Meg Taylor

THE FIRST LIGHT YOU CAN’T NAME

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

The night I woke without reason,
the walls held their breath.
Even the refrigerator stopped
pretending to dream.

I stepped outside barefoot,
grass cold enough to erase me,
and the world waited,
not for me,
just to prove it was still turning.

Above:
burning punctuation,
each star a sentence already finished,
some close, some reckless with distance.

I didn’t yet know
light could arrive late,
that brilliance might be
a ghost.

Still, something in me tilted,
an animal unlearning fences.
I wanted names for everything.
I wanted to ask the dark
why it never bragged
about holding so much.

A wind crossed the field,
thin as metal,
and for the first time
I understood:

the earth does not care
whether I go back inside.

That was the moment,
before purpose, before fear,
I realized the stars weren’t watching.
They were burning.

𐫱𐫱𐫱

Meg Taylor is a writer and business process manager living in Indiana. Her work explores overwork, grief, self‑discovery, and the quiet strangeness of modern adulthood. She is especially interested in the small, ordinary moments where a life quietly tilts in a new direction. Her writing has appeared in Exposition Review, Fjords Review, Welter, and other journals.