Three Poems

Taylor Daynes

TWIN LANGUAGE

 

A hematoma is a blood field. A meadow that has a fence is a blood yard. What is a blood yard but a test-field for our toleration of other types? The neat blood of meters and the odd blood of English. The blood in the basin and blood spillage and terrorists. Blood drones and red queens. Clubs. Cups. My stars. A water foot. Twelve. Long lost bodies and their missing bloods.

 

My brain, too, and it as an enclosure similar to a sun, fusing a private energy to outlast, be out last and still outlast the corpses in the statued field, the blood then maggot blood long since vapor—outlasting in my unnumbered black plane.

 

The only bother was my big chest blackening like a melanoma is a reminder that the sun is poison.

 

I can’t tell the difference (can you?) between a beautiful woman and the foreshadow of annihilation. I can’t tell the difference between a drone and a berry. I want to eat them both. I hate the stickiness but I love its sweet burn.

 

I can’t tell the difference between my own love and my own brain. I can’t tell the difference between a penis and a broken heart. Likewise with my hormones and my heart.

 

There are things like faith I understand but can’t explain. For this reason, they seem equally to belong to everyone, so I give mine away to whoever is greediest.

 

I perceive the fence at the edge of the meadow, and you are claiming it is not there. I perceive that my body is my own fence. I perceive am full of fear.

 

I walk the world the picture of complaint—I walk in this barbed dress. You do not recognize nuns when you see us. My sisters and I are singular. And we have no claim on authority but our voices. We are abandoned mistresses. Nobody believes us because we can’t talk lines. We can’t talk lines. We jazz in a world hot on emoji. I, we, are angry at you. Why, dear God, why, can’t I follow?

 

And God replies: take a vacation from fear. Swallow the pills no one prescribed. They were a gift from your mother. Vacation is a construction of capital. Trip, take a trip. Evacuate your little fiefdom and tell a penis of your love.

 

This is a poem to the world out there. Stop having opinions. Stop needing order. I am also a frequency, a frantic trough, an energetic seizure. Where to go but deeper?

 

I am telling you, my friends, there is something lovely in your desire to connect. I know I am a hard case. I don’t want to be forgotten. My silence, it is a kind of gravity.

 

Depressives who dream with their country of cancer. This need to hold every tragedy between my lips. Pluck the drone like a berry and feel its awful sting down my throat. Vomit up the anonymous massacre. That’s one practice. I wish I could understand it. It’s this barbed dress. It’s this fearfulness. It’s you, outside, it’s you. I am so jealous of your fluent energy.

 

Sun, star, blackhole. I am the gravity inwardly collapsing. I am a twin-language spoken in silence with myself. I am a sister with no sister. My sweet big brother. Keep me from falling upward with your mass. Keep me from smudging the ceiling glass.

 
 
 

IN POSITION
 
: Fact God holds all the rumor : me all that :
 
Her twisted brilliance her intellectual stutter
 
(a sign : tiny brain stars crippling
 
mind-constellatory arrangements!)
 
All that I gave : the universe All that there collected :
 
A sacred mill : gossip I grew
 
so tired : being grist : others’ Eyes :
 
being abnormal : a double-headed copper Minted I :
 
Tire : having so and doing so
 
little I wanted a leader and jesus was that man
 
He was the only One : understand
 
how great i was The only one who believed
 
I was not the sum : my skin
 
His Finger : my scar that mirrors his
 
That is what I is

 
 
 

PRAXIS
 
Cloistered women of the 13th century invented
a sacré-cœur, the Christ-vision in which
he braces a dripping sword between two mounds
that are the right and left atria
of the upper heart. The mutual piercing
of spirit and flesh brings about an ineffable pleasure
that emanates from the core and infiltrates
the blood. These holy women likewise
located orgasm at the center
of their body, though I do not know
if celibate sex enters by other cavities
than the opening through which
you have penetrated me.
I do not know how we’ve come together
or where or even if.
 
 
—-
 
 
Taylor Daynes grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts. She holds an MA in Religion, and completed her MFA at Johns Hopkins in 2015. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Sixth Finch and Incessant Pipe. She lives in Baltimore.