These three poems by Tessa Shea Whitehead use linguistic pyrotechnics to spotlight feminine personas and experiences, pairing the beautiful with the grotesque…
by: Tessa Shea Whitehead
It Pairs with Cain
head back —
exposed orange
liquid filaments
sluicing teeth
wounded me
a baby’s feet
washed
in seawater
how a head pops
under pressure
float off
behind glass
sand of sea
a fingernail
cropped
a loss
of the whole
to a grain
The Prophecies and If They Happened
I. “I’ll never get married,” I said.
That was the day our portable A.C. unit shaped like Yoda sputtered and shut down. In the LA heat, a nasty inflorescence from wanting to say something grew in my throat and rooted in darker bloom. I cut it for a vase. The whole violet cone and kept it until the end of what’s told.
The man who would later ask me to marry him lugged a big wood mirror off the wall and wore it as a mask. When we met in the ice rink, I saw myself in him and gasped – “How pretty!” The ice was flitting with kids learning swizzles. All he could say in response was something about how he worked in Big Data, and me and the mirror both rolled our eyes. “You are a perfect angel,” the Mirror said. In my head it was my older brother taking my hand, healing a wound I’ve always had saying,
II. “You don’t annoy me at all.”
The time my brother wished I was an abortion dissipated as cruel as mist. In this world, I’d never written bitch on his favorite football. See, it was my fault how he came to hate me. The Mirror being empty when I stepped away also came to hate me. Drunk and stumbling, he plugged his thick infected weapon into anyone. We went to Mexico once where they convinced him to buy a timeshare. It was on an unswimmable beach in Cabo San Lucas near a bar that smelled of obesity and vomit. I tried to dissuade him – there was no ice there I could eat. But he bought it. This is when he got me a ring, the ugliest he could find, and texted me a picture of it. “Is that a question,” I said, and he threw it at me.
III. “She’ll be a Vision,” my parents’ friends all said. “A Vision in White!”
I was chosen for this unhappiness because of how I look, even my brother hates me. My parents clapped at my childhood – “How pretty!” they said. “Now twirl.” As slow as a snowglobe, the tutu lifted as I spun in miniature. My hometown a picture. “Now get on your knees.” The tutu crushed, held down and soiled by a man’s hands. If it’s gentle, it isn’t touching. “Careful,” they said. “Don’t scare her away.” Trapped, I made happiness from my computer. Hunched over the blue light in my room, I bopped to “Topless Dancers of Corfu” with a hundred others in their rooms watching. Alone together. He couldn’t stand that. The Mirror. For all his sputum and plaque, I could still be happy anywhere. He couldn’t stand seeing me dance on the ice, an audience of thousands cheering me on when all he could do was watch. A mirror.
IV. “You’ll never know me,” I said and left.
Carrying it all in a comically large bindle on my back. The embarrassment and rage when he took back the ring saying, “I never wanted to marry you. I just didn’t want you to go off and be happy.” If women knew what you said about them, they’d make a choir. I can see you snapped by the blissful wind of our words and forgotten. “You make me want to die” is what I took from that engagement. I am the horrible poison. The ice dancer twirling. Etching a rough edge, miniature but with the thick hooves of skates. The satisfying slice a reminder you’re in blades. A whetted weapon. I cut the muscles of my upper back from classes of ballet. When that squat robot whose hose hung out the window of our home finally gave up, I thought how will I ever get rid of this beast?
Indigo
has a funny name she knows she has
a Casio watch and four toes on her left foot.
People cringe when they see, “what happened!?”
but she came out the womb that way.
The watch was her father’s and forty bucks swiped
from his nightstand the day he kicked her out.
She’s still not convinced that he’s her real dad
but the watch, that’s definitely hers.
A “what a pretty kid” kind of upbringing.
She used to walk the mall, an imaginary runway.
The salesgirls all rushing to play mom
and dress up. Be a dolly.
Now a strict non-believer, no astro,
no witchy, no nothing too woo-woo,
people are enough magic as it is.
She rolled her eyes when her mother sent,
a rainbow catcher in the mail after
Indie first left.
ATTN: My Only Born
Indigo May
Some Motel, Illinois 60914
Rainbows heal written in her mother’s scrawl
feathery on a Post It note, a parting gift
to a town that sounded like bouillabaisse
every day Indie said, “I will throw that away.”
But she couldn’t.
Here it is, in a window in the dark night.
Tessa Shea Whitehead is a writer and former NFL cheerleader — just two of the many weird lives she’s lived. Her work explores the performance of femininity and subverts it with heightened language, mythic figures, and broken forms. Her debut chapbook Gold Hood was published by Bottlecap Press in 2025. She won the Red Noise Collective poetry prize, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was longlisted for the Palette Poetry Prize. Her writing has been published in Beyond Words, Allegory Ridge, and others.
