Poetry by Bronte Billings

Mantle

When we were young
hands slid up our throats

to pluck out pearls. We had our
little pieces, the sticky fingers

hidden behind our uvula tutting
secrets to our tongue. For a

moment we were iridescent, smooth
untouched changelings. You bit

off fingers by their knuckles and I
smothered palms in the empty spaces

of my gums. I tried to tell you
how to hide your silky whites, cover

your lips with cerulean shell, learn to
live with the fingers tickling your

trachea. Why can’t we be young
together, pearls under our tongues and

fingers washed of prints. You opened
up sooner, incisors jagged and

cut—there were different rings
to us. Small slit lines on the inside

of our mouths. I tried to tell you,
keep closed longer, let time carve

itself out in you. When we were young
I showed you how pearls are made

of the hard grain stuck in our
teeth. You thought it was only one

bead we had to give. To bloom
once to never again. I swallowed

my whites into black pores and you
softened your skin to muddy pulp. I

wanted to cover you in crusted seafoam, but
all you saw was sand and yellow bruises.




​Pore Smothering                                    

I used to pinch
my skin until I found
estranged folds of
goldfinch breeding
diluted spots across
my flesh. My mother never
told me yellow
undertones fortuned
better foundations.
I am pink
rosacea ridging along
fattened limbs.
Cover me, I cauterize
open gaps of gummy
insides. The women
I know compromised
stability for soapstone
tongues. As in, they
flushed out their
lungs with talc to
breathe clean. I try
to be like them. Dig in
to my thighs
make mountains
of roaming red
ridges, charter
the moon in my
palms, gather myself
in one hand and
smother what doesn’t
fit.

​

Bronte Billings lives in Northeast Ohio with her not so balding black cat beauty. She earned her MFA in poetry through the NEOMFA. Bronte is the recipient of the 2015 & 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2017 Leonard Trawick Award. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Jenny Magazine, Bone Bouquet, Pussy Magic, Pinwheel, Salt Water Soul and Barnhouse.

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