mouthful of cavities (girls can be miserable & women get consumed) by Alicia Turner (Appalachia, 26)

mouthful of cavities (girls can be miserable & women get consumed) (a Gillian Flynn erasure) 
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​​                               Do what you want: just like me
                               Do what I want: I might like you
girls/dream in diaphragms and dandelions/dead roses/stinging red and
ugly/mouth cinnamon sticks in their sleep/wake to/yawning bad luck/girls/are
prone to misery/play crack the sky/slow-motion murder of the senses/die over
and over/made sick sicker sickest from smiling/baring teeth/like candy-coated
cavities/that crack/until the light gets in,/until the cough of effort is
all too loud and staying seems static/becoming a woman is weaponry/with a
little bite—we ache once, hard/a changeling/exposed until we’re

eradicated/it’s the finality that leaves a mark/to live in the shadow of a
shadow, like a tidily, clever riddle/born backwards in an unmarked place/girls
become women/and women remain girls/high and raw like honey/sweet and
round like butterscotch/plucked from bad timing/to become a testament of
dark, sticky dreams/we know more than most/that daydreams can be
dangerous/is bound to consume us/with our bodies left behind


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Alicia Turner holds an MA in English and is an English Instructor, poet, & storyteller. She believes that writing is welcoming yourself back home. You can find her jotting down confessional, conversational tidbits of every-day life somewhere in WV. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Four Lines (4lines), CTD's ‘Pen-2-Paper’ project, Voicemail Poems, FreezeRay Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, Luna Luna, Defunkt Magazine, Sybil Journal, The Daily Drunk, ExPat Press, Rejection Letters Press, Screen Door Review, J Journal Literary Magazine, Sledgehammer Lit, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, Cartridge Lit., Space City Underground, Anti-Heroin Chic, Pink Apple Press, Luphyr Magazine, The Expressionist Literary Magazine, among others.