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Taylor Teegarden

Taylor Teegarden wrote commercial content for print, radio and TV for 30 years.  Now she writes for pleasure, although she says, "The awards are nice, too--from short stories, to essays to plays."

Damn Good Writers is pleased to present the following: 


           1)    China Rag (poem)
           2)    Leftovers (poem)
           3)    Seismic Scarps (poem)
           4)    Short-Sheet Affection (poem)
           5)    Almost Tugs At Your Heart (poem)
           6)    Clothes Hanger (poem)
           7)    Death Rode Your Lungs (poem)
           8)    The Heart Man (short story)
           9)    New Orleans 1974 (poem)
          10)    Next Step (short story)
          11)    Alzheimer's:  Number One (poem)
          12)    Calla Lilies (poem)
          13)    Asian Poetry Forms - Tanka (poem)
          14)    Indian Summer Coast (poem)
          15)    One Year Since (poem)
       


       

              China Rag
 
It’s a worn rag, cotton flannel,
one of a dozen squares neatly torn
from my daughter’s retired nightgown, 
its label a roadsign from China,
where it was made.
 
It picks up dust with each pass
over counters, tables, piano,
from each weigh station on its way
out to the scrabble of our yard
joining the many motes there –
our storebought garden soil trucked in
from delta bottom land, that then sifts
on the neighbors’ wind elsewhere.
 
As I clean the TV screen the weatherman
tells us from his studio in San Francisco
that in spite of clean air campaigns
the smog and other particulate matter
blowing in to us this week come from China
that our clockwork planet moving east
cycles oriental dirt over our West Coast
every six days, polluting my house on its way.
 
Our weepy eyes and wheezes
waft in on foreign air, imported,
just like everything else these days.
 

                          Leftovers
 
Keeping company in the postwar family fridge
ghosts of the garden exhaling their stale breath.
Tomatoes collapsed, bleeding dried seeds.
Ruched romaine lettuce exfoliating like damp dissue.

Wizened carrots accompany frayed ropes of celery.
Lucky for us, I guess Mom was a bottom feeder
cruising the vegetable drawer for the leftover stuff
our picky noses sniffed at, our grammar-school palates
unable to parse pleasure from old produce.

Now that our mother has forgotten how to chew,
we take turns feeding her pureéd food --  carrots, beans,
squash -- bought at markets, not pulled from back yards.
Prepared fresh by four daughters with designer cookware,
famous chefs' cookbooks, their time to spare, shared.

Like her babies did, our good old gal opens her mouth
for each bite. Our past, her future, hard to swallow.

 

          Seismic Scarps

folded back upon themselves.
Rock is the fabric of this unsteady land.
Wound up on its thousand-mile
bolt of energy, California
fashions catastrophe every decade or two.
Earthquakes measured in jolts
times ten Richter scale
determine the exponential dance
or devastation that donates
to the daily frisson of living with the many faults
underpinning a dynamic state.
Gives residents an occasional
flinty memo from Mother Earth. 
 
                       
 
 

  Short-Sheet Affection
 
Kisses off-kilter, as if
a wry neck prevented
a three-point landing:
his lips,  missing yours,
meet air.
 
The jacket pulled around
your shoulders, a sleeve
tucked inside, left for you
to fix, to wonder why you
have to.
 
He withholds affection
the way you’d short-sheet
a bed – meant for a laugh,
ha ha, comes out anger
instead

     Almost Tugs At Your Heart
 
Funny how you get used to the protest
one wheel puts up as you tug it along,
that little red wagon of worry and woe.
 
You’ve hauled that load since childhood.
What you thought were a few bricks –
foursquare, familiar, almost friendly – 
 
were instead chockful of truculence.
It was your heels dug in, not the wagon’s weight
that made the way so long, so steep.
 

 Clothes Hanger
 
 
Arms akimbo
hands tucked
into one another
neck raised
shoulders poised
like a swan
observing the ballet
of getting ready.
Head tucked
turned in profile.
Wood.
Wire.
Tubular plastic
Padded quilted satin.
Each
with one slant eye
on the clock.
 

 

Death Rode Your Lungs

 
Death rode your lungs, a cancer in cowboy clothes
All war whoops, midnight jangles and spit.
 
Surgeons left that rawhide hole in your neck so’s air can come at a gallop, a trot, a suck at your lip.
 
