Taylor Byas’s I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

Taylor Byas is just now releasing her debut full-length poetry collection, but she’s already making a case for herself as a literary descendant of fellow Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, the 27-year-old Byas turns the everyday aspects of life into the exuberantly extraordinary. Byas, who grew up in Woodlawn before earning her bachelor’s and master’s from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, paints a Technicolor portrait of the South Side with poems that cover topics as varied as therapy, the corner store, and her grandma’s house. In I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which will be published by Soft Skull Press on August 22, Chicago acts as more than a backdrop — it is a tangible character in its own right, very much alive. Unmarried to any particular form, Byas, who now lives in Cincinnati, seamlessly transitions from sonnet to free verse to sestina to erasure. Her collection is a love letter to the city that made her — and to her own journey of self-discovery.

I SPY

By Taylor Byas

I walk outside through my apartment complex once the

sun has set and the eye of Birmingham’s heat has been

switched off. Some residents walk their dogs beneath the

flittering lampposts, leave the shit behind to be stepped in,

to cast someone’s footprint in tomorrow’s bake. Others sit

on their balconies, uncap whatever IPA was on sale at the

Fresh Market. The caps kiss the concrete like loose change.

I come out at night mainly to watch the trees, their night-

time transformations. How when I stand beneath them and

look up at the sky, the branches look like fingers culling the

sky for pearls of light. How the moon cracks like a white

porcelain plate behind their cover. I look for everything

I’ve ever known in the bare branches; the frayed fibers of

heat-damaged hair, the cartography of a river splitting,

its distributaries like offspring on a family tree. Tonight,

I find the silhouettes of the teenaged boys who walked my

block in Chicago’s South Side. During the summers, they

cycled through different colored tank tops, and every night

they anchor-chained home, all branch and switch. Shit and

damn were Jolly Ranchers in the mouth, syruping with the

warmth of their spit. The wet tanks on their backs a second,

pinched skin. Blood weeded to a surface. And I never knew

where they came from. It was almost as if they’d sprouted

from darkness itself — pushing up through the cracks of the

broken sidewalks then duplicating — their shadows twin-

ning like background dancers in the moonlight.

© 2023 by Taylor Byas. From I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Catapult LLC.