Taylor Byas

Sleeping Weather

The sky commits to reopening. Empties its water
like two palms uncupping. The sidewalks freshly

mopped with rain. Somewhere in a neighbor’s
house, a sneeze is blessed once. Twice. Your mother

calls to check if the winds are picking up
two states away, if you’ve remembered

to roll up your car windows. The phone hums
into the mattress as if trying to recall a name.

It’s too loud to think of loneliness, how long
it’s been since a body’s dip on the other side

of your bed has sucked you into the eye
of a coming storm. Two fronts clashing. Wet.

You imagine a body there in the flashes
of white, coming closer with each blessing

of lightning—their hand breaching the imaginary
line down the bed’s center, the space between

your thighs. Then rain. Heavy and loud, clamoring
at the window as if there is something to see.

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Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist from Chicago. She currently lives in Cincinnati, where she is a second year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. She is also a reader for both The Rumpus and The Cincinnati Review, and the Poetry Editor for FlyPaper Lit. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Hobart, Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review and others.