c o n v e r g e n c e:
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EDITOR'S CHOICE: cynthia linville's


Taylor Graham

Photograph by Christopher Fleming

THE RACE OFF RHODES by Taylor Graham It was Poseidon looking across the waves and Aphrodite from her temple on the cliff, and you on the deck of your 65-footer wrestling with the mainsail while your opponent, body trim as the butterfly genoa she hoisted, heeled across your bow making for a notch between islands, too lithe and slim for your muscled craft. You sailed around the long way. And she, cutting through the narrows, won. So the ocean god saluted the goddess of love with green brine in his goblet, raising it to her white temple with its headless maidens chiseled from stone. And the lovely adversary of your youth- full races – how brief her passage through the straits, and how dim-shining the distant shore she reached years before you. In addition to Rattlesnake Review and Medusa's Kitchen, Taylor Graham’s poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Ms. Graham is included in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, and her book The Downstairs Dance Floor was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

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