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i’m teething again,

have to build my own ribs over

it went in easy

and i felt my cage still there,

but corroded 

bones of milk teeth,

plucked 

but i can hear them,

a fever pinking on the daylight, just

reborn me 

and i will repent. 

sweet opacities sliced

to mark time

because they made me inside out with rifts

full up of things like

grasshoppers and menaces.

in the bed of my fingernails

sleep larvae 

whom i eat at times

So why these etchings?

clementine burns I assume I inherit

my fingertips sort through many bits of flesh,

bits of used organ,

inky clots

I'm screaming all the while.

why won’t i bleed greenish?

or sea-like?

crustaceans,

stalagmites,

my exoskeleton could cure

me,

were I to cease resisting bruise

but bluish polyps and silk

stains under buds

are far too pretty 

i must

excavate my limbs,

yearning for the day nothing

remains

but milk teeth 

and bony dust.

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in a clove room there are nine.

two conversations weave

on this side

and the other.

I ache my nod

to this side

and that,

sipping both,

unnoticed like many evenings who roam.

I plant between the gossips,

pursing my strangled root stems out,

picking up words from the floor tiles,

licking the terracotta clean

whispering please,

talk to me too. 

once I reigned over

kitchen-counter-living-room-talk,

cursing, blooming peach

on the glass tucked

in my thighs between

swallows.

we did frolics around dining tables soggy

with dew,

and I led the rounds.

orchards of bottle-throats constellated 

surface into Budweiser forests,

so we shrunk ourselves to 

one-inch-high and

hid and sought one another

among the glass trunks,

soaking in the foamy seas or floating

on bottle-cap-lily-pads.

and I would pick up 

a cigarette butt for a paddle and

set out across the open

ocean knowing

they would all follow behind.

Lulu Priddy (they/them) is a writer and visual artist who experiments primarily with poetry, drawing, and watercolor. Lulu’s work tends to explore the body, using imagery of nature and the corporeal to blur the line between the alluring and the revolting. Lulu graduated from Scripps College in 2020 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Media Studies. They’re currently pursuing various artistic and occupational pursuits. Lulu is the author of the chapbook Swallow, Low (2015).