Poetry By Meg Taylor

Matthias Ripp CC




GIRL EATS THE PEACH

She bites like she wants the fruit
to confess something.

Juice runs down her arm,
slow as a dare,
clingy as guilt
with nowhere to go.

The pit lands in her palm,
a fossilized heart,
still warm,
as if it remembers blood
better than she does.

Once, a man asked
if she meant the biting
for him.

She laughed so hard
the peach split clean in two
and a small white insect
crawled out, blinking
like it had forgotten
which world it belonged to.

Today she drags her tongue
along the inside of her arm,
leaving a streak of gold
that looks like a wound
healing backward.

She doesn’t offer anything.
Not anymore.

This peach is prophecy.
This peach is a door.

Somewhere a knife
presses harder in its drawer.
Somewhere table manners
collapse under their own weight.

She chews slowly,
each bite a small, exquisite violence,
until the fruit gives up in her mouth
like a season dying.

Let them call her unbecoming.
Let them file her
under difficult.
Let them think hunger
is shame.

She plants the pit
in a patch of dirt
that shifts under her hand,
ground that moves
like something dangerous
waking up.

By morning,
a root curls out of the earth,
pale, wet,
reaching for her pulse.

She doesn’t step back.

She offers her wrist
like a promise.






THE DAY WE STOPPED TEACHING GIRLS

The night we retired
our key-between-the-knuckles lessons,
the pepper spray keychains,
the “text me when you get home” prayers,

we gathered the girls
and told them,
You were never
the problem.

We let them drop
every rule they’d been given
into a metal bowl,
don’t walk,
don’t drink,
don’t wear,
don’t laugh,
don’t want,

each one clanging
like a small confession
that had never belonged
to them.

Outside, the boys
kept playing at crowns,
calling it growing up.

We did not hand them
a list of don’ts.
We handed them
a mirror.

This is the face
you will be measured by,
we said.

Not your muscles.
Not your jokes.

The echo you leave
in a room
after a woman
walks out of it.

Some shrugged,
said, Not all of us,
as if we were weather
they couldn’t help.

But one boy flinched
like he’d stepped barefoot
on his own shadow.
Another looked down
at his hands
as if noticing,
for the first time,
what they’d been taught
they were for.

We did not say,
Protect us.

We said,
Stop being the reason
we practice surviving you.

That night,
we walked home
with our hands empty,

no keys,
no spray,
no phone gripped
like a panic button,

and for a block,
then two,
then three,

the world felt
almost possible,
like a place where girls
did not have to rehearse
their funerals

and boys grew into men
no one had to heal from.

We did not arrive there.
But we saw it,

a thin line
on the horizon,

and every woman
I have ever known
​
reached for it
at once.

​


Meg Taylor is a writer and corporate analyst whose work examines the tension between inner life and performance, burnout and renewal. Her writing has appeared in Exposition Review, Fjords Review, and Welter.


Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Donate