Taylor Bond - Two Poems

The Last Three People on Earth

 

The lovers made their bed of flowers

and I watched from the baseball fields

cheeks hot against the chain-link fence

 

the echoes of metal bats cracked in the distance

perhaps far enough as the memory, life existing

even when it does not.

 

I was intruding but it was too late, 

I had left this world and entered alone

into the world that was shared between hands

 

and sticky August sweat, the type to swallow

skin as its own, hungrily, greedily

the rinds of watermelon embraced as its frames

 

letting everything spill over. Here, loneliness

was a comfort. Here loneliness meant the dissolving

of two into alone,  a sacred emptiness

 

everything a -ness that I watched

so sweet it coiled in my stomach and I groped

for the walls, a blindness an escape

 

I could not find

and next to the door was only

an empty vase where the flowers should be.

 

 

From Dawn To Dusk

 

One daylight is different from another

there are kinds that steal and others

that give the night a peace against

it’s own borders, weary darkness fades

at last, and in the flakes of gold and pink

 

that remind of the tucked inside of a shell

a remnant of a beach only the wind remembers

flowers relax then tighten tender spines

unfurling against the day, a former invisibility

discarded in pursuit of chasing the sun



Taylor Bond is a 2014-2015 Lannan Fellow, a writer, and a freelance photographer. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in various publications including Underwater New York and the Belle Reve Literary Journal. Her personal website can be found at www.warrior-princess.wix.com.