Allegra Wilson

When I put these teeth on, horns pop out.

Shall we walk together in the gutter beneath our city? Beetles know me by my boots. They smell
choices you didn’t want to make stinking in your throat. 

Pink and wriggling, some of them. 
Mucus-slick, the tiny tongues of people you never kissed, some of them. 
Grape-candy purple choices clack together like glass marbles, some of them. 

Tiny golden fishes: swimming, flailing. 

All little larynx jewels, gleaming in lamplight. I have a wooden 
jewelry box for you to put them in. You will be glad 
I kept them when you find them. Buried 

in our bedroom. After we’ve been knee-deep 
in mattress foam and cat death. After 
the thinned fabric stretched over the hole in the world 
has been torn through by scalpels and lack of scalpels. After 
we make two moons that float like kites or pitch 
towards the earth at utmost velocity without regard 
for the gravitational pull we produce. 

What relief you’ll have, then, to know what I’ve saved for you. 
This bindle, this nosegay, this velvet sack of smallest runic bones.

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Allegra Wilson (she/her) is a writer living in Northern California. Her chapbook, song & ruins, received the 2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award, selected by Stacey Waite. She is the author of a micro-chapbook, sex party at the opera house (Whittle Micro-Press, December 2025), and her work has appeared in MAYDAY, ANMLY, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere.