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DRUNK MONKEYS IS A Literary Magazine and Film Blog founded in 2011 featuring short stories, flash fiction, poetry, film articles, movie reviews, and more

Editor-in-chief KOLLEEN CARNEY-HOEPFNEr

managing editor

chris pruitt

founding editor matthew guerrero

POETRY / Retired Stripper / Rax King / Writer of the Month

Age oozes
through gaps in my stitching.
I am marrowy
rotten to you. When you tuck  

into my neck,
be repelled by the odor of wet
fruit. Misspell

my name so I know
it’s real. Blink: once
for wetness, twice for blood.
Slide. Butterfly 

torn like paper. Who
but a man would think
to rip tissue like paper? Slide.

‘Tissue paper’ is eerie, no?
Think about it, but
you don’t. Slide. Wind
sings through a holey 

wing and the whistling
beast won’t fly. Slide. 

Blood is only a metaphor
for other blood. Estimate
the platelets on the earth, count 

the plasma. You think you can turn
this talk into stars or sand, but blood
is at hand, sir, do not waver. Fuck me
like my blood doesn’t uneasy you. No—

not the obvious blood, but this
in my wrist, that in my tongue. We
were talking of blood, my good man. Prick  

me 

and watch me flow. Your only task to look
and you can’t. My insides don’t feel
seventeen

years old enough. Let any man

say I am less for thinking of bodies,
writing of skin. Let any man deny these breasts
full of dead fat. These hips, as stark as ribs. Lust

for a dam of torrential blood,
barely. Peel me to anatomy textbook
red and that’s it, I am known. Butterfly jerks 

on the slide—you bumped it. No blood but the potent
liquors of science. Begin again. Pronounce
my name your way. What chance

do the rest of them have, when I
am what’s insurmountable?


Rax King is a dog-loving, hedgehog-mothering, beer-swilling, gay and disabled sumbitch who occasionally writes and works as assistant editor for Sundress Publications. She is the author of the collection 'The People's Elbow: Thirty Recitatives on Rape and Wrestling' (Ursus Americanus, 2018). Her work can also be found in Catapult, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle.

POETRY / How to Have a Miscarriage / Cathy McArthur

ESSAY / Sloughed Off / Marisa Crane

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