Starfish with a shake with a finger to my lips you wake me wrap my bare shoulders in your blanket draw me out in moonlight past the courtyard to the patch of dewy grass beside the reflecting pool & show me how to draw circles & pentagrams with my hands with my body & gather starlight which you weave into my hair your fingers scaled over & glowing like fish skin blushing my cheeks opal carving bright the ridges along my collarbones staining your blanket as you find your way in
Desert All afternoon creatures periphery my vision, but I’m making them up, I think, until at dusk a small rust lizard shares the rock I sit on. What could I offer from my pockets to fill her up—what can I give but my own body now to this landscape blank as the mind? I hunger like a scream held in the gut, one that needs to be palm-cradled like a star, a gift for the hearer. My tiger, make room on the pillow you bury your face in. Give me your roar.
The Fire How could I allow this, myself—& now what’s left is brushstrokes of punishment on bark, the dark idea of a house or courtyard. I want these marks on my body instead, my unscathed skin— I would become this disfigured scene but for you, my color-palette, begging me cerulean, cool as another chance, though all I can do now is paint over what’s already there.
The Message When your voice finds me taking in the sun on top of the wall, sitting with a glass of water pressed to my forehead; when your voice comes in the shape of a small sandy owl, begging me home; when your voice arrives like the recent past lassoing the near future, eleven reaching past noon to tug one just close enough to whisper I need you; know, my eclipse, that I’m coming soon, that I’ll hold up your firmament with you, for you, for you, & I’m not afraid now of my name becoming wind, or earth, or yours.
Cold Nights Thin moon: I stir in a quilted twin bed as my legs receive between them sudden cold feet & the tip of my nose teases into sweet hair. Bare arms ease my back half-up, slip the rough wool outer-shirt over my head; then a warmer weight presses soft cotton into cotton into sheet. My wild hare, stealing my heat in the blue, stealing into my loft to burrow down where no one can hear or see, not even us—we only know each other by nuzzle, long touch, the slow warm breath of noses & knees, the quick of heartbeat.
T. Dallas Saylor’s work often meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. He is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University, and he holds an MFA from the University of Houston. Saylor’s work has been featured in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Christianity & Literature, PRISM international, and elsewhere.
