BETWEEN HORIZONS

Black asphalt, shards of glass
constellated with roadkill
anonymous as angels – fur, scale, feathers
could be raven, gila monster, jack-
rabbit, jaws locked open,
claws gripped tight to hold
what’s gone –

as we’re bound west, gulping
air blown clean by wind, leaving behind
the memory of a city’s exhaust,
this day’s journal a letterpress-
edition shadow-stamped
on sand
for the moon to read.


OLD

The old husband barks
from the couch. The old deaf
dog barks from somewhere
in the house; she has no
words for being lost.

The husband wants
a drink. The dog wants to
know where the door is.
Each of us grows to
want more than is given.

The wife is getting older
too. I hear you, she calls
to the husband, the dog.
But how can I find
where you’ve gone?


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. 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). Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006) is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her latest is Among Neighbors (Rattlesnake Press, 2007).