W 177th & Broadway

Taylor Johnson

All night you eyed the man I wanted to be;
my jaw flexed tight. Anger slipped into
desire. Easily he would rise. Easily you would
disperse, pleasure made into light:
what you want under him,
I put on to amuse—I, your worked
supplicant. Yes, love is looking away.
My desire greened in your dismissal. Was
technicolor and twilight-made and never
turning off. The city air hung humid
above our charade. What need I could fill:
to transubstantiate, to unravel?

Club 2718

Because I don’t have the juice or enough gold anything to enter, a room that occasionally exists inside of me is the poorly lit dance floor of Club 2718. Thirst is a way of knowing, not knowing. I was on a gin fueled hunt for big asses and music I could cry to. A woman almost twice my age asks where I’ve been and she shuts the door. Like any american what haunts me is my addiction to private property, not time or blackness. I want to love no one in particular the way I say I love my woman when she’s in the doorway and mad at me.

Taylor Johnson

2018

Nocturne

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.

Taylor Johnson

2017

States of Decline

The room is dying honey and lemon rind.
Soured light. My grandmother sits in her chair

sweetening into the blue velvet. Domestic
declension is the window that never opens—

the paint peeling, dusting the sill, and inhaled.
It is an american love she lives in,

Taylor Johnson

2019

Poems

W 177th & Broadway

More by this poet

Club 2718

Nocturne

States of Decline

Poems

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W 177th & Broadway

More by this poet

Club 2718

Nocturne

States of Decline

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