Featured Poets March 2007

top of page

TAYLOR GRAHAM Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada of California, and also helps her husband (a retired forester/wildlife biologist) with his field projects. A native Californian, she studied for a year in Germany and has also lived in Alaska and Virginia. She and her husband have responded with their trained dogs tohundreds of searches for missing persons and disaster victims, including the Mexico City earthquake of 1985. Her poems have appeared widely, including America, Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and Southern Humanities Review, and she’s included in the anthology, California Poetry: Gold Rush to the Present. Her newest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Recommended Further Reading: Taylor Graham 's Website

FEEDER FISH and OTHER POEMS by Taylor Graham FEEDER FISH Amber, gold and flecked with silver, ebony-striped, and only 29 cents apiece, a swarm of swimming in a narrow tank. Lacy fins and flashes, silken curves to show the shape of water. Your daughter pointed “that one,” “that.” In a bowl at home, one fish died and then the other. No one told you about feeder-fish, the kind spawned to be eaten by something with a bigger mouth; the ones that flick their fools-gold, tip their silver scales, for no good reason die. BEN IN AUGUST The fluffy gray dog pants in easy rhythm at your feet while you shape-shift to coyote who sometimes signals from down the ridge in the dark. Your new computer works on one-cell human batteries, you’re plugged in to Tuesday morning air, a marathon which the rest of us don’t give a thought to: breathing. Life’s a zigzag between the crossed-off images and your next-minute future. A mouse- click, and here you are, between generations: old Ben begetting young Ben by means of a one-soul battery, till a mortal poet assumes voices biblical and the used-up oxygen rises on its elevator cable from your lungs, a metered hum against “the quiet world of the dying to dance,” the mouse in your hand like a diehard starter. E=MC² Conversion of energy into mass. The baby crying myself! Each moment heavier, expanding into its mother’s arms at the speed of morning. Twisting against the maternal grasp. Learning the words for I my, memorizing its self as in a mirror, a quantum of light carries energy. As it changes into mass, the particles veer away from each other. In 9th grade algebra his mind dissolves into classroom glass, becomes a sparrow to the elm tree’s highest limb, song without number. Caught in an equation, his other mind. In reverse, mass converts into pure energy as it flies apart. Between steel rails of the hospital bed, the child’s old body grows thin as its own reflection, energy trapped for yet another moment, about to shatter. BRAIN SURGERY My best-friend told me marriage is a war. And then you just subsided to the floor, your eyes blanked out, bottom of the stair. On the dinner table sits that one ripe pear we coveted, as if there were no more pears in the world. I don’t care anymore for fruit, the flesh about a seedy core. For years I’ve walked beside you, unaware,     my best friend without saying. The rest I could ignore; call them too intense, peevish, or a bore. I’m holding to you like a wish for air, as if the great night deepened to prepare its morning, ocean rushed to greet its shore.         My best friend. c. All poems by Taylor Graham.