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  • Tess Taylor (bio)
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California, poetry, real estate

In every sale a list of ways your homecould be destroyed: flood, poison, earthquake, fire.You must assert you have considered toxins,

understand the risks lodged in tectonic plates.You may lodge downwind of breezesoff oil fields, refineries, or croplands.

Your world may end in fire or rain of golf balls.Still, signing below this fine print allots youyour postcard plot of golden state.

Will the soil be cancerous? God willing not to you.Your new house is younger than your mother.No one can say what karma rules this place.

At your bottlebrush are native hummingbirds.In your shed, provisions for the big one.Above you the 200-year-old redwood waits.

In redwood years, this tree’s a baby.It overlooks your fragile real estate. [End Page 181]

Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of The Forage House (Red Hen, 2013), a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Yorker. She chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was a professor of English at Whittier College.

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