They could not find a proper rope to do you in
So they did it by degrees, medical, and otherwise
Your weight diminished, your tenor voice a ruin
They rounded up your pride and cut it down to size
 
But in swallowing shadows, waiting for a posse
They found you anything-but-dead in the stirrups
Standing upright, back to being your own self, bossy
Ready for a roundup, ready to give some serious whups.
 
Funny how life left you in a Marlboro minute
But they brought out their knives, their death-ray beam
Funny how you hung on, dug your heels in, i’n’it?
Medicos made you the focus of their well-schooled rescue team
 
That hole in your throat breathes a pedigreed smell
A doggy breath panting for a walk, a chance
At the life you knew you might live so well
If only your bargain with God He might enhance.
                           
                          *****
 
                     The Heart Man

      David reached across Cate's cheek and brushed a long strand of auburn hair away from her mouth.  "Were you ever diagnosed, as a kid, with having pica?"

      "Pica? What are you talking about?"

      "The eating disorder - a craving for rocks, chalk, ice - "

      "David, you're always looking for signs and symptoms." 
 
He touched her lips. "-the hair in your mouth."
      "You used to think it was sexy, Doc."

      "Pica can be symptomatic of anemia."

      "Signs and symptoms. Diagnoses, shoosh. It's the way my mouth 
works, honey." She ran both hands through her shoulder-length hair 
for emphasis, framing her face in the vee formed by her upthrust bare arms, bent at the elbows. "My hair just goes there,always has.  Besides, I like it. You were always touching my face."

      His dark sad eyes appraised his wife of two years.  He smiled and brushed the corner of her mouth with a knuckle. "There was always that one errant strand caught between your lips."  His fingers played 
with an auburn ribbon of her hair. He knew that at fifty-six her own slowing chemistry had banked the fire of her abundant copper-colored hair; but L'Oreal's bottled chemistry had re-ignited its lame.  
"It's what I remember most about you, our first date."
 
She smiled at the tall, thin, silver-haired man opposite her.  "It was windy out on the deck." She tilted her head at a flirty 
angle, shook the thick, fiery mane. "I didn't want to wear my hair pulled back, prissy. Y' know? Of course, now that I can't wear it  that way, I want to. Go figure."

      David placed his cool elegant hands on either side of his wife's face and smiled. "Prissy is not a word I would use to describe you.  Not in that tight red shiny top you were wearing."  His mother had been busty, had had the same, 
comforting old-European geography of valleys, mountains, plateaus -  places to grab onto, nestle in.

      He and Catelyn had met at a fundraiser for the American Heart  Association. To say she stood out in the crowd of publicly beautiful people was like saying a bonfire  made the camp cozy.  As Chief of  Cardiology at Stanford - a heart man, she'd teased him that first evening - he worked the charity circuit the way the Chair was 
expected to.  He lent his name, his fame, his single status to the  round of dinners and fund-raisers that shook dollars loose.

      "Divorced, huh? Uh-oh, Doctor.  Aren't cardiologists supposed to fix hearts?"  It was Cate's first year as Co-Chair of the Stanford Medical Center Valentine Dinner and Dance.  At fifty-three,  divorced 
five years, she felt unmoored.

      "Some hearts can't be fixed," he responded. "I notice you're  not wearing a ring. Too modern for marriage?" It annoyed him that someone her age should be so graceless. It figured. Beauty and brains as a package? Sure. But with a heart, too? Not likely. Working for a mutual cause exposed their respective weaknesses and  strengths; both were up to the give and take of strategy and tactic, 
goal and score. Oxygen. Friction. Their egos ignited one another.  They fed on one another with a fierce mutual need. Together they  bested Stanford's American Heart Association fund-raising record.
He invited her to look at the house he was having restored near Woodside.  She asked him for advice on biotech investments. They  shared histories. They shared beds. They decided to get on with life.  They wed.

      "It wasn't tight. That's how knits are supposed to look; they cling." She smiled. "Besides, my mother told me that people warm up to red. Good for fund-raising."

Funny how sexual attraction often starts out as an irritation, even anger, he thought.      
 
"Red, schmed, it looked tight to me. Nice 
female appurtenances, too."

      A cough stifled her laugh.  "Among my many assets."

