canadian ~ twenty-first century literature since 1999


Snails & Trilobites

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.

 

 

 

[home]
[submissions]
[fiction]
[interviews]
[reviews]
[articles]
[links
[sitemap]
[stats]
[search]

 

[students]
[teachers]
[publicists]

TDR is produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 

All content is copyright of the person who created it and cannot be copied, printed, or downloaded without the consent of that person. 

See the masthead for editorial information. 

All views expressed are those of the writer only. 

TDR is archived with the Library and Archives Canada

ISSN 1494-6114. 

 

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada.