taylor graham

 

 

Destinations, Destiny

In the crowded hall, the talk
was of mushroom clouds and acid rain.

I walked outside under the grid
of transcontinental flights,

each one marking its vector
with exhaust.

But in the east, the heavens
had sketched their own design

of cirrus across contrails:
a basin filled with blue

on which floated a single
soft white flame –

sign of doom or
the sky’s offering of praise?


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. She also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, 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 latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

 

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