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a good mirror is nothing but a door

the stench of wet pennies mossbeds my footpads. i wishing well myself
through it, circle salt around all my old bodies, a sort of hopscotch.

bloody mary confides in me now—i was not thinking of ending my life
just leaving the kitchen, just sleeping alone in the grass

staining my skin the same green as the paint for our faces
but everyone balked & everyone swarmed & everyone sang.

nothing here is secret nor sacred. i like to sleep woodtucked, too.
i’m in need of blood work but it autocorrects to bloodworm

& so it shall be & so it is—my veins oozing with pest. i wish i were
with her sooner, collected in the dirt, a real pile of doze.

now i chant until my mouths seep & my mouths drool
& my mouths fill with limbs from some parlor of a pastlife.

out come the oil lamps hung swinging from my teeth. i hollow myself out,
make waxdolls of bloody mary still clutching rosaries by the lake.

i’ve always hoped the bathroom vanity would pry for me,
wet with its tongues & in i’d crawl to take her place, forever.

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.

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spiral at the heart of the haus

the shower whispers says bloody mary—
her name or mine or a knock when no one is at the door

neighbors dare each other to ring the bell broken for years
noiselessness existing against the fear of the haus.

i dry off make the faucet water a discarded shift
no longer of any use to me. some say the haus grows from within,

a pie is lazing on the sill daydreaming of its fruit bursting
gems against the heat of the oven.

now it bleeds from the crust & i, too, bleed something
that is not blood according to your legend. my toy bears

jolt across the room my old dolls cry at the gables their spouses off in some war.
bloody mary tries to find me in the walls.

when you die she says i’ll keep your parts inside the haus forever
the parts that i inherit a pendant

two jadeite bowls black magic roses casketed in gold
all the rings of your life & the fingers that filled them.

perhaps i’m planted sooner than is natural. my tulips bud
on a warm day in winter die out within the hour fertilize the dirt

with their deadness. a doppelgänger blossom or just another resurrection.
i’m in here i call to her from within a wall that does not exist

in her memory of the haus. she will never find me.

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.

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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.

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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.

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legend

the importance of the candyhaus is soft-sleep, voices spoken
in this ungentle rendering of my gingerbones. my birth took place

in new jersey, palace of fountain malls & ricotta tongues. i arrived
to that world pickled in the juice of my own past lives. my teenaged

mother kept her distance, found too much of me in her sleep. the first
night of air-breathing brought me no dreams, but talk with the dead

is ashore within me, my openings all shut up with salts. i was
fawn-bodied, now just a head, a cameo appearance carted off

into the pine barrens, no licorice for snacking, left wrapped
only in the scrying lake. this upbringing of caravans left me

at the altar of a folklore i’ll one day come to champion. mrs. leeds,
motherwitch, i am child thirteen, if you’ll have me in your shack

of sugar toys & smelling salts, shack of sundries & mortar-cobbler.
it takes a village—the majority rules to swath me in a pumpkin

carving. mischief night is lost to time, burned celluloid—theda bara,
vampirequeen, in my every waking thought, gone before i enter.

this starpower, beloved to me, never blamed my stopping
heart on the ghost of my past relatives, never knew my body

arrived to this world laced in the ectoplasm it left with & surely
none of me was left over for the breadcrumb following,

scrubbing the dirt road to find the sour ribboning of the witch
who bore me, still alive & crowned in pinecones. there was never

any devil in your cow’s milk—only me.

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.