Laughing Till We Cried after the quake Taylor Graham In the fifth-story room of the hotel, you wouldn't talk of anything we'd seen. You wouldn't talk. So why did I keep on laughing till the floor shook? Nothing funny about arms sticking out of concrete smashed at the shoulders, and the streets disjointed. How can you just keep crying about coffins stacked at every corner? Most hotels didn't have five stories standing anymore. You drank Corona warm to wash the sweet dead dust down, till you teetered like the after- shocks we couldn't count. My cola burbled from its can, as flat and brown as blood that's three days spilled. And I kept on learning how to laugh like a collapsed lung. Taylor Graham lives in Somerset, California.