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by John Allen Taylor for Brionne & Kyle here we are sitting in this red velvet lung of a bar sipping martinis & asking for extra olives our six knees knocking together like the night’s percussion & though we’re not in love we can pretend for one evening that we’ll wake together our throats opening & closing out of rhythm like fish in a torn net one of us slips through first then another the bed lies empty as usual & our hands stretch back into being unheld here we are slipping gracelessly into the steel bodies of taxis & airplanes thrumming a catastrophe of city & grit into the space between us my airplane touches down in Michigan which I am still practicing to call home here we are singing into our own showers with bars of soap & dead sea creatures into the splendid fogs of morning & lateness I can’t tell you how afraid I am how the time collects like coins stacked on the eyes I try to open daily now here I am eating stale airline peanuts & putting away the mower come & see the garden the sweet peas are spent but the squash is wild & cheerful come & look the sunflowers sway like a mob of mourners, chickadees preening their seedy faces come & see the garden come & see it’s not so terrible to exist  John Allen Taylor’s first chapbook, Unmonstrous, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in March 2019. His poems are published in DIAGRAM, Nashville Review, The Common, Pleiades, and other places. He serves as Ploughshares’s senior poetry reader, coordinates the Writing Center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and has recently started baking sourdough bread. Say hello @johna_taylor. |