Terry Taplin | Seawall IV | Poets Resist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Terry Taplin is the inaugural Lambda Literary Fellow at Saint Mary's College. Terry serves as Poetry Editor for MARY: A Journal for New Writing, Co-Editor of Baest, and is the Social Media Manager at speCt books. He holds a BA in Classical Languages: Greek and Latin. He is a former slam champion and the recipient of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Undergraduate Poetry (academic year 2014-15). Terry's work has appeared in PARADISE NOW and Baest: A Journal of Queer Forms and Affects. He is the author of fragmenta (Marigold 2016), and has a chapbook forthcoming from Nion Editions.

Also by Terry Taplin: Three Poems Proserpine

Poets Resist
Edited by Sage
February 28, 2019

Terry Taplin

Seawall IV

Omniformed, multitudinous > we entangle with the loss of each conceivable queer life ; decrystallization of each quickening cell. Me mber by member saw them snagged from snaptoar &browlong down the abyss. Wrakt thus we sail reweaving tattered vellum, tacking from salvage to wreckage. Each my eye watched the salted air cloven by as cended Wall. Each my eyes reflecting the control monitors’ glowrng g leam. Fibers run underearth beneathsea, & bound up w’thin’t all words writ & bound up w’thin’t consummate phantasmagorical ymages. Key Master, among us we advance myself to stations above the Nexus of Fi bers; we elect myself to thumb protean cadence, to thread the Oculus. We imbue this ymage with charge of the Moon under this face; this tali sman we charge under Lunar aspect now on this side. My enemy raising glass to toast capitulate’ reprssns, yr halls r scorchd midfeast. Chords of the fibers r knotted n nodes; weve nettd all the sea. My captains break surface w/ barnacld language; retrievd text uncoverng dialects & gendrs. My cptains discourse to engendr unrestrct affnty; Tritogenia enflame us to kin-making. Nemesis, we will show you an ocean seethi ng with unlife & broken by fyres of owr venm & searching. Sodomy ‘fflic ts the garden with fruitless inversion < You’re doing amazing, sweetie / >. My queer replicates fabricate tactical networks of tentacular sulphur. Text ile renders conceived & livable queer lives; fibers tear veils from eyes on Patmos. Cishet, yr counterfeit governance of gendrs is forfeit. We r seizing the Gates. Move against the Wall & we re-stitch the world in our unprocreate’ Idol. Pagans & fags remember Alexandrian pyres; Hypatia undone in mob murder; Pallas from the Acropolis removed.