Taylor Graham: two poems

HOW WAS YOUR DAY?

OK, honey, so somebody at the lab injected
a rabbit with DNA from, what, a jellyfish?
so the bunny glows in the dark. Yeah,
I understand, that messes things up
for all the other research involving this
particular rabbit. But you know, I heard
something even more amazing. Cathy says
the mockingbird outside her bedroom window's
been injected with DNA from her alarm-clock.
Can you imagine? At one in the morning,
there's the buzzer going off, at one-forty-
seven and three-nineteen and all night long
it's already time to get up. How could
that be, except genetic engineering?
Surely Nature would never design a bird
that mimics, just for kicks, and keeps us
sleepless.

DYSLEXIC

He reads things upside down, no, counterclockwise
to himself. Sometimes stands when flowering quince
is in bloom humming something upside down about
smiling.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. My poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Moon, The Chattahoochee Review, Free Lunch, The Iowa Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Yankee and elsewhere. My latest collection is An Hour in the Cougar's Grace.