![]() 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. 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.
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