Anastasia Jill: "Little Taipei"

Anastasia Jill is a queer writer living in the South. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fiction Anthology, and has been featured with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, Five:2:One, apt, Into the Void Magazine, 2River, Gertrude Press, and more.

Little Taipei

​I saw it with my body,
I saw it on a fish
born threadbare, or plastic
or falsified
 
to a psychosis of traffic lights,
cramped retail and decoration;
it was an incense, cleansed and
reborn through signs
 
made of plastic and mercury,
cautioning on goers to proceed
until concrete, bubblegum and
boot tip were snaked
 
together, mating the intro and
extrovert into crab air and
amethyst beads – where soup and
sandwich and yogurt are so calm
 
Being digested, so reserved
passing abandoned gas stations,
dead rat carcass, panhandlers,
and rainbow gutters
 
that are conditioned to be full,
or a casual cascade
for golden eyes that are meant
to be bought or sold,
 
but more often, sold
to the newspaper on the ground
that I seal and deliver
with my tongues.
 
I saw it in my body,
I sit here, on the ground
and will provincial ground
to suck me into its calcite utero.