Shelly Taylor, Black-Eyed Heifer (EXCERPTS) by Tarpaulin Sky Press

FI CTI ON/ POETRY

ep r o s epo e mso fS he l l yTa y l o r ’ sﬁr s tc o l l e c t i o nc r e a t es t o r i e st ha t po k et h r o u g hy o u re y e& g os t r a i g htt h r o u g hy o u rhe a d.Ms .Ta y l o r ma k e su pwo r d si n‘ ho l l e rt i me , ’ l a ng u a g ey o uha v e n ’ the a r db e f o r eb u t k no w, r i g hta wa y , t ob eu r g e nt . Ic a nt e l ly o ut ha ts he‘ p u tmer i pe ne d t he r e , ’ i nt oat h r e e di me ns i o na lS o u t ho fho r s e s , ﬁe l d s , a ndc ha r a c t e r s . He rpo e msa r ehe l l b e nt , ma d c a pa d v e nt u r e swho s edi c t i o n& s y nt a x d e f yc a t e g o r y . ~J M    

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BLACKEYED HEI FER

Bl a c k Ey e dHe i f e ri sami g ht ya nt he mt od o wnho mel o c a l c ul t u r e —t he d e e pl yr o o t e d —t hef e i s t y ,s u s t a i ni ngr h y t h mt ha ts a t u r a t e st hel a nd. e s el y r i c a lp r o s epo e mss i nga‘ r a mpa ntﬁr e ’t u ne‘ t oy e s t e r d a y ’ s ha nd s u phi nt e r l a nd ’ a ndt hef a c tt ha t‘ t he r ewe r eho r s e s , t he r ea l wa y s a r e . ’e r ei sa b u nd a ntv i t a l i t ya ndwi d e e y e db e a u t yi nS he l l yTa y l o r ’ s c o nt e mpo r a r yGe o r g i a ne c l o g u e s ,‘ a l lt hewhi l emi nd f ulo ft hec o l o r t u r n ’ a nd‘ s i l e ntf o o t wo r k&ne ws . ’ ~B  I    

SHELLYTAYLOR

e r e ’ safinede ns i t ya ndi nt e ns i t yt ot hi swo r k, t he‘ t hi ng i ne s s ’ t ha t i nf o r mso u ra c t u a ll i v e s ,a ndar a di c a l l yi nno v a t i v eu s eo fl a ng u a g e .I k e p tt hi nk i ngo f t hea l a b a s t e rb e a ra ndpe t r i fie dwha l ev e r t e b r a eo no u r ma nt l e , t he s ef a b ul o u sme mo r i e so f l i f e . i si safineb o o k. ~J  H  

Bl a c k Ey e dHe i f e r S HELL YT AYLOR

BlackEyed Heifer

PRESS

T S

2010

Black-Eyed Heifer ÂŠ 2010 Shelly Taylor First edition, May 2010 ISBN: 9780982541647 Printed and bound in the USA Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922645 Cover art by Noah Saterstrom. Cover and Book design by Kristen E. Nelson. Text is in Garamond Premier Pro. Titles are in Palatino Tarpaulin Sky Press PO Box 189 Grafton, Vermont 05146 www.tarpaulinsky.com For more information on Tarpaulin Sky Press perfect-bound and hand-bound editions, as well as information regarding distribution, personal orders, and catalogue requests, please visit our website at www.tarpaulinsky.com. Reproduction of selections from this book, for non-commercial personal or educational purposes, is permitted and encouraged, provided the Author and Publisher are acknowledged in the reproduction. Reproduction for sale, rent, or other use involving financial transaction is prohibited except by permission of the Author and Publisher.

