TIEZST “TIE” TAYLOR
Afterlife

	after Victoria Chang

father as a funhouse mirror: somewhere in that mess is my reflection.

Mama says my love is too thick,
and thick love clogs up a man’s heart.
She says men prefer lukewarm love,
room-temperature women
with 25° C hearts.
She says love tastes best chambré.
She says I should be careful with love,
that women have a tendency of playing
Russian roulette with their hearts,
that men have a way of creating murder-scenes
with blank cartridge and empty barrels.
Mama says I have the kind of body
that sheds dead skin and splinters,
the kind of hands
that burn sandalwood and napalm,
the kind of mouth
that bites into boundaries.
Mama says loving cannot do me good,
that my heart looks like a shooting-range,
men like loaded pistols,
that I am splattered with the carcasses
of all I once loved.
 
Mama says I love the wrong way,
that I kiss with my heart first,
with my lips second.
She says I shouldn’t allow myself
to kiss the edge of a mirror
inside a man’s mouth.
Mama is scared for me.
She says I talk to men the wrong way,
that love is my native language,
Arabic my second.
Mama says my body speaks love so fluently
men will want to hear its different accents.
She says men are good at pulling death penalties
out of their jeans,
producing leashes from between their teeth.
She reminds me my tongue is not a honeycomb,
my chest not a sugarcane field,
my feelings not raw dough.
Mama says men will not always know the difference
between me and a buffet-reception,
that they will drop by uninvited,
that they will ask for free sampling.
 
Mama knows about us,
knows how I lived inside your heart on credit,
housed your body on rent,
like neither of us could afford the price-tag
attached to love.
Mama knows I loved you
like there was nothing more poetic
than collateral damage,
like there was not enough wreckage
in the world already.
Mama knows how our hearts chafed together
like the boughs of a tree that ached for fire.
Mama knows I’ve got used to kissing stingers,
sharing my bed with artillery.
Mama knows loving you was an act of hospitality
towards everything I would eventually die of.
 
I remember it hurt,
the first time my heartbeat synchronized with gunshot,
the first time I shaved glass shards from my skin,
the first time you showed me
how to recycle my severed parts into poetry,
the first time I realized my poems were matchsticks
and I am addicted to the smell of burning.
Or, put more accurately:
This is how long it takes from heartbreak
to feel safe in a silo —
All I know is bearing a heart like mine
can only be an act of faith.
 
I remember mama telling me:
“Azizati,[1] I know you are angry
and ready to break things,
but please, do not be one of them.”

The songbirds are declining
like credit cards. The woman
stating facts in the aviary
reminds me that mourning
doves make milk, secreting
the liquid from their throats
for their young. The cardinal
mom divebombs us twice, 
then returns to nest building
like nothing happened, but 
my heart is still flinching fast.
The barn owl’s face looks
wood-carved, like we could
chop down an oak and find
this face among the rings. 
Her name is St. Louis. All 
of the birds here are named
for their places of origin.
The red-tailed hawk is 26-
years-old. I don’t remember 
his name, where he’s from—
but I smile when I realize
that in this place, I am
Phoenix, also bird, and as
all the birds here know, 
we’re never just the same 
when we put our hollow 
bones together again, but 
who ever said we wanted
to rise back up unchanged.

I said a living girl is a dead girl. I said my guardian

angel is racking up debts that I can’t pay. Winter is a 
debt collector. A living girl is a bled girl is a girl milked 

of her innocence. Hey you, I’m looking for directions

to a place where I won’t get homesick. Where the ground 
doesn’t smell like a lottery ticket. Where the sky’s gradient 

doesn’t shimmer like a blue raspberry gas station slushie. 

