Don’t valorise, cannibalise: three poems by Eloise Grills
Some questions I have about dogs’ dicks
Why do small dogs have big dicks?
Why do big dogs have small dicks?
Why is their lipstick sometimes red?
One time I think I saw a green one?
Are dogs being creepy when they stare at you when they have a lipstick?
Why do we call a dog hard-on a lipstick?
Does anyone else call it that or is it just me?
Why does my dog who doesn’t have a dick like to hump the face of my dog who does have a dick?
Mum says she’s displaying her dominance but I think she’s just displaying her—
Why would my mum’s friends’ dog who wasn’t desexed chase my dog around and around the backyard and leave clumps of dog jizz in Vincey’s fur like melting Vaseline and mum’s friends would just stand there and laugh they just laughed and laughed and I smiled through gnashed teeth and inside my brain I thought get away from my dog
GET AWAY FROM MY DOG
Dogs don’t have pubic hair—
Is all dogs’ hair pubic hair?
Annie r u ok
Annie you are the person who drowned
In the Seine one hundred years ago
Annie I call you Annie even though it’s not your real name
Even though it’s not fair that your face was dredged up like scrap iron
That the coroner thought you were hot and just had to take your impression
That your death mask was disseminated and it became the fashion to place it on artist’s walls
A big buck’s head—
A figment of beauty gunned still
Mass-produced so many times you happened to be seen
By a father of a boy who drowned who happened to make you into a CPR dummy
Now standard in over fifty countries
Just one of life’s unhappy accidents
Annie I will save you
For an assessment for my First Aid Cert II
I am sorry I do not make the rules
Of this universe or my life or the
Three-part assessment with a multiple-choice component
Required for my entry-level position that
Enters onto nowhere
The other requirements are administering first response
Correctly onto another person who is alive
Badly mimicking a workplace accident
In a factory where they require a sling
Or a compression bandage
And we make fake small talk and I give reassurance
For the assessor’s points
While we wait for an ambulance to never come
But for this component I am required to feel you up
Press your plastic chest
Thirty times then press my lips
Against yours
Without your consent
A century too late
Annie if only I could find out what you think
Would your aquiline nose wrinkle
Would your slack mouth inflate to a smile
Instead of hanging open like you are perpetually
Waiting for a surprise
Sequel
Death is life’s most fashionable accessory
But it’s not a reversible jacket
It’s not a pair of underwear you wear
On a camping trip, wrong-way-in, back-to-front
We don’t get to hide in the seams
And no I don’t believe in ghosts
My rationale being that we would die twice
Of embarrassment, of not having anyone
Remember us or if they do they only
Remember one stupid thing we did or the
Good things wrong
German girls modelling their looks off yours
Don’t theorise, accessorise
Don’t valorise, cannibalise
They say you don’t speak ill of the dead
They say if you don’t have anything nice to say
Don’t say it but life is for talking
And death is for sitting down and quite frankly
Shutting the fuck up, now, Annie
Let me live and be lively cruel for a moment
Imagine you in a drowning simulation that turns you over
In your grave the opening of Baywatch in slower
Slow motion animating your distaste
Like a VHS tracking over and over an afterimage
I fray heaving breast implants in red polyester
I squeeze your hand, scoop the vomit and
Reeds from your cheeks with hooked fingers
Replay taste of ocean in the back of your throat
Asking Annie r u ok Annie
The Cum Land
I: The cumming of the head
April is the cummiest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the numb hand, jizzing
Mammaries and desire, stuffing
Dull roots with Spring spray.
Wanker wept us sperm, covering
Earth in forgetful cum, facefucking
A little wife with wide boobers.
Cummer surprise-sexed us, cumming over the
Starnbergersee
With a shower of cum; we shtupped in the colon-aide
And went on in cumlight, into the Cumgarten,
And drank cum, and wanked for an hour.
I’m not rushing at all, I cum from Lithuania, pure German.
And when we were chilling, laying, the arched backs
My cummy cousin, he took me out on a bed,
And I was widened. He said, Mary,
Hairy, hold on tight. And down I went.
