Taylor Supplee
Omen
Stopped clocks, a glint of the mirror
unshrouds when the window opens to the boreal
wind, the black-witch flits in under-eye
nightjars larking from the brush—
tilting toward the wither season.
Lacing each of the death-bed’s corners, it lands
on her pale lips. Even now, the composition of her face,
forbidding, quivers at the verge of her
mezz-prano gone out of tune like a rumor
hidden in the pigment of a Caravaggian shadow.
At its mercy. The candle flame flickers
in its glass sleeve, dusking on the wings’ ghostly leap.
The talon comes glowing.
Taylor Supplee is a gay poet from the Midwest who earned his MFA from Columbia University where he served as the Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize in 2020, and the 92Y Discovery Award in Poetry in 2019, his poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Baltimore Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Image, The Moth, The Penn Review, phoebe, Quiddity, Rattle, SLAB and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City.
Return to January 2022 Edition
Stopped clocks, a glint of the mirror
unshrouds when the window opens to the boreal
wind, the black-witch flits in under-eye
nightjars larking from the brush—
tilting toward the wither season.
Lacing each of the death-bed’s corners, it lands
on her pale lips. Even now, the composition of her face,
forbidding, quivers at the verge of her
mezz-prano gone out of tune like a rumor
hidden in the pigment of a Caravaggian shadow.
At its mercy. The candle flame flickers
in its glass sleeve, dusking on the wings’ ghostly leap.
The talon comes glowing.
Taylor Supplee is a gay poet from the Midwest who earned his MFA from Columbia University where he served as the Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize in 2020, and the 92Y Discovery Award in Poetry in 2019, his poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Baltimore Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Image, The Moth, The Penn Review, phoebe, Quiddity, Rattle, SLAB and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City.
Return to January 2022 Edition