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Taylor Graham |
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OUTSIDE THE STORM You know how waiting rooms are, making the minutes pass by puzzling out the features on a face across from you, a man half in profile staring at the door. "I nearly bit his head off," someone whispers. An old woman lets herself down into a plastic chair as people come and go, so many travelers trying to get home before a storm. You flip through a magazine for a phrase to save the wait: "The last embrace, the last kiss, the last lie...." So many other times in temporary rooms, so many dark evenings. SPEEDING WESTBOUND 65's the legal limit somewhere. But not out here, where no one believes in radar, and a tail-wind carries you faster farther. And you don't keep track of horizons when you're riding a half-broke mustang, well actually a Toyota, its tires laying down rubber skin-thin on asphalt, smoothing out the wrinkles that keep eroding pavement into desert sand. Even in Nevada, the farthest you can see is your horizon. Weather happens. Time's like a trooper clocking you. WHAT'S LEFT A length of knotted rope like a knickknack on the mantle: it was useful once, now it casts uncanny shadows against the beams by lantern-light. A patchwork quilt in fading colors folded in the one stuffed chair: such repetitious working of a thread through scraps of cloth to bind like family hands. No sun. For years, dawn hasn't dared push aside the window- shade to tiptoe across the floor. He's quite alone now except for the old rag-rug before the fire, where once a dog lay when he kept a dog. [Index] |
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Thunder Sandwich #26 - Summer/Fall 2005 |
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