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.