My energy is iced and overpriced
Foam at the lip
Buzzing and dripping
A tenement radiator
The terry cloth beauty queen
Paints her teeth yellow
A unisex nursery

I am on an all fingernail diet
Wire fan tropics stir
Spring mattress paradise
Floral, sweat showered
Soiled, yet not deflowered
Skin creased and quilted
Cement luxury
Breathes exotic parrots
From Greenwood Cemetery
The highest point in Brooklyn
If loose lips sink ships it's no wonder lip gloss sticks
It's embalming fluid

Hawaiian print
Rubber sole
Gasoline, game show
Smiling up from postcard prison
Shred cuticles to gift wrap ribbons
Weave webs of Budweiser condensation
Satellite disk palmistry
Ultraviolet radiation

They found her in the gutter by the secondary school
In nothing but bobby socks 
Overexposed photograph
Developed in milk

Bronwen Brenner attends Baruch College Campus High School, a small high school in Midtown Manhattan. “Curdled” is this year’s winner of the Christopher Lightwood Walker Literature Project Ernst Pawel Student Writing Award.