Sculpture Study #1

A woman’s real first lesson about her body is nothing        to write home about. The second lesson, one of colonization. It happens in a big city, the sidewalks gone half-dust and the woman believing    [for once]    there is something for her to claim. This complex ecosystem of space, improvised measurements to guess by—the swing of a tote bag,                    a soft circumference of hair. The woman is eyeing her way to the J train when a man (made faceless by the crowd) grabs her ass. There are two options; be crazy                    or be quiet while the incident reworks the DNA. [There is one option, because the silence sires some sort of madness later.]                Right there on the corner she stops, marbles against the summer heat. Eases her hair from its rubber band to let something
         free. The faceless man hurts her to still-life, an inanimate thing bedazzled in all of the city’s wet offerings [the day’s earlier drizzle still drying, the humid air relentless with stickiness]. What are we allowed to really be when we hurt                  in public: human or statue? As if she thinks this into existence, the evening sun glosses her brown skin in a coat of bronze and she grows                    into the ground. No one can tell the difference as they shuffle around her, give extra space. Look how gentle they are

when there is no harm to be done.

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Taylor Byas (@TaylorByas3) is a black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is now a second year PhD student and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She was the 1st place winner of the Poetry Super Highway Contest, and her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is forthcoming from Variant Lit in the summer of 2021. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Glass, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Frontier Poetry, SWWIM, TriQuarterly, and others.