Teething & Reprise

Randi Wright

Teething 

these are growing pains. at the street
we never take, tears clustering cerise
salt on tequila glass rims, bloodied brine
sticks to fishmonger’s knife shucking her rind
like an oyster shell. bike crash, how she speaks

two years thereafter, herrings stuck like heaped
talc to top of her mouth, she repeats the
grinding, and again, ’til her mouth unwinds
into a wide wound. this is growing pains

and this is maturity. no bikes. cleats
barb-wired over teeth, lips screwed into pleats
‘til a sneer ruptures the face pruney. child
now non-child, but child-enough to smile
–layer, thicken, harden the vernix cheeks
and cauterize the molted growing pains. 

Reprise

after Sharon Olds and her poem “Burn Center”

dishwasher air, a swollen sky with all its hollow, sunken cheeks.
when my Mother talks about the summer of 2013, she talks about it
like it's her Burn Center. the rows of welted cotton on her arms, the murky
bathwater gazes & her burns blossoming into syrupy ringworms, shellac bits

crackling; her damp, hot dumpling flesh–i think of her–pressing into chairs,
the spume-like yeast, the charred shins. she says it was the driest summer 
under the willows’ jowls. two girls, smelling of watermelon hair detangler their
little toes plunging into fatty marsh. i could pick at the earth’s bald spots then, hover

above the peach fuzz drizzle. the red dirt. the dank mildew. with fingers trembling;
sinewy, gooey, and purple i showed my Mother a spot, blackened, mapley,
with red-hot jam in the overripe, cancerous womb of the earth. peddling
soil, saying this is where a Fire once was. i finger the mussels of tin foil ably

saying, this is where the Fire left saying, this is where it left
saying, where it left saying, left saying, left-off  

Randi Wright is a sophomore in high school, currently studying poetry and the intimacies of language. She hails from central Oklahoma and has been fortunate enough to receive an honorable mention in the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest by Hollins University. Her poetry often reflects on the nuances of family, the complexities of memory, the modern experience of bildungsroman, and the suffering of others. She is guilty of impulse buying overpriced smoothies, cuddling her cat Oscar, and reading the same book–again–while three unopened books sulk on her shelf.