Three Poems by Taylor Hagood

In these three poems, Taylor Hagood explores what lies beneath constructions of experience and being…

by:  Taylor Hagood

Beneath Philosophy

Raindrops on a dome tent,
bird calls, voices,
that camp sleep
after the Dutch oven biscuits
and sitting around the fire.

I finally learned I could stop
thinking and not spontaneously combust.
I have since wrestled
with the signifier and the signified.

But Derrida’s grapheme
seems so impoverished
and even inescapable
when angels blow the wind.
Classic

Implies a before
presumed to be
an always.

Coercive yet un-
self-proclaimed
its maxims are chanted.

Fine pants are not “baggy.”
Those camera angles of
Citizen Kane.

The impetus
of the always-better
gracefully dead.

It lives best
in late summer evening tufts
of rising steam.
What I Need From the Sky

An idea of it being
there

like not the shell
but the long neck

of a turtle.
Or fifteen times telling me

where I dropped
a memory.

With a certainty of color
yet colorless

it draws a dream
into yesterday.

Taylor Hagood is a writer in south Florida whose publications include the biography/true crime, Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend and poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and reviews in a wide range of journals.

Header art by Gabby O’Connor.

0 replies on “Three Poems by Taylor Hagood”