Tag: Taylor Swift

Two Poems by Maggie Rue Hess

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A Friend Complained on the Internet about Repetition in Taylor Swift’s Lyrics

how she’s
always singing
about midnight,
but to me
the ubiquitous lyrics
are about dancing
in the kitchen –
though maybe
it’s about us,
sidestepping with knives
and spinning alliums,
avocados, sugar jars,
twisting tops
and saucepans
and gliding
around each other,
structured by touch
and the spaces
between it –
maybe we’re
two rhythms
reaching for each other
like the hands
of a clock
striking midnight.

*

We Were Girls Together

        for H.S.B.

We were indelible magnets,
poles turning over & over to pull
& repel moments or weeks at a time.
That last campus spring we drank
a mix & match 6 pack of beer on the roof,
giggling rebels about to graduate
from the small town, small school lore
of our own importance. Our days together
spread like our picnic blankets, pale
thighs & pages sunning. Girls then
& now, girls still, proclaimers
of fierce affection unworn by adulthood
or routines. Each of us moth & flame,
soft, dusty wings with a hunger
to rend. Flung North & South,
we constellate the petty needs that drove us
apart with the gentle knowing
that drives us back.

*

Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her partner and their crusty white dog. She serves as a Poetry Co-Editor for Grist: A Journal of Literary Arts. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Connecticut River Review, SWWIM, and other publications; her debut chapbook, The Bones That Map Us, was published by Belle Point Press in February 2024. She likes to share baked goods with friends and can be found on Instagram as @maggierue_.

Illicit Affairs by Kristie Frederick Daugherty

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Illicit Affairs

Stop fucking around with me
and suggesting fresh watermelon
in the middle of winter.
Always wanting the fruits
that are out of season.
It was you who ate all
of my Rainier cherries last summer,
you fruit thief.
Their season is short
and they are up to nearly ten dollars
a pound. I saw pits under
your side of the bed when I looked
everywhere for my missing
red hoop earring at Christmas.
Thought the cat
might have dragged it under there.
I’m only saying this because
you will never read it.
I’m only breaking the fourth wall
because of how you
called me by my name
in a bedroom way that
you knew sounded like love,
texted my own name
to me over and over,
keeping me perched on
a windowsill of almost ripe.
The mistress of misdirections:
You must have eaten them
faster than you remember,
I did not touch them,
I’ve never cared for cherries.

*

Kristie Frederick Daugherty is a poet and a professor at the University of Evansville. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a PhD candidate in Literature/Criticism at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift” which was published in December 2024 from Random House. Find her online at www.kristiefrederickdaugherty.com

Two Poems by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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THE VOLTA
There I was
making a basket
with the hem
of my T-shirt pulled up
to carry the fallen apples.
& then
a distance
shortened.
I’ll tell you what
I don’t remember—
something fell
out of me
when I found out
we all leave.
What was carefree
dropped its shiny seeds
into the sad
of not-forever.
A loneliness,
this anguish—
like moving through
a wideness of air
wingless.
*
DECEMBER 13TH
Taylor Swift & I have the same
birthday. Everyone loves her,
her lyrics so specific: the red scarf
she left in her ex-boyfriend’s sister’s drawer,
her pain finding a page & lifting into a song
to fill a car, like a murmuration of memories
whose underwings catch the sun & so the sky
glistens with them, feathered & swelled over the bridge
as I wait for the light to change. Now that I’m retired
I slow down at yellow lights, have time to wait, I might
see a bald eagle or find the perfect prime number
on a license plate, time to look for saints & think
about the close-to-gone, the snow’s forgiveness
or string theory—there might be even smaller particles
than the electrons we cannot see, tiny strings to name
inside the tiniest thing—a raw almost-nothing vibrating.
                                   Sometimes I think I feel it or hear it.
The way when I was five, I sat with Mrs. Stewart
at her desk during nap time because I couldn’t sleep,
the two of us in a dimmed, breathing room,
a green gooseneck lamp arced between us,
our pencils making marks, a small sound
of lines & curves unearthing. Her face
bent down, the pillow of breasts
in a flowered dress. That infinitesimal
vibration between us, between the page
& me, between a gliding eagle & me,
between the falling snow & me,
between Taylor’s voice & me
in this car on this Earth,
everything a part
of every string.
*
Sarah Dickenson Snyder carves in stone & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com

Pop Culture Writer Calls Taylor Swift’s song Anti-Hero Self Loathing by Jaime Jacques

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Pop Culture Writer Calls Taylor Swift’s song Anti-Hero Self Loathing

and I wonder why. I mean —
has she never drank herself so blind
that she threw up into her own lap?

Haven’t we all skipped a few meals
to fit into the dress?
Left somebody on read?

She says the song is dark,
and I wonder why to be
real is to be considered ruinous?

Just kidding.
I know why.
If they can’t keep us begging for Botox
they better call us the problem.

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
and I’m a monster on the hill.

The writer says these lyrics are confounding
and I wonder why.
Has she never been highjacked by hormones,
held hostage by her own blood?

Maybe she’s numb to herself, or
under the thumb of the paper that pays her.
In that case I believe the label
of self-loathing might be misplaced.

Thousands will read her column this week,
regurgitate the ideas on social media feeds,
dismiss the song as music for teenaged girls.

And the rest of us
we carry Taylor’s chorus like an inverted prayer
while looking at airbrushed models in underwear
reading the news about roe v wade
being cat called on the street
headphones on as we repeat

It’s me,
Hi.

I’m the problem, it’s me.

*

Jaime Jacques is an itinerant writer who currently calls the east coast of Canada home. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Cagibi, Anti-Heroin Chic, Brazos River Review and others. She is the author of Moon El Salvador and her reporting and travel writing can be found in Salon, NPR, Narratively, and Roads and Kingdoms among others. Find her on Instagram @calamity__jaime.