In the mounting, there you feel pussyloose and fanny free.
I bred much of the night and go down south in the wanker.
What are the roots that suck, what fuckers grow
Out of this horny rubbish? Young dumb son full of cum,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A pile of broken vibrators, where the son beats off,
And the dead dick gives no swelter, the cock no queef,
And the dry bone no pound of wank. Only
There is shadow under this red cock,
(Cum in under the shadow of this red cock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your glory at morning standing behind you
Or your five o’clock shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will plow you queer in an arseful of lust.
‘French blows the wand
To my Cum Land
My Irish Girth
Where are you fingering’
‘You gave me higher clits first a year ago;
‘They called me the high clit girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Highclit Garden,
Your charms pulled, and your fanny wet, I could not
Spoon, and my thighs flailed, I was neither
Cumming nor not cumming, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the shart of….
Something in another language I do not understand
Something I can only guess at,
Something I am skirting around
like Madame Suckonthis, famous clairvoyant,
Had a bad cock, nevertheless
Is known to be the wildest woman in Europe,
With a wicked stack of arse. Queer, said she
Is your arse, the pounded Phoenician Sailor,
(See the pearls which were his thighs!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Cocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three sex slaves, and here the dick pic,
And here is the one-eyed serpent, and this arse
Which is wank, is something he marries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not wank
The Hung Man. Fear death by wanker.
I see crowds of people wanking around a cockring.
Fuck you. If you see Mrs. Equitone
Tell her to go fuck herself
One must be so cumful these days.
Unreal Shitty
A crowd blowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought Fergie had done so many.
I did not know that a London Bridge was a sex thing
Or that a bridge could cum around
I saw one I knew in the biblical sense
And stopped him crying that cock you planted last year in your arse garden
Has it began to rise
The wanker was so cold, sowing
The cum blossoms seeds, lining
All the gutters, smelling
Of all the tissues in your brother’s room, swelling
All I want to do is wank, depressing
It will take me at least an hour to cum, failing
because of my antidepressants, faulting—
This is not my fault but I feel it in my winter’s bone, not understanding
The Cum Land, butt, a lecturer once said
It was like the internet, each thing branching
To another etc like a monkey jumping
From tree to tree, but I think maybe it is more
Like the internet because every search is like a prayer paving
Its way always to more porn and more porn, hot young girls in Footscray looking
Ich liebe dich
I lick your dick
I like your lick
II: A Fame of Chest
Spring is cumming cruelly
The blossoms are cumming
Whether we like it or not
HURRY UP AND CUM PLEASE I AM SO TIRED
The cruellest way to cum is in the bum
Of someone you once loved who you love no longer
HURRY UP PLEASE AND CUM SO I CAN GO TO SLEEP
Nice
Nice
Nice I say Nice Nice and so it is and so am I
HURRY UP PLEASE AND CUM AND CUM AND CUM
I know fucking and I see fucking and I know fucking
Goonight goonight good night go fuck yourself
Tit tit tit tit tit
Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug
White deflowers
Sweet ladies
Good night
These poems are an excerpt from If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams by Eloise Grills
Throughout March 2020, Subbed In is donating $10 from every sale of Eloise’s book to Grandmothers Against Removals. GMAR is a grassroots group led by Aboriginal grandmothers. GMAR has been fighting the ongoing Stolen Generations all around Australia since 2014.
Praise for If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams, by Eloise Grills:
‘What Sally Rooney would write if she wrote for fun. From an ode to the old women changing in swimming pool shower blocks, to a list of celebrities who own islands for self-care, to her own version of Alanis Morrisesette's "not literally ironic but inconvenient, f****d, or borderline cruel" iconic song, Eloise Grills is crazy-talented, darkly funny and, obviously, very sexy. If you loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, try this one by Eloise Grills.’
-Emma Co (Bookseller, Better Read Than Dead)
Eloise Grills is an award-winning comics artist, writer, and poet living in Melbourne. They are currently working on their debut illustrated memoir, big beautiful female theory, with support from the Australia Council, Creative Victoria and the Copyright Agency.