Mario's Pizza Palace

There's a small child loose
and scavenging the floor.
He hasn't come to language,
but rocks and coos. His brother,
upright, squalls and tosses crusts
and crumbs. A younger sister
offers masticated thumbs.
Across the carpet in a high-back
booth, two marrieds practice
glum over their spaghetti
tangle, and finally walk out
hungrier. The server goes and
comes, avoids the infant
crawler, whose mother smiles
at large and chews her
slice of pepperoni.

Near Drowning

The flat gray ocean goes out forever
on its tides, the same as yesterday and
the day before. But listen. A seahorse
saws deep water with its spiny tail,
somewhere beyond the breakers.
Can you hear what life-forms climb
out of a bare ocean floor? Sunken
galleons raise their bony scaffolds
out of bottom mud. There sleep
the daylight men who dissolved
in the service of salt. Water joins
us all. Listen. A sea-flute pipes
its plaint in your ear like sirens.
Could you ever swim back up?

Jackpot

is up to 30 million, there's a chance
in the moon in the sky to win. The state
commission's sent out press releases,
hired ad-men to inflate, and shrinks
(call 'em behavior analysts)
to pick apart the brain of every-
one who's got one (and a greenback
dollar), to slip the finger of a gambler
in his gin.

^

Biography

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada of California. Her poetry appears in The Iowa Review, Free Lunch, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Her latest collection is An Hour in the Cougar's Grace (Pudding House, 2000).