Release

Fluorescent punching bag
of hospital hallways—

time sticks like gum
on a drunk clown’s shoe:

blue-black
          blue          black

—blue. They let you go
home. Your mouth dry

from the methadone. Menthol
cough drops smell like childhood

sick days. Something was wrong,
everything was fine: You were

there. I go out for air—
wildfire haze floods the horizon.

A sign in someone’s yard:
“In nature nothing exists

alone.” —Rachel Carson.
The self’s a seething mass

of other—microbial cells
outnumber our own, my genome’s

mostly yours. I cling to us, flash-
freeze moments with you,

force them to become memories
like divers squirming into

too-small suits, hunting
new species on a dried-out reef:

What they bring back is never enough.

* 

Rental

I slept on the cot in your hospital room;
you were in too much pain, too anxious

to be alone. In the apartment we rented
for your final months, I sleepwalked—

I dreamed I was next to you, hurried
to get up, afraid I’d toss and turn and

hurt you. I was halfway to the door before
I woke. When I try to know your life,

I unfold questions to more questions.
One day, the chapel a few blocks away

is unlocked: black paintings of nothing hang
on octagonal walls; four sets of three rows

of benches face each other and the empty
center of the room. Shadows flow as clouds

pass the shuttered skylight. The only sound
is the glass door opening and closing—

tourists, mostly—nobody’s allowed to
speak. Nobody can tell me what to do

while you’re dying. Stay in the day.
Outside, a festival for the solstice—

drummers dance by a reflecting pool, families
picnic in the grass. A stubborn teenager, my mind

refuses that childhood trick of immortality:
Presence. When I round the corner to your room

the drums stop; people dissipate. I wait.

*

Progress

My sister put her socks in the freezer
to kill the fabric moths. Maybe futile;
they’ve probably laid eggs in the rug.
My family is a crumbling institution:

old age, cancer, Parkinson’s, old age.
After the funeral I pass interstate
flyovers and wonder why, out of all
we could have built, this is what

we chose. “How’d you pick my name?”
I ask my mother. She can’t remember;
it belonged to ancestors on either side.
In the time we have left, I want to ask

what matters most, what we should do
now. Instead, chores, go to the store—
the checkout clerk’s shoulders slump
as she starts her shift, forces a smile:

“Next.” I see us all as infants—flying
planes with tiny hands, working for
large corporations, having overpriced
cups of coffee. I try to explain this idea

to my friends, but they don’t understand;
they’re not grieving. I’m still mostly
the same: I want to reproduce, to make
meaning, to feel like I’m achieving

something. We lose a pillbox, search
for a while, and when it reappears
my mother’s caregiver tells us about
her patient who lost his glasses, how

they looked everywhere, then finally
found them on the bridge of his nose.

* 

100-Year Flood

A flash flood rolled down the Blanco and destroyed
my grandparents’ house. They waited on the roof;
when the rescue boat arrived Pops wouldn’t get in.
Beside our rented cabin the stream overflows.

My friends aren’t worried; they want to walk
in the rain. We pass the wood pile, the white water,
cross the bridge between the cabin and the road.
A gully carries my eyes like a leaf. I want to be

an ant riding that leaf. Someone suggests we
turn around—sometimes what others want
is best. Or isn’t. They convinced Pops
to give in, and he got in the boat.

I add wood to the fire and watch it consume:
He thought he could save the house if he stayed.

* 

Means of Production

I took scissors to your blood-red velvet couch;
I wasn’t satisfied with the fading pink lines
my fingers left across the fabric.

When I was a brat you’d say, You’re only acting
like one. In first grade I demanded a handheld
video game console and you said, Better save up.

A few months later I had enough—with nothing
left over for any games—before I realized
I wasn’t allowed to buy it. Two years later

on a field trip to an apple farm, I had no money
for cider but dug in my pockets anyway.
A callus began to rise from the furrow

where a baseball’s seams had spun away
from me again and again, fastball fizzing
to thwack the mitt. One pitch wasn’t enough—

the hitters caught up. Change the grip,
add some break: a slider. Switching poses
for luck, you did yoga beyond the outfield.

I skipped rocks at Fécamp, innumerable,
identical, and kept the smoothest on my desk
as I wrote an allegory of humanity.

It was reductive but you encouraged it;
you understood my wonder. Today we walked
ten miles and paused for lunch in an orchard,

blossoms clinging to the apple trees. Outside
the window, squirrels forage and bury seeds;
the shadows of oak leaves cross my hands.

On the couch I make the first incision.
I am always in that room. Stop, I want
to tell myself. Be still. Perhaps, Be nothing.

*

Wilson R. M. Taylor is a poet and writer living in New York City. He was a winner of the 2024 Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, the 2024 Bacopa Literary Review Fiction Prize, and the 2025 Toasted Cheese A Midsummer Tale Contest. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Chronogram, South Dakota Review, Vox Populi, Yearling, and a number of other publications; his poetry has also been featured by WNYC and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.