TRIPLET SISTERS MEL

Melanie was first. Behind a log
with her long black hair wound tight
like a choker, and her blouse
to bind her earthward.
Second-born Melissa didn't show
at school but wasn't cutting
class in a forest clearing
with her heart cut out, her skirt
a tatter here and there.
And so the third-born, Melody,
goes every night to sleep in dreams
of someone with a famished taste
for dark-haired sisters blood-
bound to a name that starts
like hers.

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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