Taylor Payne: Four Poems

Pebbles

His ghost haunts the cornfield across from my grandma’s house—clipped ears and that mangy kitten coat—and I wonder ‘who could kill a little thing like that?’ My mother’s little lover, his first and mine next.

I look at his picture and wonder how she could miss a thing I never knew, if she feels like I have been there always, or like he was so, and softer, and never will be again.

I imagine the shrapnel passing through his silver-soft skin, and if he thought about his mother as he went, who left him for me, making me the killer or at least in collusion with him.

Does she love him always?

I hope the same for me.

Bodily Alienation

Am I human?

Or French

Because

Simple bodies are

Often just physical

engagements with

Timidity, uncertainty,

And hesitancy.

Language accounts for

More violence than

My virgin fist

But testosterone is one hell of a drug.

So send me a message

on shame—

God knows I need it.

To Lie is To

Today I wonder if it is better

to tell a lie so innocuous

you wonder why you told it at all

or to tell one so big, so grand

it might just haunt

you at your own funeral

and, today, I wonder how

it is to be loved and to love and

to still lie, and is to lie to love?

and last night at the bar with a

West Virginia ID is not to love

but to lie, and to buy a drink for her

that is both to love and to lie

I Don’t Dream

of better days,

or cleaner water

over loose bandaids

covering knuckle-punch

scabs formed in love and only

ever so and I could

have never hurt you if

only I knew, if only my mother

loved me more or my father, less

so my head wouldn’t still be filled with

this buzzing,

which never stops,

and I only ever did what

I knew it was right, I did not

know you would feel like that, bloody

and bruised. From me,

who doesn’t dream.