For Norma Jean Taylor, who said I would

This sonofabitch land had to be broken In the holler time, I came home mules & a pine line. More than four months late the cotton’s unpicked, & not of myself this sort of severing; even bees couldn’t cut the mold & honey. I came back a daughter hands clasped into the alabaster light, was practically felled in my step & the trees that were, were rotten. If there was a road it did not symmetry, making prayer not the mode to receive. Easily felled as I have known myself to be & older now (I said I never would), when two feet, gallant hit the stone & the third eye bloomed. The better to see: eyes arcing in the woodline that run from the pond to there, I watch my windows. Eye control learnt from village deer. I peer into what maiden field, break what mule, my legs cross its back, the land more than my common going averted, dusting? There’s an oak so I must be more acorn than the cloudless ground up. With no rain the cotton blesses the stalk, an impossible fallow cycle & I don’t want myself to, or that’s a lie. (An eye so dark you can’t tell the iris from the darkness rest.) Put me ripened there—the roof is lit, is tin with tornado weather that will stay. Like comfort, so opposite from the fingertip pressed down upon the something inside. I’d rather strut down the hallway, hand on my hip, where it’s blacker tonight & roughly sown, but not so bad. You think a thing, you think & it is (so simply). Even when it can’t be: as in bed me down in nothing I know adds a horse-drawn morning. That which to adorn oneself with movement. As in morning shed a blue coat I wore all day.

~3~

Go hair smoothing.

Minnows, her koi, in the cut-bucket tank, when my roofline is fallen. I give there, there child, the eyes & I latch it.

You say you think like this sometimes & more often than not, I, you, squatting blued out in the basin, heartsblood so silk itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a crime. 38 states. By moon good calves bed. Say la. La-la,

the moon may as well be half a cup of milk, & all limbs move somewhere; open dendrites receive, whose eyes are left to gather the harrowing. Less functionalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the overloaded truckfulls, nails the tamped down.

~4~

Should the precinct cavern call I tell them something ever moving despite the signs sleeps. What got situated gets spat: the land from under the land, this course of newer arms. I fed all I chose, & have been fed. Latching it, I latigo, this come here now (the desire to kneel, call the thing until it returns whole & unbothered) or back sans of it, away.

How the hand goes for its pocket & what is pulled out could be topological, a treasure map (follow byway, the streets), something more like a marble to keep the hands busy, you’d say what’s out past the hayfield is nobody’s business. The trees have become scarecrow’d, ragged, bare. Something may be running full

speed through the millet. (Onset, practice, good lord, oh my.) My little girl on given days where are you? In the ditch, the waterline just below my nose.

A woman knows omen needs of, handprints do not rightly touch him so.

~5~

I say boxes. Each vestige having been excised now given an attic corner. Here there are none: flattops, kickstand, trees for days is all. I have oranges when I want them they want their bowl. Bowls are meant for refrigerator tops. Green bowls, blue dust rings.

~6~

Raising miss g Careful what comes from your belly: if a horse she’ll not take me far. The dogs were always too close & I’d have to turn back to not leer them too far from home. We caused each other. Each achoo I make she splashed into the light show by her kite strings. Of which I tie to every slender blooming. Where are my girl’s stamped feet the piston sky? Let the dead go on & bury their dead, kicking, scissor kicking, even when I’m not she’s still somehow afloat. This little girl with her planchette & weather balloon—rabbit & cauliflower in my honey pot. There must be seeds under her feet each year she’s more than dust upwards.

~7~

Keylight That a woman needs her own sung dividend. That you have been her child there is the dirt road uphilling nearer home. When the courtship is done so too the flowers; when you sell a horse he is not coming back—no, you will not see his resemblance in a crowd face; put a carnation in your buttonhole. Gone

then’s my hoof clatter, little dodger of the aftermath, prancer, shod & fancy edges less frilled by my knife work. A past is not your glory, you can dial it, speak evenly in your best gaudy house gown from Mexico once a bathing suit cover-up. She would hum Sundays cleaning windows, it’d quake. Where the gut lies there’s a corncrib something silos. We go there when there’s nothing save remember when you swung your skirts like give me reggae or give me, nimble spider of the clocks that are first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. In a dream was a bug on my thigh & he flashes in to sweep it & I wake suddenly hip-strange, scratch a little. This can stand so as a parcel to buy

up & hole. With hydrangea (flower store), cauldron of deer horns (local botanica), from which I chant country-country & think how Ina Garten sprinkles powdered sugar on every last strawberry in the still of get your gun right. Minutes by fingers, mother (am I wrong again, my choosing) step,

