ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Taylor Byas is a fun-sized Chicago native. She’s spent her last six years in Birmingham, Alabama, where she received both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is currently a first-year PhD student, poet, and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, and others.
Poets Resist
Edited by Christine Taylor
January 13, 2020
Edited by Christine Taylor
January 13, 2020
Geophagia
“If Mike Espy and the liberal Democrats gain the Senate we will take that first step into a thousand years of darkness.”
— from a tweet by Phil Bryant, Governor of Mississippi, 1/2/2020
They say eating the soil might
be good for you. To have your pale
chiclet teeth redlined
by clay, your ocean-clear
mouthwash bloodied when you spit
in the sink. Mistake this for a split
lip, a back-alley beating
that has left the tongue fat enough
to rick your cries for help.
Your grandmother tells you to avoid
the clay cooling in the shade
of the taller trees, and you don’t.
After rain, the clay goes garnet, clumps
of wine-dark up to your
elbows, smeared around your lips.
My God, you’ve gone
cannibal. They say eating the soil
might be good for you
with all its minerals, the blood
that wept from swollen
black toes and dried in the shape
of another country. In death,
someone fed this tree. After a few
mouthfuls tonight, you feel
a little madness creeping in. You watch
the sun set while sitting back
on your heels, its half-step into darkness
packing the world into red
clay. This is blood-warm, the heat
of night closing in like a mob. Bribe
the sun to set on you instead, let
it light you aflame.
This poem was inspired by a tweet from the Mississippi Governor, and in turn made me think about Mississippi’s violent history, along with the history of eating clay.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
