from To People Who Sometimes Read
A female blue whale calf gains nine pounds an hour. Holy fuck! What a mammal. If only all females could see past their own insecurities, the fire would light a higher maternal flame. The deep sea is ridiculously blue. I’ve been caught in a wave twice and was pulled from its drowning. How high the feeling of being full of water can be, knocking the wind from your lungs, giving you no option but to swallow. That’s how to be in love, to swallow all your pride and let your body sink into its capsizing existence. The blue whale’s heart is the size of a small car.
* * *Paige Taggart is the author of Won't be a Girl (Scantily Clad Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2010. Paige wrote, "To People Who Sometimes Read is a series in which I attempt to make language my bitch. I had exhausted my previous mode of writing, coinciding with a need to change my life. It was time to admit my “soulshame,” to allow myself to be vulnerable and more declarative, a befitting circumnavigation with my lifestyle transition. I was influenced immensely by two poet’s correspondence of email-poems that were both extremely personal and had mastered a certain building format that I wanted to build-off of myself. At one point I didn’t even believe in editing. I had said it’s like trying to train a mule to talk. But I now realize that part of my dream is to begin without perfection, in fact, the more chaotic, the more likely I am to hone-in. Oftentimes, I felt like I was trapped in a cave that only allows exit when the sea is at low tide, and frequently the sea was at high-tide but with my one-good-eye I was able to scratch lesions into the walls. I found a dog that wasn’t mine but fed it anyway for four days, then I responded to the posters that had been duct-taped to tree trunks. The number put me on the phone with a sheriff. He was out for blood but when I told him my story, he let me go. I think I care about writing poetry more than anyone else in the world."
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