Gordon Taylor
When You Read What He Wrote Just for You
This is when nightmares began, the voice counting to infinity and the horses pounding down a gravel road, and there was my own voice too, the pitch I can’t recall, calling for my mother. What do you see? she would ask.
Around the same time, my father and I climbed the hundred steps of St. Joseph’s Oratory almost daily. At the top we would sit and eat ancient, freezer burned ice cream from a plastic cup with a small wooden paddle and wait for my mother to emerge from St. Mary’s hospital, from secret visits I wasn’t allowed to know about.
The ice cream was a reward for being strong enough to endure the climb, for tolerating the not knowing. What do you see? she would ask, her pale-yellow nightgown glowing in darkness. I see a road. I see a road that has no end.
Gordon Taylor (he/him) is a queer poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology, health care, and poetry. His poems have appeared in Tickle Ace (now defunct), Prairie Fire, Plenitude, The Bridport Arts Prize Anthology and is forthcoming in Months to Years and Five South.
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