The last time I asked that, we ran off west through Nebraska.
Then we changed our minds and drove down to Texas. Wind 

turbines gaged the earth like a punk’s septum. The flatter 

the earth, the bigger the sky. The bigger the sky, the louder 
the wailing. I’m gonna live there one day. Go ahead, call me 

crazy. Call me cowpunk. It’s true: We don’t get to choose

where we’re from, but we get to choose who we relate to. When 
the doctors told me my eating disorder was killing me, I said 

instead, I was dying of desire. I still desire a wet ring of my 

strawberry lip gloss around your mouth and the curls pulled 
out of your hair by a cotton pillowcase. I still desire testimony 

carved into screen doors. I clung to you like the spit-soaked white

bread from my grandpa’s fried peanut-butter banana sandwiches 
clung to the roof of my mouth, like “I’ll Never Let You Go 

(Little Darlin’)” clung to its chords. Give me one more time to 

prove I’m okay with not doing it right. Give me one more time to 
prove I can not be good and still be yours. I rehearse requiems

in the knotted knolls of the night. The moon chaps my mouth.

                 after the music videos for Blackstreet’s “Don’t Leave Me”, Sisqo’s 
                “Incomplete”, and Aaliyah's “Try Again”

In years spent cross-legged under the guiding light of MTV, Lisa Franking my notebook and coating my lips in pink lemonade Lip Smackers just so I could lick it off, the 90s, in all their wisdom and generosity, prepared me for two things: quicksand and heartbreak. I left them ready to sing, fist to chest, brows plucked and pinched, pocket full of polaroids. Ready to build my very own monument to longing. To haul myself up its sharp edges and teeter there until the corners of the frame darkened to vignette. Romance and the epic of its loss was mythology. The tower was made of women’s faces. Every tower was made of women’s faces, as though that was all we had to be wary of, but there are entire infinities that can, without preamble, take the center piece of me. Backyard canoe. Sidewalk sleeping bag. November bee bent at the false altar of my peony tattoo. Not once did my Discman get snagged on the way the body grows more translucent than a body should be and I, alone, crooned a high note in honor of the orange cat. R&B taught me how to fall, howling, to the grass, how to bottle feed a white tiger, how to defy gravity, to try again, again, again, but there were too many mansions and not enough mentions of the sexless wreckage of unannounced lasts: braiding the silken silver of my grandmother’s hair, holding my father’s hand and feeling small, or my son’s and feeling big enough to block the wind. And there is always wind. As for quicksand, it never looks the way it did back then and it turns out there’s no point in fighting it. You have to be willing to go under. It’s all love asks of you. The only thing your one life wants.

Grandmother forbade menstruating women
of our family from stepping out after dark.
On the first day, we picked nits and lice,
oiled and combed each other’s hair,
braiding it into dangling ropes. On the second day,
we embroidered hibiscus flowers inside
tight wooden frames. By the third day, we reached
the long end of our patience and silken desire. We knew
ways to open the latch noiselessly and leave
rose teakwood doors to the courtyard open at dusk
to hear the white owl flap its wings into the arc
of time, to inhale the scent of night-blooming jasmine
opening to the stained moon. Let the flickering lamp
die out early. In the sound of anklets closing in,
it was not often that someone arrived smelling of
sandalwood and myrrh. It wasn’t often that we sipped
palm toddy or tasted hemp leaves. Long afterwards,
in the luminous stillness of dawn, the wind circling
nutmeg trees gathered shadows of terracotta
figurines we knew from the textbooks of ancient history
of our burial grounds, curvature of their waists, fullness
of breasts and lips much like ours, in the rippling waters
of moss-grown, abandoned stone well.

I come from a long line of time travellers
—by which I mean, we all suffer from the chronic illness 
of being elsewhere 
—by which I mean, generations of gazes
locked on the yellow bird outside,
sipping from a puddle 
that contains the whole muddy sky
—by which I mean at any moment, 
I could be in a song, a mustard field, Calcutta 1856,  
a lover’s arms or the spiral stair of a DNA helix
—by which I mean my grandfather, stuck 
in an I do that did not fifty years ago
—by which I mean beds wet, sheets soiled,
and vegetables growing cities of bushy, white fungus
—by which I mean short salary slips, empty passbooks 
and wallets thin with change
—by which I mean I have loved people 
before I could set eyes on them
—by which I mean my second cousin sleeps on the floor 
of his condo with thirty outlawed cats, 
subsisting on crackers to afford kibble 
—by which I mean adult friendships built on trading in spider facts
—and lost to human truths 
told long after their time
—by which I mean grief is a country 
and we are its most faithful immigrants  
—by which I mean my uncle scrubs the sink at 2am 
because microbes multiply overnight
—by which I mean a favourite spoon, a safe number
and a ritual squeeze of sanitizer before leaving home
—by which I mean our babies, born with their jaws pre-clenched 
—by which I mean my little niece speaks of Egyptian queens 
like she used to swallow pearls in vinegar with them 
—I mean we’re always dancing across the double-edged blade of when
—I mean an obsession with stars and birth charts and 
the constant dread of at least one calendar date
—the power to peek into ten futures and be paralysed by them all
—I mean speaking out of two mouths 
with not enough room for a gasp
—I mean there are civilizations being blasted to smithereens 
in my head 
as I drink my morning coffee
—I mean the shrill song of here and now 
always summons thunderclouds in my chest

