by Gordon Taylor

There’s gold in our eyes.
It lives in us like salt.
Too much salt kills a heart.
That’s a fact

allegedly. At death,
Ancient Egyptians weighed hearts against feathers
to know if the dead were light enough
to journey home.

Compare the weight
of waiting for a mind to change
to the dewy arcs of an abandoned spider web
above the door. Is the web
an archive or a battlefield?

What wisdom does it hold?
I asked the spider.
She said a body is made of muscle.
Muscle fibres are a series
of connected webs.

The quality of truth depends
on the speaker. I believed
my lover’s version of my body
for years. His language floated
over us at the speed
of rumour. He told me to drink

the river until my heart grew
a current. I stood with him,
feet shoed by waves, until night
inked upward from the horizon,
a sentence punctuated
by a ginger moon.

I know my heart
holds a river.

I hold my heart.
I name it.

Gordon Taylor is a queer poet who walks an ever-swaying, braided wire of technology and poetry. His poems have appeared in Narrative, Malahat Review, PRISM International, Poet Lore, Palette Poetry and more. He writes to invite people into a world they may not have seen.