Stephanie Kaylor
He Tells Me to Take Care of Myself
The days the smoke stretches
into our eyes from the wildfires
of Seattle. Burning, like everything
else: summer in New York,
we keep every window shut—
the sun, so brazenly
the reign of Leo, charging in
more forcefully
in the wake of confrontation—
the barriers we pretend to keep
papering the houseplant leaves
into shrunken, failed histories
we’ll sever before we ever read.
Beside them already,
new offshoots, little fools
who don’t yet know
that soon, it will be coming
to take them, too.
There is always more to say
when you let there be, but then
there is no answer from the other side.
A flower in the throat is rotting;
winter in Louisiana will never come.
Perhaps there is no such thing
as a perfect environment, an Eden,
prospering for everything,
so we simply raze them all—raze
the stakes, raze tirelessly as late July,
the days the morning after stretches
into afternoon and it is time
for both of us to leave. From his floor,
I gather my dress of green silk,
costuming myself as something watered
& wanting to grow.
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Stephanie Kaylor is Reviews Editor at Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is completing her PhD at UC Santa Barbara and curates the Sex Workers' Archival Project. She lives in Brooklyn.