Poetry

(Paige Taggart)

Paige Taggart is a recent recipient of the NYFA fellowship and has an e-chapbook with Scantily Clad Press, Won’t Be a Girl.  Her poems have appeared in Alice Blue Review, La Petite Zine, Six Finch,  Blazevox, Elimae, Caketrain, Eleven Eleven, Boog City, Agriculture Reader and others. She has poems forthcoming in No Tell Motel, EOAGH, and Microfilme Magazine.


To People Who Sometimes Read

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Sometimes the only thing leaving me alone is me; bang, bang, all numb language passing through the veins. The surface is alone at night. Is grey and not-withstanding the pressure of being looked at. What it is more than anything, is that not everything would like to be constantly observed. Someone needs to take over my mind and wave a red scarf for the bull to pass through.
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As high as anyone can see is the flock of geese spread on your inner-arm tattoo. Meaning narrowly and just to one’s self slash insular. If I were to say I’ll bring you something and show up with pork and beans, you’d be grateful but I’d feel guilty all the same. Longing to give beyond what I’m capable of. So instead we get high and see shapes flying across the horizon, say that’s a bird with an ice-pick, and that cloud is the bird’s parking lot, we speak without any hesitation, as our ancestors did.
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The morning blinds me with its own concern. I would be surprised if I didn’t spend the rest of my life with the man I love. I have been tossed through a receiver. Through my past bits of information lay down forever. An old radio heart pushed aside. My laundry is done and I have nothing else to do for the day. Gone battery, gone plugs. I don’t need electricity anymore, infrared through the walls. 




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I said yesterday, the fair was as big as your eyes. I meant the day breaking-off. When the sun went down, I sawed the couch into perfect halves. This is my knack: organizational skills, trying to hone-in on the immediate. I told her, your poem is like a wild goose chase of the naïve. She buckled her knees and fell off her O. I didn’t think it would hurt. I was wrong, which is historic. 





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I heard if you’re in the Grand Canyon, the only thing you’ll hear is the sound of being in the Grand Canyon. I’ve made up for the fact that barely anybody knows this, or cares to address it. Facts run dry at the lip of splitting open. Only seven climates can be rationed in such a way as to actually alter your body temperature by eighteen degrees. The instance of mapping out a spread of land so wide it takes thousands of pieces of paper and one cactus to hold it down from the wind. Walls are clay-red and the sunset is a different color everyday. I’ve never been to the Great Canyon but I feel closer to it.
 
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If frozen, locked inside a vessel for eight hundred years, poetry would not change. Music would change, ink would change, my list of insults. Predictions don’t always work the way I think they do. I do the math that allots hackneyed results. Risk is like making a poem that won’t change for eight hundred years. I feel like I already told everyone I love how not to die.
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