~8~

the city can too be an anthem, though I’m farther now & rootless from. The man chooses not to see outside of, says my mood’s this, whisks the eggs. An otherwise performance would be a negation of hands into birdcage from which the rose trees grow & so might I, two feet alliance. Fail there & the aster is red sleeper; asters can be red & all October her laden. Since forever is today & today my horse a bike, I call her person, ‘we’—we go to visit the Brooklyn Bridge. It is ten miles or so roundtrip & since I’m country I smile at everyone, dust off my wheel hoofs & think winter similar to marriage. Al no one can stop their lives to save yours—no: the topmost is a keyhole, everything is buttressed; when you sell a horse he will not come back. You’re calling & she smells of flowers, her face down tall in the water vase.

~9~

The home is an innocent space, it can have nothing to do with what comes out of his mouth or hers. Maria what am I if not defiant?—little girl hurts, half bird uncupped, so much so murkier I’m hoping I’m made of fortune. With sheets tucked militant, drags til the sun or buses slumber, quiets the horns the way a drummer needs to place the sticks aside, must get a real job now; or for her country. I never took bystreets, could have sold the grainary, I would have burnt the barn & now our centenarian bridge flops over onto the other side’s buildings, rolls over like my horse dirties its back, say what the lord? Bless, lord. What else then have I not tallied?

The moon. Make a poem about the moon in which you do not mention its colors too rich suggesting a break into patterns so paisley-legged you can’t find your way out of. Mother gets tired; she is a cordage that tauts me upright, unnecessary. He gets drinking says my mood’s this & can’t see outside of—stores cucumbers in the cabinet: my phallus there-there now. A woman needs the phallus of. Tucks the cucumbers into bed, be well, one day I’ll count on you to get a job & be comforted.

~ 10 ~

This you’ve heard. A red-stained road lost at once upon a hill-verge: arm thrusting itself—fist & carpal, ulna, sinew—upwards, as if mouth were fingertip through a mound of red earth. This part is landfall. Silt as silk & emerge.

~ 11 ~

Drowning miss g Gibraltar, I give you away so easy, shekels, for you are just a babygirl I husband myself, still think on. Herein this grand sash around her waist, this part of the ‘the’: the street kicks, my teeth grit & someone lets out a holler more rebel than get yourself on over to my yard sale, them denim’s selling quicker than a hot-fire-Sherman gone crazy on a Georgia. Herein, rampant fire, stick your tongue tip out, land bridge, my always on lookout. I know how we sold you between us for good behavior, penance for the come lovely I can feedeth you. Thus she grows naked all on her own, one ought to motherly clothe this little girl on given days where is she? In the ditch. The waterline just below my nose. For one must obey the curvature of a ragged bank into a water from which necessity seeks me the scientific: i.e. Gabon is a country; Gabon I dip my country feet in you; Gabon I seek thee & always have since the 9th grade project on buffering & oil preservation & how to get yourself a Gabon. I was brought upright & studied in school, learnt my geography, stronghold, what could cause a sea to rise, how to sew my buttons back on. This is easy armature, an ever-so important crossover necessary for common adaption, like now that I’ve shifted my feet northern I’ll need many sweaters & a steeplechase to hedge the fences back from the ditchline fuller with the rain & with frogs which the workers will save for you in plastic buckets when the pavers come. In this winterless tis’. Formation, if I don’t think of you any longer, if you are just a baby-girl, I call you pretty pretty. Bounce you on my knee & forget to feed you & me, I just sleep all day. Gibraltar I’ll shorten you to G so I can manage, pretend you are a cat, the days umber cool. This regular ratchets I’m too old for an el-o-min-o. Like today the fantastic chin-jut & tomorrow’s the yea ole tassels. What two cowgirls

