Unconscionable Mattress

By:Adam Moorad


1.

I am a mattress and nothing feels good

I am bumpy on the sidewalk and the neighborhood kids bludgeon me with their heels

I am damp on the curb in a puddle

The sun is hot and I can’t move an inch

I am beached like a whale and hollowed by seagulls

Or crabs

I want to kill sheets and pillows

I want to suffocate their fibers with my fibers


2.

I am on a box spring and fluid is hitting my face. My eyes are closed and becoming infected. My mouth is making a warm spot and sweat is sinking into it.

And my coils are compressed

And my cotton and wood are like sunburned skin swelling with yellow-colored blisters

Strange elbows and knees knead my pad

I am anesthetic on my back and slamming my wooden headboard into the wall and I cannot stop my coils from squeezing and exploding

I can only lay flat and watch the ceiling

I can only breathe and bounce and feel my fabric burn from friction as my elastic frays and blankets rip.






3.

I am against the wall in a crawlspace watching a raccoon rape a rodent rape a squirrel in the ceiling and squirrels raping other squirrels and raccoons raping rapist squirrels and raped squirrels raping rapist raccoons

I have soaked up a bottle of wine

The crawlspace holds the air against my ribs. I breathe in chips of paint and dust from a lawnmower

Inside I am feeling water rising around my feet and my tag bleeds ink across my face and my mouth tasting hot stagnancy

And my dick sucks inside me like a snail

And I picture myself suffocating a wall of sand on a beach with my springs sharpened and exposed

And I am salivating and saturating when I think I should be sharking or trying to stops myself from sinking


4.

I am pressed against a first floor window with duct tape around me. I cough and try to breathe beneath the silver strands. I am moved from the window to the radiator and the radiator is turned on and I soak up its heat. I am moved from the radiator to the floor beside a fan and am petted where I am warm and bodies are resting against me


5.

The cereal bowl is full of cigarette butts

I am touching the bowl overflowing with dust and cinder sweet like cremated babies and I breathe the particles in and power my belly with baby ash and I feel like an earth and I feel decay

Babies taste like campfire

I am lying crooked on the floor beneath a dented lampshade in a dark hallway

I am listening to the bowl of ash crackles with butts and babies

The bowl is tired and embarrassed by what it’s become



6.

I am a mattress holding needles

My arms surround the needles and - smacked and woozy - I wonder why

I think, “When did they get there?”

A seed grows into tree inside my lung and I am looking at myself in broken glass reflections inside a closet

I do this for a while

I have nothing else to do

It’s what I do

The needles bleed and rust

I have openings with stuffing dripping and I am watching ants puss inside the opening and there is nothing inside me but my lung and a tree inside it.

Ants are moving things around in me

I become sick

I am feeling the needles

They are sharp and flavorful like fecal baby ash mixing with fresh baby ash

I taste ominous and self-knowing


7.

Green grass sprouts appear on the spores of my back

I am feeling them and the hepatitis

It is spring time

I am lying beneath two big branches with a puddle in my mouth

One day my mouth will explode with the things I can’t explain and it will not make any sense


8.

I am bouncing in a truck bed and soaking in a dead battery

I have given up on drying

I have absorbed several million gallons of semen and human waste

Probably about an ocean’s worth

“You are a like earth diaper,” I say to myself. “Or like a baby-ash magnet anthill”

“And don’t forget about the needles,” I think

“And I am an AIDS sponge,” I say


9.

There is a hole between my tag and frame that is gradually growing wider

I feel nervous

I try to sleep but it’s too cold without any sheets or pillows and my skins bogs and my bones corrode

When I hold a body, my coils break and stab the body’s arms and legs and the body’s fists reel and mouths screams and I soak in the body’s blood

And I have a cotton tumor on my rib

And when it rains the mice hide inside me and begin to pick


10.

A leg is resting on my leg

The leg moves across my threads to the floor and from the floor back to my leg

The radiator is on and drying me

I have a coma

The leg is rising and falling against my leg and my springs hiss like emphysema

I taste the leg

It is covered in small crystals of salt and scab


11.

I marinate in gasoline on a garage floor and feel my rodents inside my suffer and drown

I am melancholy

I ignite and am moved to a driveway

I am looking at the sky and thinking, “I am on fire I am on fire I am on fire” and smoke chokes my lungs and the tree dying inside my lung

My springs curl and melt

The skin on my face explodes and peals back

It is changing sun into clouds into rain

Someone is crying


12.

I am sleeping on a school bus

I dream about gallons of sweat and semen and white-sheeted inertia on my gut

A tin can rolls across me

It falls to the floor and sits, shiny, label-less

I am dreaming about eight elbows and eight knees stabbing me

They are sharp and working and waiting impatiently and I am expecting them to crush me and pounce when they think they’re ready

I think I am becoming a tree and growing someplace nice

But that my trunk is hollow and full of rodents and parasites

And my bark is pined with needles and my sap is weeping mucous

And my bones are shaking and decomposing

When I wake I am still a mattress


BIO: Adam’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Underground Voices, Titular, DOGZPLOT, Thieves Jargon, and Pear Noir! He lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing. Find him here: http://adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com/