House of Mirrors
Taylor Hamann Los
Taylor Hamann Los holds an MFA from Lindenwood University. Her poetry has appeared in trampset, Magma Poetry, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She is the author of Between My Spine & the River (Ridge Books, 2025), and she lives with her family in Wisconsin. You can find her on Twitter/X at @taylorhamannlos and at taylorhamannlos.wordpress.com.
The man I almost married carried an extra lung
to every carnival, its strange shape sagging
in his hands. If the sky erupted into fireworks,
he would unscrew a lump of tissue from his trachea
like a bottle cap & twist on the new one just in case,
in this light, someone recognized the old, collapsed
thing at his feet. He would say he was different now,
that he’d scrubbed his smog-clogged mouth.
Or that his tongue never slicked with the oil of lies,
but this is how monstrosities are made—
imposter parts & borrowed blood. Game of pain
where each piece moved meant another memory
replaced with whatever he wanted—clown faces
with makeup peeled back, revealing bone. I tried
to untangle it all, but bronchi led to bronchioles led
to the same diseased air I was already breathing,
until I found myself lying in a heap on the ground.
Get up, he’d say, before someone sees you, & I’d stumble
to my feet, retching, everything drenched in neon.