Two Poems | Abby Taggart

Automaton Naturalis 

 

Microplastics tiling my arteries:

I put them there.

Snuck inside of bites of reheated pasta & sips of my daily Starbucks sludge

the petroleum slides down my gullet like so much cheese powder.

& I’ll do it again.

I’ll chew candy wrappers like bubble gum

& crunch clear containers

pick it from my toothsome maw with press on nails

so I don’t miss a fleck of the rich distructinance.

 

Until I have shiny Barbie skin & synthetic guts

weave myself petrochemical bat wings, a pair of faux eyes meant to scare.

Take all the artificial intruders inside me, so she doesn’t have to;

her rich loamy body uninfected, less so at least.

Mama will still love me when I’m an acrylic robot. I’m still hers.

The Playmobil Ship of Theseus,

I’m my mama’s carbon-based girl:

flesh heartbeats echoing in its PVC cavern,

fungal soul unpolluted.

 

 

I Don’t Know How to Play Poker, But Deal Me In Anyway

 

I don’t have that tortured poet aesthetic you’re used to:

I don’t lounge around in shades of brown

I don’t puff grey clouds of narrow hand lettering. Best

I can do is let a mechanical pencil dangle between

my first two fingers.

 

I wonder if they’ll let me romanticize the loops

of sunshine yarn tumbling from my comic-filled shelves

as if they were silk handkerchiefs spotted with blood—

My condition, is not a wasting one

that gnaws away my waste,

I know I am not tragic or beautiful in the way a poet ought to be.

 

I’ve been a plant, awkwardly propped in the corner for a pop of color,

in every room of men composed of a few purposeful brushstrokes;

I’ve been the drop of yellow the artist didn’t realize had clung

to the bristles until I slid in next to the most recent coffee color.

 

I imagine myself a rose          perched atop a vintage cigarette holder

raised to the lips of the lady dealer                 instead

of as the basset hound in a necktie     sitting at the wrong felt table.

I imagine myself never as I am          never as they are either.

I imagine my words    as cells and my lines   as veins

pulled from the body inside my body.

 

I’ll prick my finger

drip a pool of red chips on the canvas

place a bet.

 

Abby Taggart (she/her) is a gen z lesbian with brand new degrees in mechanical engineering, english, and creative writing. She’s madly in love with this squishy queer-ass world of ours and hopes to make it a better place with both engineering work in sustainability and her art. Winner of the 2025 Staples Capstone Prize, her work can be found in several volumes of Short Vine as well as the Ohio Writers’s Association’s 2025 Anthology “Should This Book be Banned?” Off the page, Abby can be found crocheting, making overly detailed spreadsheets, rolling around in the grass, and doom scrolling.

 

Featured Image by Unsplash—Johann Siemens