“Folie á Deux” is one of two  wonderfully surreal poems by Kailey Tedesco featured in our Spring 2015 issue.

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A MAUVE FILM COVERS EVERYTHING save the sun’s fingers. Only the sound of water in drainpipes and Maggie and Mike laughing at the black air of the television.

“Good Morning, America” shouts a woman with an exposed breast nursing a child – or is it a pig? The audience applauds. She nurses long after the child has grown and the milk has grown black, crying to the cadence of the laugh-track. Beetles swarm a piece of cotton-candy, a remainder of the child’s youth. They crawl through it like vermin in the brain. Ooos and Aahs echo as a man of melting wax goes shoe shopping. The yellow residue molds into the insoles. He lights his wick and offers this epitaph: “Only those who die, die young.” At last, the bearded lady sings and the show is over. She cackles for six hours of credits, pulling hair strand by strand.

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KAILEY TEDESCO is currently enrolled in Arcadia University’s MFA in Poetry program. She edits for Lehigh Valley Vanguard and Marathon Literary Magazine, while also teaching eighth grade English. A long-time flapper at heart, Kailey enjoys hanging out  in speakeasies, cemeteries, and abandoned amusement parks for all of her poetic inspiration. She is a resident poet of the aforementioned LVV, and her work has been featured in Boston Poetry Magazine and Jersey Devil Press.