Cancer Cells As Pop Art, by Gordon Taylor

Cancer Cells As Pop Art

​​In a fresh crepe paper notebook, I list things that change while we sleep. Memories braid. Muscles swell. Cells copy. A ladybug climbs a lampshade. A moth with ombre wings rests on a popcorn ceiling. A vampire bat dreams upside down.  Questions linger, unasked, cinammon on a severed tongue. On waking, I dress in a burgundy crushed velvet blazer, vintage selvedge jeans, and an ironed white T. Too loose. I don't recognize my drawn cheeks and notched brow.
 
Do you believe in split lighting and trick mirrors?

​Here are Warhol’s Polaroids. A man stands in front of a painting of a screen goddess, her cheeks stained purple. His scarred torso, gash in a maple tree trunk. A silver crucifix between pecs. Eyes covered with one spread hand. The other hand holds a camera. Flexed bicep, snake that swallowed a rabbit. Trouser leg concealing a bulge. The cord of a floating rotary phone receiver spiraling beyond the frame 

​two clouds smudging : 

My lover’s face superimposed onto mine, a kind of kiss. Blue lips cold as diagnosis. Alter egos spin from us, pink eraser sheddings. I write a poem and mass produce myself. The speakers are purblind and vain, a middle-aged writer receiving radiation, a chip toothed teenager watering orange Echinacea, a tanned porn-star going viral, glistening in a lavender bubble bath, posting to his alt account on Insta, and a gold sequined Drag Artist named Anna F. Alaxis. 
 
Do you believe cancer demands that we change?
 
I am my own sequel. A photo of a photo of oxford shoes dropped at the edge of a photo of stiletto-heeled boots. A silver star with no vertices, hovering in front of a bookcase. A boy buried in sand, except for his wet head, smirk pursing an unlit cigarette. Two men in Rome’s Stadium of the Marbles, backs to the viewer, standing before a stone parade of identical nude bodies in different poses, inert
 
: against dawn the colour of shucked corn.

Gordon Taylor

Gordon Taylor is a queer emerging poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology and poetry. A 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Narrative, Rattle Poet's Respond, Nimrod, Arc, and more. Gordon was the winner of the 2022 Toronto Arts & Letters Club Foundation Poetry Award and a finalist in the 2023 Gival Press Poetry Award. He writes to invite people into a world they may not have seen.