What was rampant in me was not wisteria. Perhaps decay, or loss of reflection.
No one like me gets old, or so I thought, even as I watched the days fade into each other.
Was I no one? Which phrase means a grown-up girl: mica-gilded; pure myth; gone?
Thoreau might say I was trying to find the door to nothingness, that the wild was already in me.
However, I walked out my bed to find my skin, only to return moondrunk, bramble-laden,
stripped to sinew, a broken syntax. No denying how I got here, I laid down among the tall grass
and came up a specter. I came up everywhere.
Copyright © 2017 Taylor Johnson. This poem originally appeared in Tin House. Used with permission of the author.