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All Your Life
There's that double yellow line
painted across
what your good eyes can see
is safe for passing,
and the black & white just waiting
to ticket you for taking
your own life
between your steering hands,
when all you want is clear sailing
down this county's rolling
green pastures,
with a quick check
in the rearview mirror
and then upward
through an untinted windshield
for that black-hole
in a sky that's always
hungry for its quota; that's been
riding your tail
without the flashing lights.
"The Moon Is Hatching"
from the tabloids
I know that sound. It comes
through open screens at night,
after the bats have sailed
into the last sliver of sunset
for the keen and shiver
of mosquitoes on a breeze,
and the dogs have curled to sleep
and you and I are wandering
the circuits of dream
it comes. A tick-tick
you might mistake
for a grandfather clock
about to strike the hour;
plick-click
an astrophysicist might take
for alien messages
aimed at Earth.
But it's the Moon.
Way up there, something nicks
against the inside
of that silver shell
with beak and toenails.
Over our sleep
the black night broods.
Sore Throat
Father who did to school-kids
whatever doctors do,
that dawning morning in the kitchen
where my mother pulled intestines
from our chickens
Father, farm-boy,
if an old hen left off laying
you could relieve her of her head
that morning gray as gizzards,
misty as childhood before
conditionals and prepositions,
I, pre-schooler, pushed through
the kitchen's swinging door
to find you knife in hand.
"How's your throat?"
you asked
then laid the bread-
knife down, blank as cutlery
as I ran
from the light that shivered
on the cutting board.
Taylor Graham Coal City Review editor Brian Daldorph calls this poet " a meticulous wordsmith,
writing often of her experiences as a rescue dog handler. Every word of each poem is carefully considered,
and yet there is fluency and grace to her poems that sometimes seem like the mysterious language of bird tracks
in the snow. Taylor helps us to remember our links with the natural world." Graham has published four collections,
including Casualties ( Coal City Review) and Looking for Lost ( Hot Pepper Press), as well as poems in myriad
publications. She is also on the editorial board of The Acorn, a regional literary journal focusing on the
western Sierra. ("Ten Poets to Watch", Writer's Digest April 2000)
Email: Taylor Graham
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