      "I love your assets, even the fake ones." He touched her lifelike hair, bright in the ambient glow from the cast-iron pellet  stove.  Instinctively, he felt her pulse. He knew her heart would hold out a long time. God, how he wished the rest of her would too.

      She ignored his reference to her wig. "So, are we making a World War II movie here?" It was Valentine's Day.  "Where're my  Hershey bars and nylons, sailor?" This week in Big Sur was David's gift to her, to both of them. No fundraiser for other people's failing hearts. No chemotherapy, no blood draws, no CT's for Cate.  Only the portable oxygen tank, her tether to life, to remind them of  the merciless march of Stage Four cancer, which had deployed its  poisoned emissaries to outflank first both ovaries and now both lungs.

      David's colleague Nils Eriksson at Stanford had been the one to  identify Catelyn's ovarian cancer eighteen months ago, barely months after their marriage. Their midlife honeymoon ended abruptly in a  last-ditch medical march that dictated every step of their new intimacy, that fed on their passion in a symbiotic diet of daring and despair. Although chemotherapy had resulted in the inevitable hair loss and gaunt cheeks, the many tolls exacted on the road from life 
to death, it had lent a fierce shine to her deep-set blue-gray eyes. 

David the doctor knew she would not last, but David the husband could not bring himself to believe it.

      "The wife of a patient once asked me if it's possible to die of a broken heart," he said. He exhaled slowly, wanting her to give them both hope.

      She touched his cheek. "Oh, David, that's tough. What was your answer?"

      He looked at his wife, tears damming up behind his anthracite gaze. After thirty years of peering into the chambers of the human heart, diagnosing faulty valves, assessing the damage wrought by 
heredity and habit, he had come to regard the multichambered muscle  as poets did.  He granted it powers beyond his ability to heal, but not beyond his ability to hope.
      David took her hand in his.  "I told her to keep that love alive.   I told her to tell everyone how much they had meant to one another."
                           *****
 
 
          New Orleans, 1974

 
Monet would have painted her
 
Mondrian, intersected:
 
still shutters, jalousie’d doors
 
chiaroscurro’d alleys, furtive
 
when the rain pours.
 
She’s French, right down to her gutters,
 
New Orleans,  mighty Mississippi whore.
 
Tawdry, sulky, primped in primer’d paint,
 
she opens her thighs to the river’s thrust,
 
awash in the traffic of men.
 
 
 

 
 
                         Next Step
 
 
Graham Cosgrove felt the near-midday heat trapped under the shed-roofed garage attached to his condo at Clipper Cove. He turned off the ignition.  Every degree Fahrenheit multiplied exponentially as he sat in his car.  It was too hot. He should get out, but it seemed too great an effort.
 
“It’s not working out, Graham. You know that,” Rebecca had said.
 
He reached up to the garage door opener clipped to the right-hand sun visor and pressed its button. Overhead the opener’s chain drive screeched in protest, begging for a shot of WD-40.
 
“What’s not working out?” he’d asked in reply.  Standing above her like that, he knew he was intimidating. He’d meant to be.
 
“You, in this agency, “ she answered in measured tones.  “Sit down, Graham.”
Oh, he’d sat. Not in one of the chrome-and-leather Van der Rohe chairs opposite her desk. He decided they were too lightweight for someone of his bulk. So he moved to the back wall, where a leather sofa promised him a softer landing.
 
“Look, Graham.” The prematurely silver-haired president of RSVP, Rebecca Sterling:  Vantage Personnel, tapped the accordion-pleated file folder on the desk before her, avoiding his gaze. Her cell phone rang.  Ignoring the man facing her, she reached to the desk-top charger and answered it.  She would have ignored the office line.
 
Graham knew she was sweating this moment. Everyone sweats this moment. Am I the sweat-er or the sweat-ee, he chuckled to himself. The bitch is going to pay dearly for this. Oh, she was smart, but she’d never been in a battle zone, under live fire. He had.
 
“Care for a drink?” he asked. She frowned and shook her head, not looking up, shushing him. He rose from the fawn-colored suede sofa and walked over to the front-lit etched glass wall behind which hid presentation boards, a video screen, and a bar. “I’m pouring myself a drink, ” he smiled.  She continued to look at the folder in front of her. “I think the occasion bloody well calls for it,” he announced. He wondered if the center of her attention was the resume of his replacement.  It would be her style to cold-cock him.
 
