The poem uses vivid and provocative imagery throughout to describe the speaker's cut thumb. This imagery illustrates the speaker's feelings of simultaneous shock, detachment, and excited fascination. At times, it also seems to evoke the speaker's internal battle with herself.
For example, the speaker juxtaposes the "Dead white" skin around her wound to the "red plush" of the wound itself, suggesting that there's something beautiful or sensuous about this cut. However painful, this lush, soft wound is perhaps an exciting, alluring reminder of the speaker's vitality.
This image of a red wound surrounded by white skin then makes the speaker think of a "[l]ittle pilgrim" whose scalp has been sliced off by an "Indian." This image is at once cutesy (a diminutive "pilgrim") and brutal. It suggests that the speaker doesn't just feel one way about her injury; she's making light of it one moment and getting darkly dramatic the next. Here and elsewhere, the speaker's description of blood and gore might also make the reader squirm.
She goes on to compare the wound to a "turkey wattle," once again combining a comic image with her cut's gruesomeness. She then steps on a "[c]arpet" (presumably of dribbled blood) while "[c]lutching" a "bottle / Of pink fizz." Readers can envision the speaker walking across a bloody floor while holding tightly to her wound, blood "fizzing" to the top. This image also, however, calls to mind a bottle of rose champagne popped in celebration. The imagery of the speaker stumbling around with a "bottle" of bubbly while her severed thumb "flaps" and bleeds is both humorous and alarming.
Towards the end of the poem, the speaker describes the "Gauze" of her bandaged thumb as a "Ku Klux Klan / Babushka." Again, the speaker imagines her thumb as its own little person, the white gauze of its bandage making it look like a hooded terrorist or a grandma wearing a headscarf. The tension between the violent associations of the "Ku Klux Klan" and the more playful "Babushka" continue to suggest the speaker's inner conflict. Her wound is painful, comforting, shocking, and thrilling all at once.