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 International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, 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. —Back to Orsorum Contents— |
ChinatownHe opens to me such a brownand hopeful hand. Instead of pennies I place in it a fortune cookie baked in a grin fragile as his own. He chews the sugar crust, then hands back the paper scrap. He has no vocabulary for such a fortune: The virtuous understand equity; the small profit from it. This is way beyond my understanding. How could I explain vendors of futures, the wide options of a balance-sheet, how mortgaged virtue opens up no exit for the spirit? He nods and smiles. He’s no richer, but the taste in his mouth is sweet.
DancingKept so long from moving,speechless in her white bed, her shy body for a nurse’s aide to turn— now, it’s just a matter of splitting the sheets, signing for her ashes to fill an urn— and she, she’s thrown off flesh and tubes to clasp an angel’s wing. So many footless steps to learn.
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