Paige Taggart

from The Thread

The infrastructure of emotional trauma took-off into a whirlwind of inopportune exposure. Time and space collaborate into facial muddled thoughts; coexist on the planet with strength and intuition guiding a fever of surveillanced truths. The rubric's cube of hope echoes for its own shadow to be removed and introduce a new side; i.e. a color-coded clarification for making the familiar align. I've hidden in the angst-shadow for too long. Window-drawn and inhibition like a written rule for larger confessions. How you show yourself to be strung-up in a chord of lies and draws that make you feel less judged and more mobile to model the affairs of a general "collected people." A big map of a dynamic trio enters the universe from many directions and displays the calculated inquiries into what lexicon? What private sentiments? Oh, with the hidden tactile won't you reveal yourself? Oh, with the upkeep? With the truest of true natures, with the value vault? What if not an entity held inside and embraced by its ever-dark chambers. The true depth of your enterprise is one of forgetting. Forgoing tales that leak matter into an inquisitor shaped doodad.  Oh, to offer attention would be to forgo rebuttal. Would be to stand with your head etched, as if shadows were your natural born state, as though what you haven't given birth to has already birthed you. Kerplunk you land on the planet. You are forced fed god. You become hostile in the most taboo of senses.  You stitch an overcoat with an anarchy symbol. To symbolize a road with many directions that aren't paved. You poke further and further inside but nothing rids you of the fantasy to surrender until you die. You blow all the inside. You take cover and destroy what little love is kept inside. It makes for an unpleasant evaluation of feeling. You smoke cigarettes on the fire escape and never come back inside. Ride a horse into a prairie of endless degrees. It trots through water and the water runs onto your dress or duress and soaks the ways you felt dirty into cleaner conditions. A hole is fused through you and with you the hole can't rest. It lights itself on fire and the way it burns makes a crevice around the edges of your face like burnt paper. As if you were all burnt up. You become only crisp edges. As if you needn’t a thing. As if time was a fucked up bloke on Charlie Rose and you were a surgeon endlessly mending hearts. The world sustains records that link back to native roots, to make religion more narrative and cause less futile disputes. We want to treasure what glows but we are so burned by it. We are so nerve-pinched and soul-locked and ship-guarded and empty deputies of valuable affirmations that god does not exist and that everything emptily looks out over you and doesn't really care about you because you are more than one in a million, you are like those chickens hatched down a chicken-line. A slate is the prognosis of driftwood; you drift with it endlessly on the sea of incomplete things.

Paige Taggart's first book is Want for Lion (Trembling Pillow Press, April 2014) and Or Replica is forthcoming in November with Brooklyn Arts Press. She is a jeweler.