The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: FOREVERHAUS by Kaley Tedesco

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mother moonlights as bloody mary

she split body & spirit

one in the raspberry bramble with her motherbody

the other stuck in my windowpane painted white

i am not allowed the chocolate i stole

& so i’m sent to the hall mirror’s singsong, sheetbody, & wallgleam

my eyes become invisible thistles underneath

& the motherparts make me overly precautious

i stretch on the bear rug kissing

its snout la belle et le bete

this whole time i think i have been digging

for hell just to prove it’s a place i haven’t already been

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.