by Catherine Graham

Radiating coolness like my grandmother’s cellar
I pocket a stone from Portmuck Harbour.

Stamped with a snail shell, it fossils me
to the summer of my mother’s first operation

when we moved to Ridgeway, to a house on a quarry.
Three decades before her birth, an underground faucet

turned the limestone basin into a water pit.
Walking the pipe-holed edges, I’d stoop

to touch the leftover lives of little animals
radiating coolness like my grandmother’s cellar.

Catherine Graham, M.A. in Creative Writing in Poetry (Lancaster University), lives in Burlington, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Poetry Ireland Review, Books Ireland and other international journals. Her work is anthologized in Signals (Abbey Press) and she is included in The White Page-Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets (Salmon Publishing). The Watch (Abbey Press), reviewed in TDR, is her first chapbook.