TV EVENINGS

“I’m not enhanced by this movie,” you say.
I want to say “you’re losing it,”
a word lets go – hand of a loved-one
who’s slipping from his life, his language.
“Enhanced?”
“No,” you say, “I said ‘entranced.’”
Must be my hearing, after all, but words
suspended between the lips, the spoken wish,
and the listening ear – that cup
whorled in a spiral shell – remember
how we’d find them on the beach,
the sliding tidal space, waves erasing
footprints, letters of the alphabet –
these days, I wonder if you’ll find
the words, a story that fits the coiled shell
of my ear that yearns to grasp
what you mean – after all
the years – oh, where and when
did it begin, this question,
my reaching for your thought,
love’s lifeline?



ASTRONOMY IN THE TABLOID CENTURY

from Weekly World News and the SUN

Did you know:
An ancient parking lot was found on Mars,
a Spanish galleon is orbiting Mercury.
Dogs and cats are descended from space aliens
and Ben Franklin invented the Moonwalk.
There’s an alien port-a-potty on the Moon;
beer cans and an old mattress on Mars;
an Elvis-shaped constellation out there somewhere,
and a planet made entirely of noodles.
Hungry, hungry space rats!
Does it worry you that Moon rays turn
astronauts into werewolves,
the ozone hole is sucking penguins into space;
the Moon is hatching something
with big teeth? No matter, giant space spiders
will save the Earth, their webs deflecting
killer asteroids.
But the Sun will explode in 6 years.
And then what?

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).