Poetry of Marilyn Taylor > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Marilyn Taylor

, Milwaukee's third Poet Laureate, teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Her work has been published in a over fifty journals and anthologies, including The American Scholar, Iris, The Formalist, and Poetry Magazine's 90th Anniversary Anthology. Known for her effortless formalism, her work has been honored with the 2003 Dogwood Prize as well as first place awards in recent competitions sponsored by Passager, The Ledge, and GSU Review. Her chapbook, Exit Only, won the Anamnesis Press Award. Her book, Subject to Change, was released this year by David Robert Books and has been praised by Rachel Hadas as "...a robust, pleasurable, accomplished collection, vivid, poignant and frequently funny." She also occasionally teaches classes at Alverno and here at Woodland Pattern.

Summer Sapphics

Marilyn Taylor

Maybe things are better than we imagine
if a rubber inner-tube still can send us
drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river
like the Wisconsin-

far removed from spores of touristococcus.
As we bob half-in and half-out of water
with our legs like tentacles, dangling limply
under the surface

we are like invertebrate creatures, floating
on a cosmic droplet-a caravan of
giant-sized amoebas, without a clear-cut
sense of direction.

It's as if we've started evolving backwards;
mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon-
toward that dark primordial soup we seem so
eager to get to.

Funny, how warm water will whisper secrets
in its native language to every cell-yet
we, the aggregation, have just begun to
fathom the gestures.

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