Apr 15, 2025
I think of the woman in the Bible who asks for John’s head on a platter. Maybe she was only hungry. Maybe she wanted to be satisfied.
- Jordan Pérez, I Consider Violence.
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I think of the woman in the Bible who asks for John’s head on a platter. Maybe she was only hungry. Maybe she wanted to be satisfied.
- Jordan Pérez, I Consider Violence.
The boys are sure the girls have mistaken a wolf for a deer, or a man in a pelt. Deer don’t look at the world with the kind of hunger the girls describe, don’t come out of their meadow dripping blood and black eyed—but this one does and all the girls wonder aloud which one of them will vanish one day because the Deer Lord found her on the far side of the glass after dark, coaxed her out to be his bride. The girls argue about who among them has the same taste for blood, try to forget how they too have cut their fingers, sucked their own blood, how they liked the taste.
- E.B. Schnepp, Deer Lord / Dear Lord.
My father lost me to his hunger, to a line of does, button bucks left to hang from the neck, bleed from the belly until even the flies didn’t come anymore, even the flies knew
there was nothing vital here. He was hungry when he hunted them for their blood, their chase, but in the end he ate neither. In the end they were just a collection, a barricade
of wasted bodies blocking the water pump, attracting carrion crows, larger predators. The coy wolf, who came to see what to make of the newest monster, the one who named himself man, whose cubs shook
before all the flesh he didn’t consume. I was one of those cubs who went for water, found empty eyes accusing me of being unable to stomach their flesh, for my father who’d forgotten them. I couldn’t stop myself
from fingering the open gash where everything vital once had been and now was gone; intestines, heart, and sex, only to suck my fingers, tasting vitae as it chilled, turning from red to muddied brown. I couldn’t tell the difference
between my blood and theirs. I sought warmth, another body; following instinct I found myself curled inside, a hermit crab seeking a new home. I could expand easier here.
- E.B. Schnepp, Deer Lord / Dear Lord.
- Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love.
“Maybe I’m tired of rooms full of knives & still being the most dangerous thing around.”
- Yves Olade, Slaughterhouse.
“It was strange to me that my body smelled sweet, it was proof I was demonic, but at least I breathed out, from the sour dazed scum within, my father's truth. Well it's fun talking about this, I love the terms of foulness. I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain.”
- Sharon Olds, Waste Sonata.
“Before Lamia was a monster she was a mother, and before she was a mother she was a queen. The god Zeus tended to impregnate any woman he fancied, and he fancied her; the stories don’t specify how she felt about the arrangement, but anyway she got pregnant by him, and anyway she had his children. When his wife Hera got wind of yet another clutch of bastards, she killed them. Lamia turned her grief first inward—in some stories, she plucked out her own eyes—and then outward, murdering other children out of envy and revenge. She doesn’t kill children to keep them away from her. She kills them because she wants her children back.
Which is to say: It is considered monstrous not to want children, and monstrous to want them too much. Grieving infertility or loss, coveting others’ children or having ambitions for your own: These displays of feminine over-emotion are not immediately rendered acceptable just because they have to do with motherhood. Ambition filtered through children is still ambition; self-pity filtered through children is still self-pity; envy filtered through children is still envy. These traits are, if anything, more monstrous for using the innocent as their vehicle. The ideal relation to childbearing is at worst resignation, at best dutifulness.”
- Jess Zimmerman, When It Is Considered Monstrous Not to Want Children, and Monstrous to Want Them Too Much.
“She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.”
- Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love.