Kailey Tedesco
SAY BLOODY MARY ONCE, THEN PAUSE
quit it stop
tenderizing my gowns against the grass
you villain you cop
i’m fat with ruffle tulle gravid mascara veils from my eyes
my body doesn’t exist without your body
my body doesn’t exist without the reflection of your body
calling me from the rotary mirror
dial me up with your lipstick signature over wet glass
when a thing gets a name carved on a tombstone
a thing gets a new story for you to believe in
& a thing gets a new body birthed from the reflection
of an old one it’s a long labor
lore-stuffed a cream puff resurrection
i’m scary because i look like you
used to look / will look
i have the opposite of grey & wrinkles veins ribboning
my face like a maypole hair in yarn for friendship bracelets
we’ll make later when you realize i bleed
red wax back to you
when you realize i bleed your same blood
you birth me, but
i am birth
FEARCRAFT FOR THE WEEPING STATUE
no one else can hear the sobbing lady in the other room
or in the other, other room & with you i am so cross. out
of clay i carve talismans of what i dream of finding against
the discard of this cellar — there are no toy bears any longer, only
chicken bones & placards. in a time long sun-faded & of turrets, the lady of
sobs gobbed our wrists moist as a way of assertion, cut us
unintentional with her acrylic french tips. i have become her disembodied
weep, costumed in the bodies that caused it. there is no where
left to enter but the violence of collection. i bell jar dollheads,
for memory’s sake, sew their pieces into cushions so you’re sleeping
with legs of porcelain, necks queen-cuffed in doily. leave me now;
i’m roiling. most especial, my dog’s tooth lays in the moss of ann’s belly
& i know her name because when i took a hammer to her glass,
it said so on her insides. there’s nothing odd about it — we’re all well organed
with language, walking lachrymatory bottles. sit with us for a while, you naughty
child, become turbid, then sheet yourself with doily — silence the crying with your noise.
PUPPET SHOW / AEROPHOBIA
my legs ooze giallo, sans blood, in the water, synthetic. it is so blue & so wet & un-water — a rain-puppet. i, too, finger-puppet the lollipop guild or a committee of liminality — we are entering
is what i tell myself through a jazz song. once upon our wander phase, the storms became handsy with the aircraft. one woman went lockjawed & it took three of us to bring her beyond
the threshold of her shock. meanwhile, i mesmerized my own city, an un-city made from icomalt & batter, but mostly from my own necklaces, knot-tumored at the bottom of grandmother’s hope
chest. they were not always my jewels, but now i puppet myself in them & put on a show of her, resurrected & with her old feet, once shrouded in casket-flower, discarded. similarly, i have
wigged myself in safari barrettes & the echo of bra straps from my babydoll top. it was a kinder-whore phase when everyone presumed i was with child. the real story was one in which i match-
stick oleanders around my body, a vessel of poisoned milk. & so, you can guess i came to this bath as a way of shrouding myself from the illness of the plane that could have killed us &
what a shame it would be, death with its fingers in our mouths — the tragedy of never getting to tell how it was we acted in our exit.