2 poems by kailey tedesco

MATERIALIZATION

This is the drink of a cardboard uncle gummed up with ambrosia. This is the drink of myself, a condemned mansion with hedge-maze arteries & I am flocculent with cabbage roses. Do you remember shooting my old blood between the eyes like a rabid dog? It is wrong to believe the bread is Christ & eat it anyways, so I shrike it to the bottom of the pew & tip the table once a week. There I come blooming from your nostrils in clumps of atom-less peonies & yet you’ll still cluck your tongue at the snap of my toe. ​

PSYCHOMETRY

Back barn, wooded over & zapper-lit. A piece of top-skull, curved. A tiny moon or enlarged fingernail. Hands placed around it, finger bones feeling the hollow of their ancestor. Hair still mossed to the head, stubborn against plucking. A prayer. And then another prayer. And then a question. To what lock does she belong? In the aftermath, the death-mess keeps its chosen pronouns. She-bones, their-bones. Re-forms a whole identity. Something to feed. Tea sloshes around the bowl & the aftertaste of calcium & dust delivers us to the old bride. 

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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, will be released from White Stag in 2020. She is a senior editor for Luna Luna Magazine, and she teaches an ongoing course on the witch in literature at Moravian College. You can find her work featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, Bone Bouquet Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and more. For further information, please follow @kaileytedesco.