Audiation
by Jerica Taylor
I almost buy a keyboard on Friday morning;
a digital one with weighted keys that serves up
sound like a real piano, for the sole satisfaction
of learning to play a song stuck on repeat in my head.
When I was small, I could copy a tune
I’d only heard once. My parents hoped it meant
I was gifted, and hired a tutor. The fluttery sheets
of music made me tense. It soothed me to pick
out on the cracked keys what rumbled inside.
I recall with a spread palm the stretch
of my pinkies and thumbs to reach the farthest
keys and the confusion when a six year old outplayed
me right before I quit. I thought you were good
or you weren’t, you had the skill or you didn’t,
and sitting on that unbalanced scale left me
perpetually hungry. I have swung too wildly
to the opposite amplitude, denial to overindulgence,
for what I was not allowed then and wish to feed
myself now. Impulsively, I click Add to Cart
on an instrument meant for musicians and not sad
little grown up girls who only want to pound the keys,
call forth chords deep and sweet, a glissando
to slide out of danger just in time. I don’t complete
the purchase, but it sits open in a tab. You could
have this, if you really needed it, I sing to
the frightened face of a younger self. No one
could say no. Together we could play for as long
as we want, until our melodies reintegrate.
Abattis
by Jerica Taylor
CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ABUSE
I told the middle-aged
couple wearing matching anchor
print collared shirts and leather boat
shoes at the art gallery in the city
that he was my brother.
I knew that I was not supposed
to tell anyone anything in that wide
open maze of hallways. We were
here to be inspired, not pry
into one another’s naivete.
Together the four of us
contemplated Rodin’s abattis.
Wire and clay and limbs;
less person, more part.
In the museum café my brother
bought me coffee and
read me poetry and
longed to draw me nude.
The charcoal would see me down
to the bones. My clavicle, his favorite.
The musty attic the only place the six-foot
stretch of paper would fit, was too hot
to tolerate that summer, even
stripped down. Instead we
spent most of our time together
on the porch in the dark with my head
on his chest. I was old
enough, but he was older.
If the man who was not my brother
slipped his hand up the back
of my flowy linen shirt like Rodin
had touched his lady visitors, aching
to travel into the eternal tunnel,
the nautical couple would not be able
to parse the gesture through
the sculpture’s bent legs.
About the Author
Jerica Taylor is a non-binary neurodivergent queer cook, birder, and chicken herder. Their work has appeared in Postscript, Stone of Madness Press, Feral Poetry, and perhappened. She lives with her wife and young daughter in Western Massachusetts. Twitter @jericatruly