Kailey Tedesco | Lizzie / Lizzie | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Kailey Tedesco is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing) and These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press). She is the editor-in-chief of Rag Queen Periodical and a staff writer for Luna Luna Magazine. She also performs with the Poetry Brothel. Currently, she teaches literature courses on three campuses, including a course on the archetype of the witch. Her recent work has been published in Electric Literature, Phoebe Journal, Sugar House Review, American Chordata, and more.

Kailey Tedesco's Website.

Rag Queen Periodical

Also by Kailey Tedesco: These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese we are turning gold / we are dying Promise Ring

August 2018

Kailey Tedesco

Lizzie / Lizzie

It’s a rush to connect with a spirit. One house with brick walls & one house with green paint. Some floors ashen / must-wet / powdered in doughnuts we licked from our palms. I need to keep your aural clippings / cigarette dust / lavender placenta. You kept uteri & a baby ghost-born. I’m that baby’s daughter & I’ve no ear for tongues — I hear an orphan / barren / suckling light. I hear bad static & CPRed dandelions, attempts to connect. I bury your music boxes, the ones I’d wind all at once. 100 ballets haloing my detachment. You could see meals through my opacity: biscuit heart / corn lung / gravy appendices — I’m eating. Now come find my porcelain teeth — I’m bleeding.

"Lizzie / Lizzie" is a poem from a larger, book-length project that explores the duality of the Borden Trials and of Lizzie Borden herself. The book is narrated by a spiritual medium who is trying to contact Lizzie for answers, but ultimately finds there are lines blurred between Lizzie Borden and the self. "Lizzie / Lizzi" is intended to be a sort of capstone for this project that plays with the language of death in a way that makes it clear that so many of us have this desire to take in stories of death, especially deaths that are so distanced from us that we can treat them as a tale instead of a history.

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