Our neighborhood is home to Carey Lee Taylor, an accomplished poet and photographer whose inspirational sources include what she sees in Concordia. Take her poem “A Woman on 22nd and Killingsworth.” Taylor explains how she came to write it after a walk in Concordia.
“‘A Woman on 22nd and Killingsworth’ was inspired when walking home from Alberta Park one winter morning at the beginning of the pandemic,” she says. “The image of this couple stayed with me all day, and the poem, I hope, gave them a chance to be seen with the dignity they deserved.”
Taylor is the author of The Lure of Impermanence (Cirque Press 2018). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Ireland and the United States, and she holds a master of arts degree in school counseling. She has lived in the Concordia neighborhood for four years. You can learn more about her at careyleetaylor.com.
A Woman on 22nd and Killingsworth
sits in a wheelchair
outside Cornerstone
Community Church —
foam curlers in her
hair, she pulls a tube
of lipstick from her purse.
At the curb
an orange extension cord
snakes from the open door
of a duct-taped camper
to an electrical outlet
beside her.
An unshaven man steps
from the camper, moves
towards her, bends
down, and kisses
all that pink—bedded in her hair
like Magnolia blossoms,
clasped
to her head
like a crown.
Concordia Neighborhood #3
It makes no difference to the sky
what happened here,
or the east wind taking its
much-needed break.
Even St. Michael
was taking vacation
from shattered glass
and squeal of tire
seated at the bar of some
scuzzy seaside honky-tonk,
on the ebb tide
of his third beer.