Taylor Graham

I’m a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also help my husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. My poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and I’m included in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). My manuscript, The Downstairs Dance Floor, is winner of this year’s Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press".

HOSTAGES

Do parallel truths pertain

within and without the walls, literal

as they are of stone?

The guards, the tedium, the governor.

A cameraman trying for the perfect shot

through a bare-paned window.

The tedium. Guardsmen motionless

on rooftops, behind a hedge; inside,

official knickknacks on bronze patrol

of shelves; men with guns

playing cards. And then

two crazy humans holding the walls

of song. Her clear soprano,

his dusky baritone: a window shattered

in bright mosaic shards. Their captors

helpless in stained light