Taylor Supplee

Wart-charming

The depression of his head had hardly left
the sofa’s arm

                         when the foxglove pressings, harboring
hidden devils in pale papered bells,

fell from the pages of an old album.
We have a history of this.

     Everything that can makes a noise
     in the dark.

                         Arrhythmic symptom, fever
opens its eye in the palm, the lines there

barely legible to the touch and pulsing. I would love you if—

     The chamberlain, ever over shoulder, boasting
     effective medicines and sentence,

teases his small finger with a pithing needle.

Taylor Supplee is a gay poet from the Midwest who earned his MFA from Columbia University where he served as the first Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize in 2020, and the 92Y Discovery Award in Poetry in 2019, his poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Baltimore Review, Carve, Foothill Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Image, The Moth, The Penn Review, phoebe, Quiddity, Rattle, SLAB, Thrush, and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City. taylorsupplee.com