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.