A Poem by Rosamund Taylor

Author: Poetry Editor

May 7, 2019

This week, a poem by Rosamund Taylor.

We Lose Our Edges

For hours after I undress
I’m marked by the gnaw
of my clothes. My bra
a toothless mouth
gumming my torso,
my stomach chewed
into red ridges.
Now I unpack you too,
taste the sweat
between your breasts,
the soft black hair
on your lower back.
You are criss-crossed
with buttons, elastic.
Outside, bees, a crow,
piano scales.
The heat gathers
against the windows
like a fin whale lying
on our walls.
Without clothes our skin
loses its edges
the way in deep water
jellyfish look as ornate
as chandeliers
but become slick stains
when they’re thrown
on the beach

and we give ourselves to salt.
I can’t read the words
in your skull,
just the throb of your heat
against my thumb-bone
and how your eyes open
as the fin whale passes,
as the roof dissolves
over our heads.

——

ROSAMUND TAYLOR won the Mairtín Crawford Award for poetry at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017. She has been nominated for a Forward Prize for best single poem, and twice short-listed for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Widely published, her work has recently appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Banshee, and Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2018.