~ 12 ~

we have been, my girl if-of-hands, five fingers. What a lasso-er, my-my, how you can hogtie. So I dam up those that need a sand-swirling—save the precious—come to change the earth awhile; —for myself & for the belly rush I once said would take me in & (to have gone with her person), & for the neighborhood kids on their bikes that need water in a hydrant release, come to get their feet wet; & of course, the sun. And for G, whom I know would be wearing a blue bathing suit out on the street pulling hair & kicking as I did, kin of biters, two little broken selves. Blue like my first mare Sissy’s eye gone cancerous or blind or worsening like cataracts do, or, a blue for her blindness & mine all the more. Elfin orphan child in a honey pot that learnt stir, that against her best learned stay when I said okay it’s time now.

~ 13 ~

Three versions Whatever made her leave her home for Motel 6 was more than the deer shot, the beer drank after the skinning. In the tub I keep the house silent. Mama names moss from the cypress ponytails: when you come home them ponytails will shift in the wind. Thirty-five miles westward a woman’s found four days later; the smell from under door 213—Wild Turkey, her. I figure for the sound of what might be tires on the gravel, tilt & turned into the drive. She had a tub too, gone cold & I imagine her hair, brown, beautiful the way most hair is across water. Mama says through the line, all women look before the key is purchased—he laid his money down more than a few times—so I, too remember parking lot to lot. She went also, I imagine, before the rifle. All that I am thinking has been done. Before his truck parks, mama high into my rice bed. All water moves clockwise a woman’s head rolls, before the drain.

~ 14 ~

I pause to laud his greatness via personal impaction, this is how it, oh lord, brushes my skin. The mouseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stuck down on the glue trap I forbade myself lie for what feels like months, still kicking & I know it in yesterday & today & forgot to separate it on out. Best shake it loose, so on itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll backwards. Will it with him he is both the monument & its foot-etching.

~ 15 ~

I thought the thing would run unbridled over the land if not stayed. The earth would take the hoof & the horse would belong to mist over ether, over the hillside, churning the earth, I must’ve walked all the way home barefoot the way a child does. A woman boards a train to please her father over love, what necessity keeps me here, what ‘what can I get you’ is the hand that perchance is the evener. Arriba. Total the longing for the horse & the land, call him fast with whistle, call him Mark & father by his name, call 9-1-1. Quick to the Chick-fil-A, that trailer leaves off with my horse in it, meaning dust me off the ground in any partnership lingo. After that I went west fast as two pistols, left the city suckled under the land, my bottles in their speedrack; blame silent movies for Mary Pickford’s death by bottle, blame Douglas Fairbanks, the land; not that I ever would.

~ 16 ~

When he sleeps a trench comes over him unevenly & he labors. When the winds blew across the desert there became a city & we are our city, in essence. Echoing mother from which we have atlased, the city leans toward the Hudson for a country girl & god grace a river from his only shoulders. Rocks lifted from the beachside, my own’s showroom darkens after the workday’s done, then she’s home. Loved be pain, eh, a servant. In the interim, in things begins another, when did a horse not love a river, even if my feet not in it, ears turned to cup the sound of movement & when he ran I positioned myself on him, neckline flat to back as a thing stretched running is. Brown lawns, tumbleweed in the nosegay handle, what child ever gets out; the windows are boarded up, metal on the radio, dethklok in his heart. Big truck hums the way a fine diesel should, fills in the father; save the horse that long body was meant for running, never slow down Hontas, whoa, it’s time now, & turn.