Rebecca looked up, her eyes focused on the middle distance. She was listening to something she wanted to hear, evidently, for she was looking at Graham with that smarmy, even, steady, “I-told-you-so” smile that women who come up the hard way, with aces, like to throw on the table.
 
Articulated metal-and-fiberglass panels of the garage door shut out some of the heat and all the glare of the October day.
 
Cosgrove looked up through the sunroof of his thirteen-year-old Jaguar sedan and grunted. Next step? Next step?
 
Take the cardboard office files out of his trunk now, while he had good hours before him? Or pour himself another shot of lubricant, something to ease the sticky parts of his life? Hell, it was almost noon. Time for lunch. Time for another drink.
Graham Cosgrove looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. Fifty-seven isn’t old. Fifty-seven had experience behind it, something to show for showing up all those years. Hell, fifty-seven had plenty left. He stuffed his cell phone into its black kidskin leather pouch, slipped that into the larger case that held the Palm Pilot, all tucked executively into the pricey confines of what his friend and sometime-companion Eleanor called his “VIP Purse”. He passed through the single-car garage that buffered his Mill Valley condo from the glances of his neighbors.
 
            Wrong day to wear the raw silk shirt, that was shit for sure. OK, so part of the sweat was physical – he knew he needed to lose 115 pounds – but part of it was emotional as well. He caught the familiar rank edge of fear, remembered the smell produced by the prospect of a Walther PK shoved under his chin. Funny how smells shove the past into the present.
 
OK, the internist had warned him. No more steak, not even the stuff on sweet grass and clean water.  No more pork, damn the “other white meat” campaign. No more paté, no more duck or goose. No, no, no, no. No more cigars.  No more wine, no beer. No booze, period.  
 
Fuck ass, no booze. He padded over to the built-in wet bar, reached for the bottle of the stuff he reserved for himself and poured three fingers of Laphroig, the fifteen-year-old stuff, and slid open the patio door. Nothing prettier than real old, real Scottish scotch clinging in pale amber ribbons inside a Tiffany hand-cut crystal old-fashioned. His ex-wife Livy had bought those glasses, three dozen, in Limerick, Ireland, when they heard he’d won the Pulitzer.  That was ’81.
            Graham looked at his image reflected in the mirrored wall facing the entry. Now his raw silk shirt wore huge half-moons of sweat under his ample arms. He undid the waistband of his pleated silk shorts, which took the pressure off his crotch, stepped onto the deck. He could see the channel from here, but Just Cos was anchored elsewhere, her draft too deep and her thirty-eight feet too long for the slip, free with condo rentals, just out his back door.  Low tide in this lagoon couldn’t accommodate an offshore boat. Instead, he kept her dinghy close to hand, a quick motor out to the Taiwan-commissioned Tayana sloop.
 
Graham collapsed into the iron deck chair and perched his feet atop the stainless-steel railing that bordered his end unit. He’d let the scotch work, then he’d work on a solution. Then he’d work on the part of the sweat that had leaked fear, anger, betrayal.  Nine fucking years as vice president, nine fucking years of kissing that broad’s ass, shmoozing witless clients, hustling business at every event, buying into every seminar where he could steal clients, sucking up to airhead young tyros with full pockets and empty brains. And one fucking year short of a big piece of that broad’s ass, a piece of a business he’d damned well helped build. He gulped an ounce of scotch all at once.
 
Fuck ‘em all. She forgot he’d been senior field reporter for, then chief of, Time’s Paris bureau twenty years before he started missing too many cues and clues, when his nightmares began hugging the shadows like assassins in gum shoes.  He knew more about Mediterranean murders, Turkish bath takeouts and Iranian ice-houses than the taxpayer-funded Intelligence Agency.
 
They forgot he knew more about how the world’s commercial wheels got greased and who held the gun than any ten of these thirty-something yahoos with the beachboy hair colors and earrings.  Why risk his neck? Citizen Sixpack wanted to watch soft porn, not read hard news.
 
So Graham retired from journalism with the minimum pension and a maxium grudge.  He went home, packed up what was left after his wife went for the divorce and the house, and his ignorant kid went off to UC Santa Cruz to major in babes and beach sand.  OK, so Graham too opted out to California, went into sales, bought the Just ‘Cos and put up the storm jib. Next step.
           
