Incarnadine Lament
Iron stained fingertips
at the bloodhungry mouth of morning.
We wear our sighs
like blankets.
Keys searched for,
keys found with
quaking fingers.
We enter through the front door.
Too soon
for bone
for cartilage.
The country music station
clots our eyes
feverdrunk
among swollen happiness.
Fever breaks
when a delicate elderly hand
reaches for heaving shoulders,
lips whisper corroding shards
of consolation.
We are asked to leave through the back.
Weep
until the air
fights back.
Weep
until we realize life
has never been easy.
Fingers ironstained and quaking,
drink and remember
the incarnadine colour of losing.
The Weight of What We Carried
Some dreams die in the womb others,
in the toilet
We don’t float anymore, lately
we prepare.
Our clutching fingers hold aloft tests
that only prove
we can stare longer, read deeper
into unstained disappointment.
We are not a mistake, you were not
a mistake.
Nor you, you, nor you
not even the absence of you
loved and loved and loved and
dreamed and carried.
I press my hand into a hopeful,
new-filled belly,
I say, girl, girl, sticky
and sweet
she’s there
You press your hand to my heart
and say
This will break us but we won’t die,
please stay.
***
Dylan Taylor is Dad who sneaks off in the small hours to write. Dylan is a writer who spends his afternoons as a dinosaur. He has work published in Entropy Magazine, Pidgeonholes, JMWW, WhiskeyPaper & Hobart. Find him on twitter @MacTaylor89
Rejection Letters 