Taylor Graham

This Cold Music

We’ve come so far off the map,
the compass doesn’t work.
We’re way up north and windswept,
snow-blown at this high perspective
on the globe.

How soundless we’ve lived
inside our borders,
inhabiting a land of tariffs
on blue sky and two-part singing;
where listening for a breeze

becomes a crime:
a country of widow-makers,
old mute emperor trees in dotage.
The slightest wind
would blow their crowns off.

From this new view-point I can hear
a hemisphere whistling as it spins.
Balanced on the frozen edge,
let’s learn to do more
than just breathe.



Starting Now

I’ll set a strapping pace
against the hanger’s undertow
and those counselors sulking danger.
They lie forsaken
as daily ugliness, as leaden
senses that never bloom
with a blush.
Oh, dare to breathe whole.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. She 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, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she is included in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Taylor's latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

 Current Issue:
July 2007

Annabelle Butterworth
Patricia Cook
Joshua Cristiano
Michael Estabrook
Anthony Gee
Taylor Graham
Michael Lee Johnson
Jerry Judge
Stephanie Kemp
Michael Keshigian
Stephanie Kjaerbaek
Brian Mayer
Steve Meador
Jessica Sidler
Karla Ungurean

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