MID-LIFE

She’s just trying to hold
the centerline, while everything
falls apart around her – a hurricane
named Hollie, beloved daughter
blowing through the living room;
outside the kitchen door, slugs
invading the camellia bed;
a migraine no aspirin
can cure.
Hollie beloved daughter dreams
of flying carpets aimed
at a life of her own.
How could a mother explain
the true kismet
is studded with days
like this?

FAMILY REUNION

Red plastic plates and throw-away
paper napkins. Swaps of photo-snaps
from last year and all the deaths
and babies in between. Gossip about
anyone who isn’t here. Sophie's
bringing artichokes. They grow free
in her neighbor’s big backyard.
Sophie likes the way steamy green
fills up a picnic basket. Spiky
tips. You scrape the fleshy
butts off with your teeth. It's
potluck, it's family.

ROOM 111, SILVER SPUR MOTEL

Seven fleas adrift on bedsheets,
six drop-dead Buds, a dirty bandanna
and someone wheezing garlic on the other
side of a one-night wall – you’ve been here
before, on the eve of some private rodeo
where the bull is sure to win.
Will you ever think of a good reason
to just walk out under streetlights,
one thumb skyward and two scuffed boots
measuring the centerline?

NEWCOMER

You’ve moved in down the road,
having paid your city money
and put up city gates and KEEP
OUT signs. Inside new white
plastic fences you’ve cleared
out everything our old neighbor
left behind. You’ve planted
ornamentals in her rusty
wheelbarrow (freshly painted
green). Her old deaf dog
no longer lies in wait
to rip neoprene from passing
bumpers, and cock one ear
and droop the other, and wag
his country tail.
You’re clipping, trimming,
improving all over the land
you say belongs to you.
But we’re not sure
you belong here.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Email: Taylor Graham

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