Poetry from Paige Taggart
Horses Are High
Tonight she tires under spell
What wave
Tired and bathed in that liberating light
It’s so ridiculous the way beauty shoots off
And gets lifted
And strides into a current theme
An artist’s statement read
“I had no pain so I made it up”
Paint frantically for 5mins like yr in heat
Then stop
Recoil
And belong to that old space
Rhetoric
Devices nowadays make us purely technical
Who we thought we’d be & who we actually are
Not unlike using Silly Putty to pick up
A newspaper cartoon
Lymphic angel now sing to me sweetly
She put ginger in her crotch
The water bends the surface of expectation
Donuts itself
We sit alone
When the warning overhead
Tells us to gather
—–
When a storm is pending
Horses approach one another
Come close to make a home
As if war and a bunker
As though the naturalized position
Of a collective unconscious grows
From threat
The success blooming from your shoulders
Critique the way a field darkens when the shadows of storm clouds press on
In it an absence collected
I loom before I break into a crowd
Beads around the brow line
The stress
Hold my hand
Nobody goes into the middle of a field
When lightning is about to strike
If so
Sit low and tight
The ground is your friend
MULTIPLE LIVES
Now that my neck is in my hands and i’m having blood drawn
i see multiple figures wrap around doorframes and feel a hyper sensation
the dizziness is licking an ice cream while wandering through a labyrinth
dictating that stress is the underside of all bad habits
this feels like making-out with a puppet
my head feels disingenuous and connected through a standing stick
my arms are clearly worked by myself
but my tongue is a bird trying to feed its baby
i don’t know which way feels more like me
as stage props i feel skills bursting
sunsets me into a corner where i backdrop as just a shade of orange
doors closing in to make an exit more welcoming
here we elicit carbon shaped memories and record them
if i cry my way out of this it will be the first time that parallel lines ever intersect
i try to explain that even these temporary grievances form alliances inside your dna
making permanent homes in the cross hatched shaped of this internalized scarring
i’ve recently learned that you can write an entire poem about the body without using the word body
i think by day 187 i’ll have found a way to be truly successful at this
it’ll be one of those poems where people say it takes the top off your head
no disfigurement pun intended
though it spreads itself naturally as lathering sunscreen in shade seems to emit hyperbolic concern
i told the doctor the other day about my family medical history
grandfather’s heart conditions, grandmother’s breast cancer, my mom’s lupus
in it i held hands with a kind of imminent condition
almost blessing myself off this planet
it’s appealing to not suffer the disaster of disease
the origin is in the landscape
makes shapes even in the crazy wind
MOST OF THE TIME
Most of the time
My head feels empty
A vast expanse of nothingness
Emerging has been killed off
No emotions
Feedback loops
Fire subject nagging at the
Pull of brain chord
Diseased in fact
All together angelic
Haunting apropos & wasteland
Demigod and idiot
All together curt and stylish
Licking butter off a bayonet
Scrub or light a speechless fire
Feel something in between
Neither flesh nor horizontal figure
In sticks lying down
Like taking a collapsible bath
worthy
And breathless
Hinging on the absurd
Can’t take notes worthy of notetaking
Or host a party in the middle of a forest
Weary are the thoughts of travelers
Or passerbyers trying to move in
You can’t comfort me with yr head of ash
Jaws lacking something
Drop open for talk
Look-up the weather of your heart
What can we do to stop this hurricaine?
This eloping festering
What bridge
What tidal wave
What elongated body bag
Traverses now
Libations Kept Private
Plaque and Shine
Paige Taggart grew up in Northern California and has lived in Brooklyn the past 11years. She is the author of two full-length collections, Or Replica (Brooklyn Arts Press, Dec 2014) and Want for Lion (Trembling Pillow Press, March 2014) and 5 chapbooks, most recently I am Writing To You From Another Country; Translations of Henri Michaux (Greying Ghost Press). She runs her own jewelry business (mactaggartjewelry.com).
