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milk river

By Taylor Alyson Lewis

after Derrick Bell

there once was an island love or magic resurrected
where they could go to rest and look at
each other plainly and hold one another’s
hands and play music in their cars so that
the bass reverberated through the mountains
and down into the ocean and live. of course, there were
still problems. what they didn’t take with them,
they took with them. all of what was written on
them. the past of the past. the words that
meant difference. but on this island, there was no
crime or punishment. no one dared come up
with a system that mimicked before.
don’t sink, begged the islanders, at the
very moment their skin had given them
everything, when to breathe was freedom
only Blackness afforded, when the fruit there
was neon and plentiful and ripe with
children, when the honey was floral and thick.


 

 

 

Listen as Taylor Alyson Lewis reads milk river.
Added: Wednesday, March 19, 2025  /  Used with permission.
Taylor Alyson Lewis
Photo by Michelle Schapiro.

Taylor Alyson Lewis (he/him) is a poet and educator. He holds a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. At Rutgers, he taught first-year composition and was a research assistant and project manager at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. He has also been a visiting instructor in creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and a high school English and Social Studies teacher. Taylor has received fellowships to support his writing from Lambda Literary, Fine Arts Work Center, Tin House Summer Workshop, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, where he was awarded the Queer Writer Fellowship in Prose. His work appears in Nat. Brut, Poetry Online, Voicemail Poems, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. 

Image Description: Taylor Alyson Lewis, a Black man with shoulder-length dreadlocks, stands on a beach during golden hour. He wears brown, rectangle-framed glasses, a collared, navy-blue short-sleeve shirt, and a white t-shirt. His hair blows in the wind.

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