09-14-2026
Shelly Taylor
This sonofabitch land had to be broken
In the holler time, I came home mules & a pine line. More than four months late the cotton’s unpicked, & not of myself this sort of severing; even bees couldn’t cut the mold & honey. I came back a daughter hands clasped into the alabaster light, was practically felled in my step & the trees that were, were rotten. If there was a road it did not symmetry, making prayer not the mode to receive. Easily felled as I have known myself to be & older now (I said I never would), when two feet, gallant hit the stone & the third eye bloomed. The better to see: eyes arcing in the woodline that run from the pond to there, I watch my windows. Eye control learnt from village deer. I peer into what maiden field, break what mule, my legs cross its back, the land more than my common going averted, dusting? There’s an oak so I must be more acorn than the cloudless ground up. With no rain the cotton blesses the stalk, an impossible fallow cycle & I don’t want myself to, or that’s a lie. (An eye so dark you can’t tell the iris from the darkness rest.) Put me ripened there—the roof is lit, is tin with tornado weather that will stay. Like comfort, so opposite from the fingertip pressed down upon the something inside. I’d rather strut down the hallway, hand on my hip, where it’s blacker tonight & roughly sown, but not so bad. You think a thing, you think & it is (so simply). Even when it can’t be: as in bed me down in nothing I know adds a horse-drawn morning. That which to adorn oneself with movement. As in morning shed a blue coat I wore all day.
Call the thing until it returns unbothered
And what came streaming: light / or, the unborn ones ruthlessly swamp-going in the form of gas—miasma? Did you say they rose up, become your old granny’s ghost on the dirt road / if on a movie screen: her face forever pinioned by the keylight? Oh everlasting nowadays, permit us hang our legs over the abyss see, I have been the right woman for you. (And they who choke? Call the preacher fast.) They’ll deliver you meat & milk daily for as long as you live in the country, a country house with an attic surrounded by a stand of trees (see: blockage & the wind shall come), a fence line soprano answers to rise & rise & shine. St Francis of the talking birds & hands, danger calling whomever remains so staid. That who is in my house? They are, the roads sponsor a return, & it may be funneling from the ground up & dust, & I will go then. In that kind of weather. Cotton stems a-flying, fling cherries, & the very trees bent. Father sulked. Closer,
keep your flashlight still, this bear / he just might choke me. Anyone can save a frog though certain animals are more or less tricky. Along came a spider & sat down beside ‘er. I engage myself with & as the photographer, & with & as the photographer I dress my red lips rightly. And you, you have suffered long & you have called on your mama; she disappears behind the screen. Line up your nuncio, line them / lead them out this dark alley (such is the world) / sleepwalkers & fathers, I settle round them like a house would. Gut oft the sheet music, alders bending under the holy micro & micro discolored. Let them sponge if they must but not on me; must I look a wretchedness / must my very breathing be so compromised? Probably right then, call the thing until it returns once more (bastardly, tail-between & broken), you have been the fireman, & I get busy with the rigging. A time for ashes is not so near, Vasco! You look right with a hat on but do things not so good for your eyes & now our tea is turning cold. I am fixative with protection: I wear shoes, shoes & armor.
If the pencil makes the trace of a shoe pattern then I am inevitably threading the bobbin / mother costume prop & time watching, you work your fingers & the outside wearies itself dimmer, says the sundown on my sketch paper gets gruesome. Shoeing it, in two shoes I come home: doctor take all my teeth. Father sulked, by morning light, a pitchfork for my two white sprig arms outreached. Up, shadow this, come and take shadow, come. When the day’s at its apogee, heart-line-meridian up! Don’t you go talking to my pigeons! When clouds move shadowing over the earth unbolted, wear your shoes. I bought mine for 15 dollars used & jeez, loved them better than any new pair. Girls in lace around a riverbed, shale-eager / the abutment of corner to wall where is spiderwebs. If I were a shopgirl all the clothes’d be red. Red & gray & creams & I’d pile mannequins one on top of the next but with no ill intention, as they would never be strangers or ill or depressed, eat their breakfast everyday in nice silence. On the hour a thousand spies eating pies, eating their heads off—the horse—the horse, though / has never been the invention of historians & our rivers are large & begin so small you might skip-hop across them on the dot of night. Cloaked. Lavender & oval the padstones, say what now mock orange, indistinguishable from the fencepost. These things do not exist I tell you. These do: the trickster in the story prone to winning. Name the thing ‘saint converted.’ Slave to saint to oh this blessed sight: go paint it with a sword. Give the converted thing a paint horse & some light, I might (oh will) like it. Caravaggio whom someone called a ‘dark horse.’
The man who survives a tragedy is never the hero of it. Aeneas told the story & is not so the traitor but the hero & so much so, besides. In the strictest confidence I have but few heroes, I call myself one, mama, & fear the birds as I offer them hand & feed. A tramp never changes the opinion of a policeman, & my private lapidarist shines the Ferris Wheel goes round & either you get on or you / (get down) pray. Still-life is the face painted, lips, by a bowl of oranges that is green atop the refrigerator growing dusty.
Trickster, I hung the banner the trees & said myself welcome home. I could save my life myself. And that which I love is then cumulous, wearing flannel, grows a beard & / is not then your awful bear with clutches roars so mighty into a still say not the moon. Vice of winter. I fear I am not the invictus, gas stations in the dark, what I might grow to be in the absence of an ablution. Piles of ‘I wills,’ thus I will rise before the noon & get started with my uncluttered hands which will clean & straighten through afternoon, Jolie Holland on the record player. This whole post-human funny thing an eye can catch & what else to do save live, the bus shuffles, stops on the street outside my window. Spotless now, the two broken up all over, near the window, are known climbers. The street kicks my teeth grind, the street bestows mojo: break any bones, son?
For the child you tell will be alright
Every time I drive I think of lighting candles at the mission. Drive to the mission and light a candle for someone who needs it. Such is this winter in the desert where sometimes there are coyote on the streets at night. Lions march across the length of my arm, like a mile in the far-off distance, the length of this arm. I have been one of them in dreams, grasslands in snatches out the window, yellow, and last night I said remind yourself of the lions in the morning ten times. Music, they say came to them at their worst hour and a plague took the city every couple centuries to restore it to its natural luster. Prescribed burning on the savanna, wolf-like they smile to keep their feet upon the ground. I think this wind is a contagion I could live without. So too technology, shareholders, the schoolhouse, and flippant invention. A mother who offends is a whole desert. I think of her and of being a lion. What is the thing that splits the rock? Lullaby, they say, old love.
-from Black-Eyed Heifer
Shelly Taylor is the author of three full-length poetry collections, B-Side Girls Knockin’ Sugar in the Gourd (The Magnificent Field, 2021), Lions, Remonstrance (Coconut Books Braddock Book Prize, 2014) and Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2010). She is the co-editor, with Abraham Smith, of the anthology of rural American poetry and essays, Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015). Notes from Byzantium (Black Rock Press, 2019), a book arts chapbook with artist-collaborator Eben Goff, is her most recent chapbook publication. Taylor lives in rural southern Georgia with her daughter, Maizie, cattle dog, Willa, and crew of feisty red mares.
