Three Poems
Taylor Sykes
Making Love in an Abandoned House
Feel as the wrist feels, bent back as far as it goes. Here’s to breaking
and entering. To knowing no one will come looking. Push open
the wide front door and slam it. Hard. Let’s dance on dirt floors
and shed our walls too. Press our bodies together on whichever surface
we choose. This is our home now. No echoes but our own. Our history,
the house’s history. Our darkness, its darkness. There is a darkness we create
when we shed light in lieu of contact. Just look where the chandelier fell.
Passion is not unfamiliar here. After all, the house invited us, didn’t it? Brought us
to our knees, asked us to do as we pleased. Here, on the staircase, and there,
on the windowsill. Slamming again and again against the stained glass.
Our love commingled with disaster, with downfall, with abandon, at last.
Back on My Bullshit
Overall I’d say it’s been good to be back on my bullshit. I haven’t slept in nine odd weeks and I keep forgetting to remember to eat. My skin has never felt thinner and my eyes are ringed with a silver shade named Is it Regret or Is it Rage? I’ve been taking long showers to cry and masturbate. At least I’m writing pointless poems again. Maybe I’m better off bitter and eternally prolonged. Longing is an underrated emotion, wouldn’t you agree? You wouldn’t? That’s a shame. Surprise, surprise, turns
out, I’d rather writhe. So fuck you very much for jumpstarting my heart. Don’t worry, I won’t forget to write. I’ll just carry on my merry way and keep getting lost in my own vodka sauce. I can cook up incompatible realities all day if I choose. Take up smoking again before I run away from home. One day I’ll change my name and lose myself in some new mirror. But I think even if I managed to abandon everything about myself, somehow I’d still find you.
Coffin-Kept
I keep you in the coffin under my bed
My bed itself is a coffin for affection
If coffin were a language
My bed would be coffin for distance
You never got so close to me
Now I keep you under, I keep you close
You used to kick at the boards
A restless death, no quiet going
So different from yourself in life
Beating the boards with splintered palms
The sound that cradled me in sleep
We were both messy sleepers
When I turned, you turned, my mirror man
That was our embrace
There were those nights I almost crawled in there with you
But that coffin was not made for me
Both our bodies could never share such a space
My bed was my coffin and we were death stacked
After months you grew quiet and lay still
You were complacency curled
I kicked the coffin like a dried wasp nest
Just let me die here, you begged, voice spent
But I was not merciful, I was as selfish
As a widow deserves to be
I did what I could to keep you
Though I knew a coffin-kept man had no hope
When I writhed at night, you stayed still
I cried your name and you could not hear
You were barely breathing then
You went the night I slept with another
Loneliness was my excuse, even as I imagined he was you
He did not know your bones were beneath us
By daylight he dissolved and you were gone too
Had you heard? Did you care? Does death envy life?
Alone now, my coffin creaks against yours, back to chest
In the note I ask that they burn us together
In a coffin built for two
Taylor Sykes’s writing has appeared in The Masters Review, Slash Magazine, TIMBER, Miracle Monocle, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, NPR’s All Things Considered, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the James Hurst Prize for Fiction and a 35 in 35 Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Originally from northwest Indiana, she has an MFA in fiction from North Carolina State University and teaches writing at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
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