CATHERINE GRAHAM
The Rusty Toque | Issue 3| Poetry | October 12, 2012
BERRIES
Wild strawberries I picked for him,
fairy berries; a crop; I filled a whole thimble, right to the top. A silver container, “Last night the itch,” Dorothy Molloy No god smiles on sidewalk cracks around the quarry, only fossils like moles or freckles that make a face a rock. Tattoo curls of permanent. Can’t hold them with my hand. Let touch slip time between these wild strawberries I picked for him in the goldenrod field. Plump-ripe heads see breezes that rustle the reddening. Don’t stuff so many in your mouth. But who can resist? Poppies in a field, these fairy berries—a crop of how much I love him. But my tongue holds no language for that. So I pick wild berries to fill our loss, the her we no longer have, the dead red that lives in the living-room silence. I filled a whole thimble, right to the tip of the end of my thumb where her finger used to sit like a head in a hat, safe from pins and needles. The sewing click is silent in her nook. Clothes are store bought now. No hands like hers. Thimble top. A silver container. TOURNIQUETNobody can say she can’t
beat him on the tennis court. Her shots land safely on lines and chalk flies up in puffs of surrender. But take him home and he’s the ref. His whistle lives inside his mouth between the pink of his teeth. Like a drawbridge she lowers on a string, makes waves at the moat she can no longer cross. Come back, come pull me up. Can’t straighten herself in her flattened state or feel his foot pumping her back. Can’t see a thing until he signals: over. Cotton is cover-- what clothes are for, and hair that falls across forehead and shoulders. She knows the pain a hospital hides like the red on her arm now blue now white. She makes a tourniquet out of his next attack. One day he leaves. She is lying on the floor though she’s standing up in the house of herself, cornered and quiet. |
CATHERINE GRAHAM is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections: The Watch, and the poetry trilogy Pupa, The Red Element, and Winterkill. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Poetry Ireland, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Joyland: a hub for short fiction, Poetry is Public is Poetry, LRC, and The New Quarterly. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her next collection will appear fall, 2013 with Wolsak & Wynn. Website: www.catherinegraham.com