"Rooftop Monologue" by Taylor Byas

​Taylor Byas is a fun-sized Chicago native. She's spent her last six years in Birmingham, Alabama, where she received both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is currently a first-year PhD student, poet, and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, and others.

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​Rooftop Monologue
 
 
When I’m not thinking of dying, I like to play
God. Look; from this angle,  the world folds
 
inward like a Monopoly game board,
and those people below are more than just ants
 
to crush in the pretend-pinch
of my index finger and thumb. See the top
 
hat and thimble, the boats and silver dogs
backsliding along the sidewalks? I wore my old
 
Converse today. The soles unstitching
from the canvas, the beginnings of lips
 
around my toes. Enough flex
in the soles to cuddle the roof’s ledge the way
 
the other woman might hold a man after
a fight with his wife. I don’t want to jump,
 
only to be reminded of how thin the line between
breathing and falling. How fragile a crossing.
 
With the sun setting like that, it looks like you
could hike uphill right into heaven, these skyscrapers
 
steps for the giant. And the sky like hand-pulled
cotton candy, sifting into ropes of rose
 
and gold, stretching and re-stretching itself into
mouthfuls. Listen, I told you I don’t want to jump,
 
but what a view. Watch, the sky is hemorrhaging
twilight. Makes me want to scatter myself
 
on the sidewalk tonight.