Back to Issue 4

Jenny by Taylor Graham

  1952 - Her mother's daughter learns
  to swirl in organza and rayon crepe.
  She can balance a china-doll saucer
  heaped with garden-party dainties
  less fattening than a fashion plate.
  She's fluent in every genteel language.

  1964 - The keeper of words looks down
  from her high-rise stacks on a world
  like a crossword puzzle still unsolved,
  and all the tiny mortals scribbling
  to fill the squares. Keeper of words,
  she never drops a syllable.

  1975 - That was then. The westwind's
  sweetheart can pronounce every name
  for compost without holding her nose.
  At home with weather, drainage ditches,
  and what's lives on the other side
  of fences.

  1989 - Ancient maiden in denim armor
  and cockroach-killer boots, she's made
  of strings & twigs, guts n' gristle.
  She can pretzel herself out of any fix.

  2005 -  Don't ask how many years.
  She wears a mis-matched skin, washed &
  bleached, more wrinkled every morning.
  Worn thinner than fashion. Almost
  comfortable, almost broken in.

Up The Alcan Highway by Taylor Graham

  Could a car-trip to Alaska
  exceed a child's expectations?
  In Montana, a ride on a paint cayuse
  had me in a trance. The Calvary
  Stampede was better than any circus,
  with a raffle for a pony
  I didn't win, but cantered all summer
  on its fabulous withers.
  On to Lake Louise, its waters bluer
  than beyond the seas I hadn't sailed.
  Up the unpaved Alcan, every milepost
  marked yet greater separation
  from the discovered world.
  Each night, we spun the matrix
  of our lives in a roadside shelter
  from the rain, wet clothing
  strung from every rafter.
  Did it matter that I couldn't
  see the stars?

Bio: Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog hander in the Sierra Nevada. She has had her poems published in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly and elsewhere. Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.