Blackbird Archive
← v19n2, Fall 2020
Poetry · Volume 19, Number 2

Imaging

Tyler Mills

You shove me with your hands

and bicycle me with your feet

and bend your knees to kick me

like a wall

in a pool to shuttle fast

through the water.

You throw your arms in the air

like you’re falling

in a cart on a track

but smiling somehow.

The first time I see you

stir in me

before I know you

as my daughter,

we play with the idea

of an origin. But I won’t turn

to myth. I want to free you

not change you

into a linden tree

or a stone that will always stand

in my garden

or a feather

that escaped the ash.

Your first room

rounds me. Your toes

emboss my skin

in a pattern that disappears

like waves in the sea,

and I can’t follow you there

though there I am.

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Tyler Mills

Tyler Mills is the author of The City Scattered , winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award (Tupelo Press, 2022), Hawk Parable , winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, 2019), and Tongue Lyre , winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). She is co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie , winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize and forthcoming in 2021. A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker , The Guardian , The New Republic , The Believer , and Poetry , and her essays in AGNI , Brevity , Copper Nickel , and The Rumpus . She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet, and edits The Account . Photo by Arik Lubkin