Taylor Graham

Taylor states, " I’m a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also help my husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. In addition to Gypsy, my poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and I’m included in the new anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004)."

HOT FLASH

The neighbor’s dogs are flush

against the fence, yelping.

The sun’s not quite awake.

A towhee flies for cover, and all

the small birds silent.

Was it a fox?

In my mind

I pick apart pictures

from books:

Renard, ruddy, prick ears

famished as a fairytale,

low-slung slinking quieter than

a dog on tip-toes.

This creature’s eye catches

me before it slips

a shiver into shadow

back to myth

like fox.

ALL-NIGHT PIE

After the cheap Chinese dinner

at a formica table, and a foreign film

in the dark end of town,

we’d sit under a row of grinning

partial pies, one slice

apiece in front of us.

Plain peach for me, you favored

something chiffon with whipped cream.

The all-night lights were unforgiving

but we knew we wouldn’t meet here

anyone we knew.

One evening – I forget the film,

and whether it was chocolate-mocha

you forked into –

a small black cat appeared

on dainty paws against the glass,

staring at us wrapped in our lights

eating our separate pie.

I took her home. She lived with me

more devoted, much longer

than I knew you.

INHERITED TASTE

My mother served in blue-onion bowls.

Salad with a bleu cheese dressing

thinned with milk. Pale iceberg lettuce.

The dead smell did not come through.

My mother never could afford enough

of anything she loved, her taste

for roquefort like a needle prick

to the palate, shooting blue fungus

through veins inherited from the home-

land, a single cow kept for milking.

Churned and aged, the ripe would mother-

lode its passage through creamy white.

Bitter winters, her ancestors blue

in the toes, hobbling on rotten stumps.

My mother said, you can’t cultivate

that taste. It infects you. I never

loved this about my mother. I refuse

to water my blue cheese for a dressing.

I slab it onto hunks of sourdough

and eat it rotten raw.