maybe never by Kailey Tedesco
it’s the dream again where i fall asleep & never wake up
the fun house ride with no tram-car ending, with the birthday
party & the birthday party & the birthday party all my candles
collecting dust— their own cult ritual. even my ectoplasm glosses me
& what do you know about getting soaked? about shattering light over your mother’s
favorite carpet? about the drowning / the dream itself? it was pretty-pretty
before i emerged, bagged fish-sheer, 60’s technicolor, a prom
in two pieces, & blood at the corners of my mouth. i exist now
as a vessel for a barber blade snuck in the bustle of my dresses
& whosoever traipsed drunk up the god-mountain remembers how i lived
wearing a crucifix & how i found stones with holes
for looking at the bad things. my canker sores heal trystwards,
treasure palaces full of faux coins & rubies i place in my brain-box
labelled news. i’m awake now, i think someone
once told me. it’s a story we like to pass around, a moist-germ,
its own kind of birth.
may 15th, 2020Kailey 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 Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, Blood Bath Zine, Fairy Tale Review, and more. For further information, please follow @kaileytedesco.