The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: FOREVERHAUS by Kaley Tedesco

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mother

under your cheek it’s all blood & i see it. by the lake so dry, you cart me
through the forest in nursery rhyme. tonight i am either precious

zirconia or go far from here else find my heart-pieces, boxed.
childhood friend of mine, i take you to the haus full of golden

junk we love with every carotid artery in our one-day bodies.
you’re-not-my-real-mom beats me upside the matted curls with a tooth-comb.

for the umpteenth time, fear not— mayday is soon & the dancers
will surely spike my cranium with ribbon. now my very heartbeat is the name

bloody mary & my very corneal tear is a mirror with glass shatter to the hundredth
decimal point. the wrong time portal has me sutured to its underbelly.

this is not the natal chart i came with. just once i’d like to live in a future
corpse, rotted to a pile of improperly laundered delicates. that’s right—

i’m made of lace & that night you storied me about ghosts so hard,
they black-magicked my retinal cavities. bow down bones of you.

i am an afterlife for at least one small thing. unmothering as an attempt
at good works is what you should call it when you speculum your mouth

& all kinds of new genus roses fall out.

This selection comes from FOREVERHAUS, available from White Stag. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Kimberly Ann Priest.

Kailey Tedesco is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing) and Lizzie, Speak (winner of White Stag Publishing’s 2018 MS Contest). Her newest collection, FOREVERHAUS, is now available from White Stag. She is a senior editor for Luna Luna Magazine, and she teaches literature and writing at Moravian College and Northampton Community College. You can find her work in Electric Literature,The Journal, Ninth Letter, Fairy Tale Review, Black Warrior Review, and more. For further information, please visit kaileytedesco.com. Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021), Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (Finishing Line Press 2018). Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Borderland and many others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Embody reader for The Maine Review. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.