All in by Taylor Byas

When the Air-Conditioning Breaks

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Byas

by Taylor Byas


We discover home-grown autotune and yawp
our Vaselined lips mere inches from the box-fan’s
lattice—the flowered blades compute and swap
our breaths for robot, monotone. When our friends

sardine the porch and ask (y’all coming out?),
we let the screen door boomerang back to chop
the wooden frame, our dizzy laughter cutting out
our grandmother’s kitchen edict—close that door and stop

letting my air out this house. All bark, no bite.
When we return, our shadows race the sunset
back to the earth. Inside, we doff our white
tank tops and blue jean shorts, our naked silhouettes

like trophies welded in summer’s afterburn,
hot metal cooling to things for her to love—to spurn.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, and others.

This Kill Bill Scene Has Me Thinking About Weave and Girl-Fights

SWWIM Every Day
by Taylor Byas

by Taylor Byas

The camera lingers for a moment on the black
flame of O-Ren Ishii’s hair in the snow, just sheared
by the bride’s Hatori Hanzo, and I think
about what it means to draw hair in a fight. To hitch

a braid or a track from another woman’s scalp.
What would our grandmothers say if they knew
we’d forsaken the old proverbs—where is my Vaseline?
or Bitch, hold my earrings. These days, victory depends on:

· Grip-strength, how well we crook our nails
beneath the cornrows, how much we loosen
the black thread holding the extensions

· The strength of the first tug

· Drag-distance

· The size of the hole the asphalt eats
into the other girl’s jeans.

Somebody yells out Worldstar, starts recording,
and the crowd’s collective flash is hot as stage lights.
Someone’s nose is knuckled to spit and blood.
A lip bellies around a cut. A black girl’s bruises

grey under white light. And when they’re pulled
apart, pieces of themselves left behind
on the other’s shirt like O-Ren’s slit of blood
in winter’s fresh down, the judges must decide

on a loser. The phones record a tracking shot
to the clump of hair or braids on the pavement,
zoom in. The cameras linger on the weave yanked
from owner and updo, and the crowd’s uproar

is something like exit music. But we know
this is no samurai’s death. No one lives this down.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Taylor Byas is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a first-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.