CATHERINE GRAHAM
The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016
SENIOR CLASS TRIP
Watch it work through her sleep, glazed eyes open to the hotel dark, she bolts upright, mewling. The sight she sees is not for us, three roommates. How well does one know the other? Her white-clenched bedsheets are knuckled-tight. Caged, she spits gibberish in fast random, a Zeppelin record playing backwards and all those touches pulsing from within, indenting from a core so deep, whitewashing her face and then-- stopstopstop—she pushes the vastness off-- It comes back. We hear the grunt. Begin again. We stand watching what happened happen while eleven floors below the red slaughter of New York sirens approaching some other terror can’t cut through this one. MASKS
I entered Chaos through the plastic mask of anaesthesia. Styx & Stones to bones that don’t break, just the lessoning landscape beside a nipple that never milked yet puckers pink. I need a deeper slit on the left to secure clean margins plus a sentinel undercut-- Hospital déjà vu a dawn reentering as sun dreams. No nail polish on hands. Baby naked beneath a stiff blue gown falling open at the front without a pre-op grip. How summer dissolves spring and autumn into masks that seasons make from spin and tilt. I am made more uneven above the heart in a holding cell of numb. “Wake up.” Maternal presence never felt since her Christmas death. Inside my age is the age she died. THE HARD SWEEP
I bring his broom inside me. The one he used to sweep clumps of cottonwood-fluff off window screens; sticky as adhesives over wounds. It blocked his view to the quarry. It wanted his world to grow white, to match the state of his heart. Attached to his broom, his long arm of determination, reach-- I hear his mourning scrapes inside the left side of my chest, the hard sweep to remove cells survivors fear most. His unstoppable chore has come to use. |
CATHERINE GRAHAM'S most recent collection Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects (Wolsak & Wynn, 2013, now in its second printing), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Poetry Award and the CAA Poetry Award. Winner of the IFOA’s Poetry NOW competition, she teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. Her next collection will appear fall 2017. Visit: www.catherinegraham.com
