential spectacle.

Hermit crabs are social creatures;

Make it scold enough you have to leave.

Your hydrothermal vent,

Withdraw when you are crimsoned,

Tender— a crustacean kind of girl.

Exquisite, soft and terrifying.

You look hot.

Ready to be dredged up?

Ogled at and sun-bleached

Simmering in the throe,

A strobing sea; disempowerment;

You are a vision in the open ocean.

Bodies, bodies, bodies.

This is getting embarrassing.

The porcelain has calcified and fused—

It carries you on its back

This shell is too lofty to lug around;

Gouge it off.

Get out, get out, get out.

Tonight you are a fucking Kaiju,

Cthulhu from the depths of Darling Harbour.

A kraken shirks a husk and spreads

Warp yourself and tower.

Cephalopod;

It’s shameful, but

This is the kind of beast you have to be

To be seen.

Amy Condren is an emerging writer studying Law and Arts Majoring in Creative Writing at Macquarie University. She loves experimenting with fantasy, gothic and surrealist fiction, but enjoys poetry most of all. This is her first published work, and it was Highly Commended for the Future Leaders Writers Prize.