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Emphysema
When you’re flat on the sofa
staring at the ceiling
is when you notice
there’s an attic overhead.
You never used to give it
a thought all the crazy things
you did, and packed away:
first cigarette; first kiss,
delving the universe in the backseat
of your dad’s DeSoto;
punching metal down a mountain-
road by luck and instinct,
lit cigarette
in your left hand on the wheel.
How heavy an attic gets
with all those boxed years.
It weighs down the shape
of the sky.
A Stupid Question
Pointless, really. We should have
just shaken our heads, moved on
to better things. But
a stupid question leads to
argument over definitions, opposing
interpretations leading to
accusation, censure, rules of right
and boundaries, mine versus
thine. Inevitably, that leads
to fences, gates, asphalt laid
down flat across what used to be
a wide, springing meadow
where I’m still clinging to one
green fringe by my toenails.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada
, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her
poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International,
and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the
Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her newest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor
(Texas Review Press, 2006),
is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
Email: Taylor Graham
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