Bio

Stephen Taylor teaches writing and mythology at Glendale College. He has won an L.A. Arts Council Literature Award and the 2004 Main Street Rag Short Fiction Contest, and has been a two-time finalist and Honorable Mention in The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction given by Nimrod International Journal. He was co-editor of the sports fiction anthology Suicidally Beautiful and most recently Off the LIne, an anthology of stories and poems about the influence of cars on American culture, both published by Main Street Rag. MSR has just published his second story collection, In Praise of Big Women, which is available for purchase at mainstreetrag.com.

Ø
is
more
sacred
than the trust
we built between us,
built it at first on jokes and lust,
then with confession and profound looks. That's why the worst
was not secret Facebook friends I found or coded messages you claimed that I mistook,
the viral lies that squared, but how easily you filled me with expectation, baited my ego, so now I'm unprepared to face myself.
It's like you stole my identity, emptied all my assets, left me without credit,
so to get by I have to rely too much on friends
until their trust accounts run dry
because they know my
balance is
getting
close
to
Ø.