Sam Taylor’s first book, Body of the World, was published by Ausable Press and is now available from Copper Canyon Press. Work from his new collection, Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series, 2014), has appeared in such places as The New Republic, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Orion, New Letters, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry Daily. Whereas his first book primarily explored themes of mysticism—world as self, […]
As it is given, it is whispered, it shall be lost. It begins with your name and the marble block that becomes your face. It begins with a city where your cry is small as the seeds of coriander. It begins with a claw foot bath and a wind of pine, mother’s black hair, a […]
Feel the old bricks, color of burnt crimson, and the shipyard ruins, windows shattered; sadness rolls in off the ocean, you can feel it— the woman in the motel combing out her hair before sleep, the faucet drip behind her. Is it inside or outside? Are you the sea? Are you the broken board churned […]
A beacon moving through the darkest crime scene my friend said when I told him I didn’t know what love was. Two months later, Joel woke up reclined in a truck that had no doors or windshield, his left shoe missing, the driver’s seat beside him empty. Somebody was calling his name— no, not his […]
Where is the doorway into this impure world? We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. When he turns the faucet on, her blood begins to flow, the man who lives below them starts to sing. All morning, the mourning dove. All mourning, the morning. Your call will be answered in the order it […]
“For God so loved the world, He gave his only Son. . .” — The Gospel of John, 3:16 The perfection of God that rose Jesus out of its body also put forth two Mexican girls, four and five, running alone down a city street, a wind of white dresses and red ribbons, hair as […]
Today I walked over a real mountain. With real feet. A heart that splashed in the center of nothing, a red world. Tonight, I am staying out of the arms of my love, so I can feel my pain like a tree standing alone in the night. ∞ ∞ ∞ Watching the invisible slaves we […]
When you are sailing and the wind on your brow makes your outside feel like a blue heart, don’t forget that it’s dark inside your pocket and that the pocket watch that is not there lies under a glass window in downtown Houston where a Mexican boy thinks of his grandfather, points, asks how much […]