The mother bites her lip, six straight-pins

held between. She takes another pinch

of fabric between her fingers, pins the hem.

So many colors swirling in a bridal white

held fast in satin. Her elder daughter inches

clockwise to the light. The younger fidgets

for her turn. Last night the girl dreamed

of lupine hanging by their stems, drying,

waiting to be catalogued. So many colors

of lupine, so many names she doesn't

know. In a spring-green meadow once

she ran through mountain lupine purple-

blue as queens, or bruises. "Hold still,"

the mother lisps between straight-pins.

White lupine with just a blush of lilac

drying in her bridal daughter's hair.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems have appeared in American Literary Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she's included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her chapbook, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.