The Pain They Need, by rose auslander

Freaks: Lost Damaged Icons of the Midway, by Nate Olin (USA) 2023. Click image for more info.

The Pain They Need 
​
Feel the weight of it. It won’t give. You must tilt back your head. Relax your 
esophagus. No gag, no joke: learn to control your reflex. They’ll say you can’t. 
Start by putting fingers down your throat, past the pharynx. Then spoons. Knitting 
needles. A bent wire coat hanger. Be ready to swallow what you must. Inch by 
inch let it pass all the way down to your stomach. Taste the hurt. It isn’t a sword 
until you swallow it. It’s not even sharp. It doesn’t need to be, to perforate you. To 
swallow it you must have swallowed worse. Swallowed enough to loathe & love 
the death you thread down your throat. To feel nothing. Allow no one else to hurt 
you. Control your power. The world is watching. Make them wait. Take the pain 
in slowly. No, slower. Wait for them to beg. Then let your pain fill the holes inside 
them.
 
rose auslander 

rose auslander lives on Cape Cod and is addicted to water and poetry (not necessarily in that order). She is the author of the book Wild Water Child, winner of the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Contest, her current book ms. was a finalist for the 2024 Four Way Press Levis Prize in Poetry and the 2024 Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize, and her poems appear in the Chicago Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, and RHINO, among others. https://roseauslander.wordpress.com/