The sky doesn't know 
what to do. Black clouds

between patches of blue so bright
they're almost manic.

Warm sun, then a downpour again
as something dark passes over. 

Atmospheric clarity
with a hint of woodsy rot.

Today, not even a professional
meteorologist can tell me 
 
who I am or might be
by tomorrow.

It’s all alright darling
drop your act. Say that you know
what you want.
Pull the toy shaped like a hand
gun from the night-
stand & open your mouth
like a baby dove waiting
for morning to come.
Your lover enters
from the bathroom right before
you pull the trigger.
She replaces the barrel
with her thumb.
This is what it means to be
American. To always want something
in your mouth. Virginia
Slim. Toothpick. Golden
reed. Say that you know
what you want. Stand
at the top of the tower.
Monument of indulgence.
Shrine of desire.
Drop your panties
to the wind. Baby,
this is the sound
of an American. A cooing.
A suckle. A land
flowing with milk
& money.
Say that you know
what you want. Someone
beautiful to notice
your swollen bulb
of suffering. Someone
to place the tip
of their thumb
on the pistil
of your tongue & watch
as you massage the red
plum hidden beneath
the bough of your bush.
A ripening. Someone
to say good job
& half-heartedly want you
to stay. Pull up
your bootstraps
like a good western
boy & ride off. Prodigal
son on horseback
chugging across state
lines. The stars lining
the sky like a Christian
Louboutin belt.
This is what it means to be
American. A game
of role play where you act
as your own Messiah. Running
a great distance towards
an unending dark
blue sky. Hoping
it leads back
to your childhood.
An eternal American
summer. Green
pools. Boiled pigs.
White girls with pink
tans. Mouth full
of juju bees.

You should see these cabbages of mine
fan their generous green leaves…and their size—
massive, stretching in an endless line.

I’m aware an emperor is divine,
and it’s kind of you to call me wise—
you should see these cabbages of mine.

Oh, yes, how the city did shine,
her marble monuments reaching to the skies,
massive, stretching in an endless line,

but here, since I have resigned,
I have secured a valuable prize:
you should see these cabbages of mine,

as plentiful as grapes on the vine,
as big around as one of your thighs—
massive, stretching in an endless line.

I’m afraid I must respectfully decline
to return as emperor, but please, come, rise,
you should see these cabbages of mine,
massive, stretching in an endless line.

lounging in your maroon dress at the end of my sentence—
your sweaty hand reaching out into the silence, always
sipping on the hush of a lover who swears off erotic
pleasure—the split between poplar & tree—the pressure
to live off the surface of your cold, cold knees. Because
my loaded, rupturing heart sinks down in reflection pools
at the center of that old cemetery—now, bird sanctuary.
Come with me & whisper conspiratorially—the only
way I know how—to the red cardinals writing poetry
on the burial site of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—
he has rested long enough—so long we have arrived
at that terrible precipice, again. Say we live in his death
box with the third wall cut out like a diorama, & we are
made of clay—remade by something traceable—not dust
but the curvature of your pursed lips. You are the line I
hold in my chest with too much certainty—I cannot
release you without this pause about how I am angry
with the gentleness of your teeth—the stinger to your
bee—boomerang of history—O, how we threw it—
throw it all back to the sky—