A coin falls into a piggy bank
and a girl draws flowers

with a pen.
A father, home

from work, places
a comic

on her desk. Richie Rich, Archie,
Caspar the Ghost. She hears  

the revving silence
of the Singer.

Outside birds play house:
find the right mate; find  

the right tree. Flight-maps
in air, traffic of matter.

There before
and there thereafter. 

They’ve stolen the song
from a mother’s mouth.

 

ZIPPER

                                        

Spring meant papercut daffodils
taped to classroom walls,
no crosses like at my best friend’s school

where April heat prodded our backs
towards the shortcut. Fresh kittens
at her cousin’s house, a nest  

of soft, when coming up the hill,
pushing his ten speed— even then I felt the sun
twist round him, the plunge 

of my gut—he used his cycle to gate us,
to block our path, watched us slow, stop.
He checked—no one. The hill  

shadowed his dark. The fat tongue on his t-shirt
eager for flavour and beneath it, the growing
pink he’d unzipped—no adults to pull

us back except this twist in the blood said—
run!  The mud soft-sucking our shoes.
Don’t look, don’t fall—

She screamed between our broken breath—
you asked, you touched!—she ran
—disgusting!—straight into her cousin’s house

while I stood chained to the sound
of the lock sliding time forward
and back into place like a zipper.

Catherine Graham’s most recent collection Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects, 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 SCS where she won an Excellence in Teaching Award. Her work is anthologized in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol IV & V and The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and has appeared in such journals as The Malahat Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Ireland Review, The Ulster Tatler, The Fiddlehead, LRC, Room Magazine, CV2 and elsewhere. Her next collection will appear 2017. Visit: www.catherinegraham.com