STEPHANIE KAYLOR

Stephanie Kaylor is a PhD student in Feminist Studies at the University of California
at Santa Barbara (USA). She is Reviews Editor of Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

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The Ultrasound Shows Me an Empty Sack

In the waiting room, a single
flyer with a reminder of hand
washing: how we often do not
know all we carry, how happy
birthday can be sung to our-
selves. I would rip it down
but today I don't have enough
song in me for envy. Even good-
bye, its single set of footsteps
shattering the trees' shriveled
rejects, brings its own music,
though I, too, have muffled my
ears. Today there is only an
envelope addressed from an
old lover with no letter in it, today
there is only a bell without a
clapper—I clang it with a hammer
to let the walls bear its wailing,
open the windows for the neighbors
to bear witness when God can't,
a single schoolboy riding a red
bicycle through the empty street—
he does not turn around






Ordering Dinner After the Miscarriage

The Uber driver picks me up at the
hospital and asks if it's just me. He
sees me looking back and knows I
am still waiting. I nod and shut the
door. Tonight I do not want to open the
empty refrigerator again, do not want
to hear the fan motor's roar unwavering
out of ignorance or hope, do not want
to ask if there is a difference between
the two. He drives drives through the
park, its potholed road that tells the
budding trees that they can bloom any-
where but here, and I do not look up,
going back and forth between the two
food delivery apps on my phone, their
same restaurants, delivery fees, wait
times, too grateful for options to be
disgusted by the possibility of meat, I
am in hunger, I am in awe—how you
can get anything you want, delivered






On Hearing That Rape Is Not Sex

It has been years since my hips
have sprouted into question marks
enclosing a stammered clause in
grey ink while the men grab on as
if to unbend them into arrows of
straight exclamation, and I am
too tired to always mind, to ask—
what then is wanting to sleep with
everyone only because you wanted
to sleep with no one, wanted
to show them you could do terrible
things, laughable things, have them
happen to you and it would not
be rape, you would not say rape,
except to clarify that which is rape
and which is not rape, underlining
again that this was not. What then
is the red ink below these words.
glowing like the warning of the
morning sun we never heed as
we leave for work regardless, what
then is the time before spent in a
stranger's bathroom in which you
want to go home, want to take a
shower, want to take time to decide
whether you will save their contact
or watch a nameless number punch-
ing through your inbox like an incorrect
password that one day, maybe, will
be recalled. What then is the acquired
taste for gin, the banality of memory
and the memory of trying not to
remember, the contradiction you don't
have time to disrobe because a lover
is at the door. I open—how you thought
when I moaned louder because you
hurt me that I liked it, how I didn't
have it in me to bring no into our home






Survivor's Guilt

the gypsum pendant in the windowsill—

its sisters mined for chalk, lovers'
initials beholden to the sidewalk by
a crooked heart until rained away
and groundwater is pumped to purity

the half empty cup on the nightstand,
the dead fly floating in its grasp, infinity
in its still open eyes

in another room there is no window
in another room we shut the door

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