Spitting Teeth

By Ashlee Karlar, Alison Paradoxx and Chiara Gabrielli

Dear reader,
Skimmer,
Finger licker,
Page flicker,

Before you peep and peruse,
I ask you one thing

For me, these words, when typed and printed are flat and too smooth.
They belong with your lips, your teeth and tongue.
Roll them around and savour each one.
Take big bites, or nibble at edges

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paroxysm Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781876502256

Book preview

© Paroxysm Press 2019.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher - apart from limited reproduction for the purposes of review, criticism or research as allowed under the Copyright Act 1968.

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SPITTING TEETH

Ashlee Karlar, Alison Paradoxx, Chiara Gabrielli, Nico

ISBN 978-1-876502-24-9

ISBN 978-1-876502-25-6 (e-book)

Cover art: Meg Wright (Red Wallflower Photography)

Ashlee Karlar

Alison Paradoxx

Chiara Gabrielli

Nico

Ashlee Karlar

Dad

Death is never pretty the nurse said

We arrive kicking and screaming and sometimes we leave the same way

Even after you flatlined you squeezed my wrist

Neither dead nor alive

Still salt

and water

and grunt

Refusing to let go

Perhaps we were more alike than I realised.

Nectarine

My co-worker asks me to describe my boyfriend and I answer in safe pronouns they, they’re, them.

but you’re too pretty to be gay & my mouth opens like a wound.

I hold her hand on the train and a man calls me a worthless dyke my sexuality leashes me to his voice box, and he can drag me where ever he wants to.

The taxi driver refers to my girlfriend as sir and I ask him how his day was. She tells me I am enabling ignorance, but I tell her I am surviving.

My dad doesn’t care that I am gay but tells his friends my boyfriend couldn’t come to the party.

I smile and change the subject.

It feels like eating a

summer nectarine and swallowing the stone.

Ode to my stretch marks

My stretch marks refuse to hide

behind coco butter or fishnet.

They vivaciously snap gum as they sun themselves

Pink string bikini fragile

Open mouthed and burping on a beach towel.

On weekends they parade the streets in combat boots and eyeliner;

all tantrum and stomp and yell

refusing to apologise for bitch face

spitting at the feet of men who tell me how to smile.

On my lower back a nursing home of 11 silver

grandmothers quietly play cards and share stories about

the old days

They like to slow dance, smoke cigarettes and shimmer.

My stretch marks make a mattress out of my inner thighs

they reach with red fingers

as they scramble for more space

Loud, raucous, greedy,

they trumpet their proud vicious feminine

they shout the woman inside of me is bursting at the seams.

Smoulder

When I was 13

I was told that if a boy ever touched me

to call fire instead of rape

that bystanders would find the idea of flames more

alarming than the sexual violation of my