To be tucked between recipes:

Rain trickles its tentacles, licking,
darkening and amplifying the climbing ponderosa pines,
their smell saturates the air.
Separately, the woman asks her lovers to give the scent a name.
For each it is different—
vanilla extract, syrup, smoke, waffles burning.
The woman nods, peering into each face, eager to build a bridge.
Every time the woman is not asked the same question in turn, her feet quicken,
so they trudge on at high speeds, the woman and her lovers, never closer to anything.
And yet—
in rosy dark dreams she plants new lovers out back by the rosemary,
her nails clogged with hungry soil.
She returns again and again to feed them. Water makes a Rorschach test of her denim jeans.
When these lovers twist from the earth, the warmth of their breath will be her ladder,
why, she cannot say—
maybe that’s why everyone has an eye for the ring she gave me,
clunky and indelicate—sturdy, set stone love.
In her kitchen as we chopped, poached, and shred, she slid it over my finger.
It’s supposed to be imperfect, she said,
her words adrip, vanilla.

***

A reformed Texan based in Missoula, Montana, Taylor Stein moved west to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where she served as Fiction Editor for Cutbank Literary Magazine. You can read two of Taylor's flash pieces, "Minx, Siren, Norman, Stone" and "Apply Chapstick and Try Again," in the Word Dog Quarterly and her short story "The Wilting House on the Mountain" in Duplicitous: A WriteHive Compilation, available on Amazon. To read more of Taylor's work, please go to steintaylor.com. Since 2016, Taylor has taught with the Free Verse Writing Project which amplifies the voices of incarcerated and other historically erased youth across rural Montana. She also teaches a creative writing class through the University of Montana's MOLLI program and works as the Grants Manager and Development Coordinator for Youth Homes. When Taylor's not writing or curled up with a book, she's looking for new places to snorkel in the mountains.