Lodging by Stephanie Kaylor
lodging
by
Stephanie Kaylor
the other world rewards me
with memories
blank eternally
as a photograph,
shapes and colors
the remnants of their explosion
out of context
at land
there was a flock of starlings,
I could not tell you anymore,
not even if the creatures,
breathing,
surrounded me again, here,
now
I would only see a monochrome
grouping, I would only see
the whole
what more could you see
when one of us breaks
or cloaks herself in new silks?
the great changeover armed itself
in nothing but the delusion
that you were always master
and these are all your tools
far-sighted
I see myself at your side, eye
-to-eye, inside which is still a tincture
of the time before you and I
in my eye too
was the house, the glorious
overthrow of the ledger
the markings of our losses
I never saw
the inside but as spectator
I knew, with all the windows
leading to all the rooms
that I could house them together
there were no padlocks
here nor a single car
not a telephone wire, a time
or a name or a face misplaced.
Poetic Statement: Let me mourn. Let me dream. Let me see you not as how you present yourself to be but how I envisage. Let me write my story, let me turn the pages, let me bridge subject and object with my own brand of ink. It isn’t white ink, ink of life, the glorified rape of the canon, sowing its seed in anyone’s lap. It’s the red ink, the ink that transcends the permanence of the whole thing and rewrites, retells, the nagging voice in the background your history sought to cut out. It’s the ink that seeks not to hide glitches but to bring them to the center light.
Bio: Stephanie Kaylor is based in upstate New York where she is completing a MA in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is also a current MA student at European Graduate school, concentrating in narrative structure and desire. Though her musings are not political in content, she is an ardent supporter of activist causes, including sex workers’ rights and prison abolition.
