AFTER THE DISASTER

Don t go back for the things you leave behind. - James Lee Jobe

How fracture yearns for form:
an instant back-up from catastrophe,
de-shift of plate tectonics, or
re-winding of the funnel-
cloud back into sky,

to a sunny morning all intact
before the town s inhabitants stood
at the fact s shattered edge
like tourists gaping
into brimstone,

a yesterday when they gazed
through smudged front windows
at their ragged, imperfect lawns,
their crabgrass and dandelions;
a day when they were

not afraid
to shut the door behind them
and walk away
with only the clothes
on their backs.

NOT SO LONG AGO

No mercy from the hangman,
nor from the good townspeople
come to pray for the soul
of the condemned.
Girls with rag-dolls
and boys with licorice sticks,
bonneted matrons
and gentlemen with their business
put aside, all gathered
for the moral lesson of the day.
They hold their communal
breath, wait staid and silent
for the ultimate
roller-coaster plunge,
the drop-
dead: the only way
this story in a nation's
archive could end.

AFTER

You've eaten the still life,
the pear and the brass platter.
You ve danced the masquerade
till your gown s gone limp
in the closet, the stars
on invisible hangers.

Now, nothing but a new dawn
paints shapes on air.
The car at the curb, blue
as yesterday; pavement mottled
gray. The same, but
incredibly strange today.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s 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) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her latest project is Walking with Elihu, poems about the American peace activist Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith (1810-1879).

Email: Taylor Graham

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