When the dark curtains for the bedroom came,I blacked you out like the nightyou fight in. Forgive me, but I’m still workingthrough it in therapy. Lately, I’ve been so suddenwith my decisions—cut my braids outof my head a month early, put a deadlineon a man’s love. I’m leaving space for nothingbut blame in the new season, and this hereis no different. I never told you about the great hurtbetween us. Me, thirteen and thinking I needed youto speak back to me. Back then, I skipped my wishesto you like stones over water. I slept in the overhangof mornings that relieved your shift. I’m angryI still don’t know what to call the thing betweenus. Were you friend, or sister? The first loverto leave when I became too much? I’ve surrenderedto the half-truth; men remind me of you. The mixedmessages, you in my bed every night and nothingever to say of it. My therapist says I’m projectingbut goes silent when I mention that you’ve been doing itto me my whole life. At night, I get moodyin waiting. Anxious for you to ask mehow I’ve been. Anxious enough to pay someoneto ask me now instead. The harder and fuller truth:men have abandoned me and I never heardfrom you. I was a shadow of a wolf,whimpering into your blank light. I didn’t knowthat love was an ancestor of quietude,that you were still there. Of all thingslove, I’m still learning.
Dear Moon
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- January 17, 2024
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“Dear Moon” from I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES: by Taylor Byas.
Published by Soft Skull Press on August 22, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Taylor Byas.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Acquisitions Poetry Editor for Variant Literature, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a 2023-24 National Book Critics Emerging Fellow. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contest, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Bloodwarm from Variant Lit, a second chapbook, Shutter, from Madhouse Press, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and her second full-length Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in 2025. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, published with Texas Review Press in December 2023, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology forthcoming from HarperCollins.
New York, New York
"A buoyant blast of South Side love and ache, conversing with Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg, finding room for Harold’s Chicken and Claudia Rankine."
—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
"In prose both heart wrenching in one line and hilarious the other, Byas paints a portrait of life in Chicago with all of its ups and downs."
—Sam Franzini, Our Culture Magazine
"A literary descendant of fellow Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, the 27-year-old Byas turns the everyday aspects of life into the exuberantly extraordinary . . . Her collection is a love letter to the city that made her—and to her own journey of self-discovery."
—Diamond Sharp, Chicago Magazine
"With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues . . . Byas etches out the beauty in the most mundane parts of Chicago with a reflective eye . . . I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times offers a weighty contribution to Black Chicago’s poetry legacy."
—Reema Saleh, Chicago Reader
"This impressive debut is a celebration of Chicago’s South Side, telling the story of a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery. Every poem is alive with the beauty and intimacy of growing up in the city . . . [A] stunning achievement whose lyricism echoes some of Chicago’s greatest poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Eve L. Ewing."
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"It is impossible to understate the breadth and skill that Byas demonstrates throughout I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times . . . This collection is further proof that Byas is one of the most important voices in American poetry . . . We are experiencing a legend in the making."
—The Poetry Question
"[An] ecstatic debut . . . These nuanced and complex poems offer unforgettable snapshots of Black life in a vibrant city."
—Publishers Weekly(starred review)
"The poet uses her strong voice to deliver evocative, richly described snapshots . . . In this promising work, Byas tells an intimate story of growing up."
—Booklist (starred review)
“My fellow Chicagoans, rejoice. Taylor Byas’s poems are visually stunning and formally inventive. They give us more proof that everything dope does indeed come from Chicago.”
—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold
"So many of the greatest poets in the American tradition have been Chicago Black women and this debut collection is an announcement that one more has joined that proud tradition. Byas’s work unfolds with tender attention to all sides of life in the Black metropolis. From mulberry trees to daisy dukes to candy ladies to liquor stores, this work sings of the city that raised me in an authentic way, with a careful formal attention befitting the lineage of Gwendolyn Brooks. This is a work to cherish."
—Nate Marshall, author of Finna: Poems
"In The Wiz, Dorothy finds the song of Oz and follows it down the road, easily—Taylor Byas unearths that spirit-music, too, in her stunning debut, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. These poems illuminate Chicago, the body, the sweat of condensation on the Kool Aid cups cooling in the heat on a summer day in technicolor memory and careful music. It is the Chicago that's there all along among the emerald streets, the self that is always there, the loud and frightening sparkle of a father's memory, and the sharp edge of a lover's rough touch. It is the shades of love blooming, green, across the South Side of Chicago. In fresh, inventive, and living formal verse and free verse, Taylor Byas paints the golden path, brick by brick, and we ease on down it."
—Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now!: Poems
"Some collections attempt to build new worlds. Others return to old worlds and write them anew. Byas' dive into the familial and the familiar is an intimate project, one that questions motherhood, love, and mourning in tandem. All this, in a Chicago that shole ain't what this world tries to make of it. Taylor's Chicago flexes and bristles and brims with life. In Byas' work, Chicago is a/the world, one reimagined as a clever, raw, and beautiful character. Clever, especially so because Byas uses a vast toolbelt stocked well with forms and voice(s) and smirking candor. She tells us of and tells us the truth. Byas writes, 'what we want has so little room to grow,' yet all the while, makes room, makes room, makes room. Move out the damn way already!"
—Aurielle Marie, author of Gumbo Ya Ya: Poems
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