She had called him a loser, Rebecca. That bitch. After landing the Bechtel recruiting contract for her. He cut off the tip of his last Partagas, lit it up. No way that fucking broad got her X on that dotted line. Y? Graham chuckled at the pun he’d made.  Y, he thought, was what having fifty-seven years and the Y chromosome under your belt gets this world. He added three more fingers to the empty glass.
 
            On the patio table the red cordless phone rang. He picked it up and exhaled.
After a minute or so, an office assistant on the other end handed him over to his internist in Greenbrae. In the low tide in the lagoon below him, a quickening of light and shadow hinted at a chase. Thousands of tiny silver shiners seemed to be baiting something faster, bigger. Just as soon, they were back out in the marina channel.  He stood watching them, listening to the details of lab reports. He trusted his oncologist’s judgment. They golfed in a foursome every now and then. He was a good man, Steinberg. Talked about next steps.
 
            Graham pulled on the Cuban cigar, input the appointment with Steinberg in his Palm Pilot. His plate seemed suddenly full of next steps.  If you’ve got your health you’ve got everything, right? What if you don’t? What if you get a rash of shit?
 
            Graham Cosgrove snuffed the cigar, went inside. He punched up his messages. It must be a record, only nine and almost noon. Fired on a Monday. Fucked on a Monday. He stripped, dropped his damp clothing in a heap at the foot of the bed.
 
Next step.
 
His left jaw ached below the ear. He massaged it as he wandered out to the front room. A quick glance told him neighbors weren’t around and he didn’t give a shit anyway. He walked out to the patio table and picked up the half-smoked cigar.  Next step, next step. He relit the cigar and wondered if the pretty redhead in 5206 was home.
 
Downstairs, next to the boat ramp, his retired, alcoholic landlord glanced up. His three-hundred-pound tenant was standing naked in the breezeway on the second floor. “Say Graham, how’s your supply of Laphroig?” he grinned.
 
Graham turned his back, went inside, slammed the glass-door. Fuckin’ A, Graham muttered, pulling the vertical blinds.  Next step ain’t there.
           
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 






 
 

Alzheimer's: Number One
 
She sees horses now;
cowboys call to her at night.
Memories gallop faster.
Father lets her go.
Unbridled, Mother trots away.


Calla Lillies

No one plants,
deliberately plants,
calla lilies.
Old women lay them out,
like long bones, on coffins;
perhaps they are plotting
their own deaths.
No one asks,
specifically asks,
for calla lilies.
The man in the greengrocer’s apron
spreads his hands and stares;
he poses for Millet.
He cultivates more patrician bulbs, he says.
But calla lilies? Is this a joke, he asks?
Why, they stalk old Hepburn movies and Art Deco lamps.
Sturdy and bare of face, they are plainclothes actors;
they sing a fanfare for dead (or dying) things;
they nod their stiff eulogies
over the ground where animals clutch the earth.
When a pauper dies,
they are the only bells to ring him under.
 


Asian Poetry Forms -- Tanka
 
 
Mustard hurts the eye
Blossoms reach for sun and sky.
The earth aches for spring.
Clustered yellows burst from green
filling fields with bite and sting.
 
 
Tendrils twine brightly green
Leaves unfold, spread long and lean
Shoulders, braced, hold fruit.
Heavy-laden, grapes hang there
Ripening in the summer air.


Indian Summer Coast
 
 
Furious surf
is beating bull kelp
to impotent ribbons;
stripped of community,
beached snarly ropes of brown and green,
the broken forest spends itself,
one last grasp for earth.
 
Above the low,
foggéd dog star moon
pulls late October in;
the declination of a year-end sun,
in lowered gaze, rends seasonal light;
slant clarity, a gift of heat,
the last we’ll feel this year.


 

One Year Since

It has been one year since
pleasures puffed in my cheeks
and romance played its flushed
sonatas across my skin.
I want my mouth full again,
my tongue tasting some name.
I want to be connected to the clock,
again – ticking, ticking, ticking –
wound up in a smile, a touch,
calendar dates circled in red,
little O’s, little mouths of surprise.
I want full-length pleasure and
back-to-back nights pushing my
datebook full of his name and his number.
I want to be unstrung all night and
unhinged when he leaves in the light.
Am I an addict? Who cares, who dares!
It is my beast, it crawls on all fours.
What it goes after, reaches for,
Is my habit, my want, my life companion.





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