Sample Poems by Jane Vincent Taylor

The Lady Victory

At the end of a horseshoe drive
circling a statue of the Blessed Virgin,
the Home stood waiting.

Without signs, you knew
to slow down. March winds
blew the crowns of old salt cedars.

Call it southern Gothic
haunted by gossipy spirits,
guilty girls, our hidden for-bearers.

Mother sat in the silver Buick,
beautifully pressed, a polished
cotton skirt cut on the bias.
Dad had turned from telephone man
to sad unsinging
Perry Como in a small town suit.

I shivered in the backseat,
dressed to the nines, three months along
in my blue unbelted shirtwaist.

Staring out at Our Lady of Victory
I wondered why
she looked so pale and helpless

having won some war or other,
having come to stand
so high on stone.

The Sorry Cake

A bunch of pregnant girls
having to sing together
happy birthday to a kid they hardly know
when no one wants to think of birthdays
anyway, having to smile
and act like you appreciate the cake
and wondering why the nuns
cook up these things and how
you'd planned to lie about your age
and say not fourteen, going on sixteen soon
and now the cat's out and you'll be pegged
the youngest, called the baby
and no one wants to be a baby in maternity
clothes or have a birthday in a home
for unwed mothers and have to sing
a song to someone like they might
be family when they're not and then
to look around at fifteen strangers
mouthing words from childhood
in the light of fourteen candles.

A Kind of Food

Banana is the food of charities
always on the table in plastic bowls
day old, week old, blackened, the dried up stems curled like nuns'
arthritic fingers, eternal crooks. I hate them. All prisons, half-way
houses, old folks homes, orphanages and every kind of sacred loony bin
is swamped in the do-good banana stench and that's how
we will know each other when we meet in the real world
someday-the post office, supermarket, cleaners-by the lingering odor
oozing under our skin, old oily shame.

Burning in the Night

Minnie longed to see her hometown
so she spooled out pictures
in the dark and they floated
from her iron-stead bed to mine

burning off her tongue
like fireflames spewing refuse
from nightspires, petroleum's
stinky smoke stacks

and way up on her grandma's
pool hall rooftop patio black ash
covered everything, she said,
a film acrid as local air

so I knew it was Conoco
she spoke of, rich with Ponca
Indian blood, roughneck sweat

and Minnie tried to tell me
she'd only done it once
and bingo, pregnant, like
it was the town, unlucky town

then drifting off, she'd start
explaining all the stupid rules
of playing Snooker, but hey,

I slept under the open window
and could see the small town stars
and I knew good and well
Minnie had done it more than once.

Naming Names


Each are equally anonymous.
No one's name's the same
inside the Home, no one's
home's revealed.

Maybe your dad's a big shot
(like Sally) or you could be
a senator's kid, the youngest
daughter of the TV newsman

or a Kerr-McGee girl
accidentally gone bad.
We speculate

but we don't know, except
for Ruby. (ruby-duby-do
who's poco -loco)

She spilled the beans
about her father's hardware
store in Sallisaw and how

she's been here twice
because her mother says
she's slow and doesn't
understand the world.

Sister and the Babies

In the glassed-in nursery
she sat in one rocker,

big, slump shouldered
and I, in the other, fat

while the babies slept -
Bertha, wrinkled William,

tiny cross- eyed Ann Marie.
We had fed them all,

illegitimates, newborns
nobody wanted, then

Sister started crying
huge west Texas tears.

I need a new assignment
she said, these babies

just keep coming and you
girls, you young girls

but then she stopped
because it was time

to take the baby bottles
from the autoclave.

Steam whispered wet
on her wire- rim glasses

and all those weeks,
I had seen her,

watcher of the unwed,
big keys jangling,

as my holy keeper, but
we were all locked up.