The Arithmetic of After
Meg Taylor
I used to think before and after
belonged to tragedy,
the slammed door,
the call at midnight,
the name carved into stone.
But every hinge is not a loss.
Some open toward arrival.
There was before you
and after you,
the air rewired by laughter,
a room suddenly fluent
in warmth.
Still, subtraction teaches best.
The job that vanished,
the body reshaped,
the friend I stopped chasing
through her storm,
all of it proof that after
is never just one thing.
A stubbed toe can split a day,
so can a birth,
so can silence finally broken.
We want to measure by weight,
but pain is not math.
Happiness is not math.
Each fracture redraws us,
whether it’s a crack
or a canyon.
Maybe life is nothing
but these thresholds,
each one insisting:
you cannot go back.
And maybe the work
is not mourning the before,
but learning to name the after
without apology,
to say: this is who I am now,
and it is enough.
Meg Taylor is a Midwestern poet whose work explores resilience, loss, and transformation through sharply drawn imagery and emotional clarity. Her poetry has appeared in Wingless Dreamer, The Write Launch, and WILDsound Writing Festival. When not writing, she balances the demands of daily work with a drive to excavate what’s real on the page.
Nellianne Bateman is obsessed with the color purple. She is a writer, painter, and educator. She’s making the world a better place with a feminist lens and words and images. She is an MFA candidate in Art Writing at The New School.