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Francesca Kritikos is from Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Hotdog Mag, Witch Craft Mag, Fur-Lined Ghettos, and more. Her website is francescakritikos.co.

2 poems by Francesca Kritikos

MALL OF AMERICA

I vote for the same person
every four years:
Monica Lewinsky


One vivid memory
that I have
is when


my dad stole
a deep-fried Oreo
from the Mall of America


Later I drank
cherry-flavored Tylenol
and went on a roller coaster


Another vivid memory
that I have
doesn’t feel like a memory


more like someone’s been
deep-frying my body
since I was 15


I would write about it but
it is not a unique situation
for a girl to find herself in


 

 

 

LITTLE GIRL BLUE

I want Glossier Stretch Concealer & Perfecting Skin Tint
in shade Light. My insides are shade Blue.
My skin is thin, but I can cover all that up.


When Karen Carpenter sang “Your hope is getting slender”
about the Little Girl Blue, did she mean that she’s losing hope
or that her hope is to get more slender, or both?


Pulp’s song Little Girl With Blue Eyes goes
“Little girl with blue eyes, there’s a hole in your heart
and one between your legs / You’ve never had to wonder


which one he’s going to fill / In spite of what he says.”
Jarvis Cocker wrote this song about his mom.
He states in his book Mother, Lover, Brother


“I came across a picture of my mother on her wedding day
in which she looked very young and apprehensive.
My mother’s eyes are actually hazel.”


Blue bruises the truth.
So is blue a cliché way to talk about sadness?
Or is sadness a cliché way to talk about blue?


My apprehensive blue eyes are actually hazel, too.
My hope is getting slender, too.
My thin skin burns blue.


Emily Dickinson wrote a series of letters
addressed to Master. No one knows who Master is.
In one of them she writes


“Master—open your life wide, and take me in forever,
I will never be tired—I will never be noisy
when you want to be still—I will be your best little girl.”


So women are meant to be girls
and girls are meant to be little
and little girls are meant to be blue.


Little girls can have so much power.
In the Salem witch trials, the accusers were predominantly
preteen girls. Women were hung on their word.


Dead skin turns blue – lack of oxygen.
When I was a little girl I felt for the first time
a hole between my legs, heavy-wet with bluewater sadness.


It still gapes open sometimes to let the sadness seep out
like a dead witch’s pooling blood.
I don’t know why blue needs to happen.


It’s hard to scratch my way out of this ocean.

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