Tess Taylor’s ‘Three Notebooks’
Tess Taylor captures fragments of dream text, blank invitations, and stored receipts, in a poem from LARB Quarterly no. 47, ‘Security.’
By Tess TaylorJanuary 1, 2026
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This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.
¤
Three Notebooks
1. LOST
once truly lost
it surely contains
some fabulous now unfindable poem
dream text from
the ghost book
that might once have—
2. NEW
Promising, blank
(clean sheets on the bed)
invitation
to the unmet lover—
(—the unsaid)
3. OLD
a year’s nightmares
haiku from spring
notes from a midnight
my ribs would not move
& in darkness a mockingbird
sang its mobius of trills—
staccato river
of fricative triplets—
I offered up
symphonic
outpourings
postcards to some future.
You did not judge:
You stored these receipts, still waiting:
—I am trying to live.
¤
Featured image: Paul Klee, Heitere Gebirgslandschaft (Joyful Mountain Landscape), 1929. Katharine Ordway Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, (1980.12.22). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed December 29, 2025. Image has been cropped.
LARB Contributor
Tess Taylor’s work deals with place, ecology, and cultural reckoning. Her play LAST WEST, about Dorothea Lange, launched at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book of poems, Come Bite, is out from Milkweed Editions in 2027.
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