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.
