Taylor Supplee

Poetry

Taylor Supplee is a gay poet from the Midwest who earned his MFA from Columbia University where he serves as the Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A finalist for the 92Y Discovery Award in Poetry in 2019, his poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Foothill Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, Midwestern Gothic, The Moth, Rattle, SLAB, Quiddity, and elsewhere. He is the Deputy and Managing Editor for American Chordata and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Passage

If you were to meet me, coming over from that distant road bordering this tract of squash patches from the lemon orchard, and the scarecrow the crows have made into a flannel home, then I would give up and go the way of the physician and tend to any wound or peasant fever from an apothecary of bad habits. I would not think of offering fraudulent prescriptions in a name I don’t recognize, measured out in dark vials, safe against the sun. The stacked-stone sign posts, pointing out the way to the ancestral farm, have toppled and need at least four hands to be rebuilt, and we could manage. If you come with me into that needless country denying passage to none, I will go embarrassed of my riches, unadorned. I will go agnostic and glad.

“ Much of my work concerns departure and arrival, often from someplace quotidian and into a devotional otherwhere, a world each poem creates for its own occasion. Poems send us off on a pilgrimage to these places with the purpose of achieving a deep personal alchemy; and, by the lyric’s incantatory nature, poems invite us to discover what we might change into, completely free and abandoned to the devices of the imagination. In the case of ‘Passage,’ the speaker desires company in this travel. Sometimes, It’s dangerous to go alone, and the speaker is willing to offer up his component parts for the chance of companionship as they both go on to that realm together. ”

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