Beginning and Ending
Some mornings we
stayed up waiting
to see the first sunlight come.
On my balcony,
facing each other across a small black table,
seated in those two plastic chairs I found
on the curbside years before.
Because if we slept we would lose
each other's company
for a few hours.
There would be the gristle of
chicken thighs left on our plates
for us to gnaw
like animals come the morning,
in lieu of breakfast. But fine,
we thought,
we were animals.
The sun rising behind your head,
through the window out the other side
of the fire escape and perfectly framed by it,
reminded me of a halo—
though you were no angel.
Nor was I,
and we thought that was why we could be.
Neither of us would say it was worth it.
Now it’s springtime again. But the trees
remain bare
and everything is frozen.
Those still here and without hope,
or myself alone,
await summer and the fall of angels.
In The City of LIfe
Imagine, say:
three ships along an old horizon
sailing for that ivory, that iron port set
astride the bounds of the same deep shores
where every ancient empire found its fall.
Where they came from in their hunger
is only death, and death travels
beside them within the waves,
death ignored, death embraced,
death in collars, death's waif
held close to its hollowed bosom.
In their lust they flee
towards a ruin of life lived
otherwise,
old men in soiled rags chewing on bone
in the dusty plazas where poets wrote,
whet their tongues, where nobles gossiped,
where peasants crouched, huddled,
where philosophers would brood. Before
calamity struck. But death is yet to find this place.
Life lives. Huddled around a bonfire, starved,
it looks up and sees ships with steely eyes,
it stands to lope towards a grotesque shore
and receive its visitors and let
them find their
ruined chambers and palaces while flesh
melts from skull and bone, drips to the ground
to be lapped up
by these foreign hounds and handmaidens,
perhaps to be reincarnated in another bloom.
Taylor Gray Moore was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1992 and has lived there for most of his life. He attended McGill University, where he obtained a B.A. in English Literature. His work has previously appeared in Graphite Publications, Pulp Magazine and the Spadina Literary Review.