“These poems are hilarious, joyful, dirty, deeply felt, fucked, totally inappropriate, gorgeous.”
—Kate Zambreno

 

About Pretty Tilt:

Pretty Tilt examines sex, feminism and gender roles through the lens of early-21^st century girlhood.  Influenced by both the Gurlesque and by post-confessionalism, these poems focus an unflinching eye on the strange, ugly, and beautiful paradoxes of growing up female.

 

Excerpts

 

Pie

Like the little lightning of the slit where it knits

together,

faces squiggle when I say

the only thing I really want to do is have a baby

& let it all be damned, bedamning with your lowslung belly

full of lead.

I see your honeyed baby fat & lower my neck, I raise

you a gold-plated doorknocker,

& the man continues coming on my slightly jutting,

slightly perfumed collarbones. You’re

less slim-hipped than in sixth grade

& I said let’s all eat pie after pie

it’s good for the bones, baby

then the bones twisted to fairylights

& the big Nativity scene went

all watercolored on the lawn,

almost amniotic where I put my prayers,

each same puked puce

prayer in rivulets, unbraiding.

 

Here is what I like:

I’m lying in bed eating madeleines & reading about the case of the onion vagina. A man & a woman were drunk & had sex & the woman woke up alone with an onion in her vagina. It was in London, 1961. She thought it was a tumor, but he left it as a “parting gift.”

Sex tip: Discuss merits of breastfeeding.

Sex tip: Advise on the best cleaning kit for your weapon.

Remember that time I had a stomach virus & I threw up after I took my birth control? Your face went white & you wouldn’t even finger me for like a week. I said I’ll Google it but I’m pretty sure I’m barren anyway.

I’m lying in bed eating jellybeans & reading about Marilyn Monroe’s pelvic x-rays. They will be sold at auction by her former gynecologist’s family. The x-rays are rumored to be have been taken before a miscarriage in 1954. In black & white, the scrollwork of her fallopian tubes.

Sex tip: Recite peak fertility days for the last five months.

Sex tip: Shoot out the porch light with a .38 special caliber revolver.

Remember when I asked you what you think about during sex & you wouldn’t answer? so I said When we fuck I see a scrolling marquee of your name up in lights surrounded by fireworks & laurels, raining joy & gumdrops. You smirked meanly.

Sex tip: Tell him where to aim.

Sex tip: Tell her you like a little belly.

Remember after we had sex & I said, Look at all those Eastern European babies running out of me? I’m proud of being Italian & Irish, but really, you & I are both just white. Eastern European babies just sapping their way down my leg.