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K.T. Billey




Self-Portrait as Sulphur


As in, that which occurs often,
  narrowed by revelry

Calm never comes that comes
  but even if I were the wine

  that’s relatively clean heat

Powder for each cheek
   papier mâché

The tonic for internal

Call me hot stuff.
Spin spidersilk hoods




Sublimate anything
  and the name

Call me brimstone.
Sing my lungs and bathe
  the lashes that spell
in seams
and war.

to all
of wrath, rising steady
as steam along the highway

for every house.

of hallowed ground
and scraped-up girl.

complaining is a burn
         purgative by nature.

so you see
not light but edible
darkness—the ship above
         the last white whale.

into manageable form
flowers. Is flower.




the letters
the brightest salt.






K.T. Billey left rural Alberta (the Texas of Canada) for an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University, where she is now a Teaching Fellow. Poems and translations are upcoming or have recently appeared in Phantom Limb, The New Orleans Review, Prick of the Spindle, H.O.W. Journal, Palabras Errantes, and Other Voices magazine. She co-curates the Lamprophonic Emerging Writers Series and is proud to be a Girls Write Now mentor.