Like a child, you call it what it could be
before it fully forms. I draw you a half-moon, you claim
a thigh that quivers in nosy moonlight. I sketch

the curve of a suture needle and your mind
will supple it, mollify the metal into a breast drooping
into a waiting hand. Anything cylindrical is off

the table. This practice of misnaming was once
a rite of passage, a multiple choice test bootlegged
on middle school bathroom stalls in nail polish 

and Sharpies—the most sacred parts of ourselves 
abstracted in our childish renderings. How much 
mischief could a drawing conjure then, when the first 

time seeing myself was not in glass but in too-
sharp angles and miscalculations, inches and inches
of space between what a boy could reach with a flick

of his tongue? In one sketch, the vagina yawned open
like a greedy newborn, in another, it bled
like a bullet wound. At home, I laid in bed, pried

myself open in front of a mirror to find the monster
I thought I was. I tried to draw it from memory,
its curves and folds, shaded in where my skin

was darker than the rest of my body. It looked more
like a rose, mid-wilt, just beginning to stink
with its thirst. In its fullest form, I couldn’t call it

sexy, it did not make me desire myself. 
Like a flower in its last days, it only said look
at me, look at me now. I will not always be this pretty.

Published June 20th, 2021

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is now a second year PhD student and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She was the 1st place winner of both the Poetry Super Highway and the Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and a finalist for the Frontier OPEN Prize. Her chapbook, Bloodwarm, is forthcoming from Variant Lit this summer. You can find her on Twitter @TaylorByas3, and you can find her work at https://www.taylorbyas.com/

Kaveri Raina is an artist born in New Delhi, India, now based in Brooklyn, New York. Raina earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited by M+B in Los Angeles, PATRON Gallery in Chicago, Assembly Room in New York City, and Annarumma Gallery in Naples, among many others. Kaveri’s recent exhibition at M+B, NO LACKS, ME AND MY SHADOW, can be viewed online, along with more of her work at PATRON Gallery and Luhring Augustine.