McKenzie Teter

Where Do You Open?

“Where do you open? Where do you carry your dead?”
—Heart, Maggie Smith

See? Under my tongue, lying flat
as knives, are the women of my life.
Some as familiar as flesh and lips,
some as transparent as a fable.
They were swallowed whole by their lives
and revealed to me in manageable pieces.
An anecdote here, a joke there, until the vision came together.
A painting so large, I had to step back to see it fully. 

Between my fingers and in the creases of my elbows
are the men. Though I have tried and tried, something
about them won't come clean. Generations of stubbornness
I have yet to crack. The keeping of tradition can be
a violent act, and I have the knuckles of my father. 

Deep under my nails you’ll find the fibers
of one boy’s shirt—the result of holding on too tightly.
Between my toes are someone else’s track marks.
Dangling from my ear is someone else’s jewelry.
A Frankenstein's monster of my own history. 

Unearth my chest and the stories will emerge gasping for air.
I am nothing, if not wide open. A fruitful thing
with a seeded core—some sweet, some cyanide.

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McKenzie Teter is an alumni of the University of North Carolina Wilmington's MFA program, where she studied poetry. Originally from Ohio, her work focuses on working class themes, family dynamics and her Italian heritage. Her work appears in the Italian Americana Review, Voice of Eve Magazine, Foothill Journal, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. She can be reached on social media or through her website: @kenz_teter & mckenzieteter.com