~ 17 ~

Stat Blue room with haphazardly thrown magazines on plastic squatting tables, white & doctorly. The perfume page’s scent, gone; too many noses, too many necks—inside, near the corner is a woman sitting with her legs crossed & eyes cast to the floor. Her face too long caught downward in the 360 degree turn that once owned all the sky, mayhem. Now’s the carpet—blue creek, blue bark, no sun. Leave this sky. Leave this land. Somewhere under the hem of a pant’s leg hides the moon.

~ 18 ~

For love Granny gather your geese my wolf usually ends us badly. This stereotypic land gash, ooh land mine—deep swallowing of the ting that opens the belly pit—& it is open. And it is red. Your words means a lot they hellhole themselves a they, they don’t wear platforms (are not my bestest friend when I need the heating pad) or do a look back: h. bogart stern face insinuating things they might miss very much & wanna crackle open, no foolin’. This is just to say the harder I look the more I want to. And so I pose, cycles wax my ass to the next, next—we too posers, auto-shut eye & as usual I get my feet into it & drink of. Self ain’t your born center, away; I got a line of mine on into Malaysia like a sisterhood. But someone better take care of that one—his they has gone & sold my rollerblades bell up on a hap temple, is more close to a self center than I know how to fill the story in for. They his souses with spray & never looks a shoulder back boastful on the silver screen or something like it. His runs away on a zeppelin for America sing-clapping like mad.

~ 19 ~

You lost your picot in the phlox garden, still flowery. Are you not my little girl any longer?

~ 20 ~

Nothing is going to turn. Nothing. Coffee, get your coffee, get Astroland, get some tom kai guy takeout from Song. A ‘W’ sits the table with Kate Moss looking healthy on the cover, Havasu Falls is on the telly. I think if the very thing could turn I might want to go this year, in a month or three, there are California Condors with a 10 foot wingspan, caves beneath the clearview water. When, if ever, have I listened to someone saying the reality is, is that you will not make. When. You won’t buy the horse, you’re not leaving the city, you have in fact lost your job because a man, damn this man & now that all the street cats have eaten by my hand, I know no more than lonely women who talk the cats up, is how it goes. If I had home enough I’d bring them all in, talk to them Sunday-to-Monday, feed them; self-loathing, you owe the truth. You owe your hands up silly disconnected from the truth of what hayfield & fat horse I will exercise there in a month. I will exercise the horse, my aunt says take the horse, to treat him like my own. But you won’t leave off the longing for. And you can’t run from it. But you’re so damn good at—I don’t know the right mind—adobe or tenement, right angle or rounded-rounded, left on the corners of the busiest streets in the world.

~ 21 ~

It’s Christmas come cattled home, I’m pearled sheets, bed & a white window shade, looking. Back to statuesque women with hats who stoop hunched to string lights across the house corner at noon. Men with guns all sizes, sad now because the city-wide ordinance, no guns. This is the modernity. Sons believe I’m a witch done cursed the field of its deer, by morning come home empty-handed. Land voodoo, we women love four legs. Tell me now how fine mine are.

~ 22 ~

Acknowledgements All my thanks to the editors of the following journals in which these poems first appeared: CUE, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, Cutbank, Diagram (introduction by Arianne Zwartjes), Word For/Word, horseless review, Wicked Alice, and Shampoo. Thank you forever Brenda Iijima of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs for making a chapbook with me in the summer of 2008—Peaches the Yes-Girl. Thanks so much to Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press for publishing a second chapbook, Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In, in 2009. I’m grateful to my parents & my sister in particular—Sheryl & Zach Taylor & Mandy Coulton—whose belief/support/love makes all stuff possible. Thank you to my sugar, Neil Hyland; thanks to ‘Pops’ Dan Anderson & Mara Vahratian, for reading & support; Noah Saterstrom, for painting cover; Kristen Nelson, hard-working designer. Much appreciation & respect to Elena Georgiou & Christian Peet for supporting young writers.

About the Author Shelly Taylor is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). This is her first full collection. Born in southern Georgia, she currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.

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