Inheritance

By Taylor Johnson

Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781948579780

Taylor Johnson

Pat Sabiston is a much sought-after author, motivational speaker, and writing instructor. Pat has published books, essays, short stories, articles, fillers, and interviews. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta/Journal Constitution, New York Times/Asbury Park Press Edition, Small Press Magazine, NPR Online, and The Southern Poetry Review, to name a few. She received recognition from Writer’s Digest for her inspirational essay “The New Legend of the Sand Dollar.” Sabiston also does feature articles for three Christian magazines in Florida, and is the owner of a marketing and public relations firm.

Book preview

PENNSYLVANIA AVE. SE

Bless the boys riding their bikes straight up, at midnight, touching,

if only briefly, holding, hands as they cross the light to Independence.

Bless them for from the side the one on the red bike looks like me,

his redbrown hair loose against the late summer static heat.

The boy who is not me (see how I did that) fixes his mouth to say

something I will never hear I love you or I’m so sad though

more than likely Catch up. Bless the boy who is me on his bike

because he was a witness to my witnessing and did not turn away,

did not make of me a disappeared, burned thing—instead nodded as boys do.

Bless the distance and the knowing there. What my mind makes of these boys,

bless that long hallway I’m always going through.

Bless what could be mine or me.

Bless the boys I wanted to be or wanted.

NOCTURNE

What was rampant in me was not wisteria. Perhaps decay, or loss of reflection.

No one like me gets old, or so I thought, even as I watched the days fade into each other.

Was I no one? Which phrase means a grown-up girl: mica-gilded; pure myth; gone?

Thoreau might say I was trying to find the door to nothingness, that the wild was already in me.

However, I walked out my bed to find my skin, only to return moondrunk, bramble-laden,

stripped to sinew, a broken syntax. No denying how I got here, I laid down among the tall