Taylor Graham

DEATH THE MASSEUSE

You walk in, softly shut the door.
They say, she knows the human body
like her own hand: each knotted muscle
and rainy-weather ache, the trick-knee,
the stiff-necked spine fused into a
question-mark. She’ll probe a finger
into each invisible bruise till she
can tell you every time you’ve
slipped and fallen.

Get undressed, she says.
No fooling around, she’s got
a tight schedule. Lie down
on that table. She puts on a pot
of coffee, water boiling into steam
as she grinds the bitter
beans to dregs. She rolls up
her sleeves. You’ll feel
better, she says,
in the morning.


AMONG THE MIRRORS

A skeleton figure repetitious as candlesticks,
in an old robe, like the portraits
he stands redoubled against the wall.

The mirrors look inward, their reflections
privy to some larger plagiarism that dittos
his form on the high ceiling, and repeat, repeat.

There will be a continuation of himself,
a continuity – DNA serves as the bondage,
and the generations go on. They moan and love.

Newborn and dead, family bears such warranty.
The ancestors carry the little ones. He is
resigned; the silver surface shines his hair.


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).

Current Issue:
April 2010

Taylor Copeland
Taylor Graham
Carol Lynn Grellas
Karen Kelsay
Bill Roberts
Russell Rowland
Lucille Shulklapper
Kelsey Upward
Patricia Wellingham-Jones

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