The Animal Game

after “Gradma’s Zoo” by Dorothy Molloy

Now I’m a bird in the nest of your lap.
I flap my blanket of feathers.
Elongate my growing neck.

You take another one out, and I leap:
frog-green and slippery,
my tongue slides, ruler-long—

I aim for your fingers. You pretend
to dribble and present it to me.
It roughens my tongue like wolf teeth.

We feel the drumming tremble. Mean fists.
Our game is bruised.
Sit down. Your grandmother’s coming.

My Skin Is My Grave

after “Bones” by Dorothy Molloy

Why should dying be news?
The bug is in the matchbox.
The shoebox holds the bird.
The first grave is our backyard.

And Mister Death, the high grotesque,
grins above. Aired in the room
before the earthworms’ dark,
lidded and locked, my bones will be

like the cut tree, no longer expanding
in rings. Time skins me, and soon
my bones will lose their marrow, but they’re
brave disintegrating; being change.

No longer serving their calcified
purpose, they’ll hollow themselves out
for more sonority and air will song
through them as throats of birds.

Lucy

after “Grief Therapy” by Dorothy Molloy

She wears a bell so the birds
know when she’s coming.
She pads the grass to collect the dew,
walks gingerly through tulips and daffodils.

Mottled fur, she licks the white
endlessly, her tongue sandpaper tough.
And yet her fur has lost its glitz. Sex
with stray toms wasn’t nice.

She’s fatter now. Plods
along like her tolling bell,
silver tinkle on a pink collar.

Silence. She must be sleeping
or being eaten by animals
with bigger teeth, that wear
no warning round their furry necks.

But there she is, like yesterday, where
listless, she lay on the grass to consider
her next move. And later, between
taunting bird chirps and the electricity
of crickets, she’s meowing for her bowl to fill.

I always pet her when I visit. We have no cat.
Dad’s allergic, so he says, though he never
sneezes when Lucy rubs against him.

She’s mesmerized by the twitch in her tail.
Down on my belly I slither to her.
She answers my hiss with a purr.
I strike at her face; she responds with one bite.

Domestic

after “My heart lives in my chest” by Dorothy Molloy

He sculpts my words with the chisel of his mouth.
Fits me inside his mind’s binding. I do what I’m told
to get my playpen back, the edge of no to end
each day. What did I do to exit his eyes?
Blue-blinding marbles detached from the brain
that stems them. He won’t answer. Sits
in his fat easy chair. What did I do or what
did I do not but wear something pretty? He spits
his words in blurry circles; hurls stones
of vowels at fields of bruises. Clothes
with round edges give too much of me to see.
Who you trying to impress? Some fancy man?
He’s laughing now. You think I’m serious? Just
want you to be safe, Pet. Blind heart, pack up and run.

Catherine Graham is the author of The Watch and the poetry trilogy: Pupa, The Red Element and Winterkill. Anthologized in The White Page /An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets, Graham’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Room Magazine, The Malahat Review, Descant Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Antigonish Review, The Rusty Toque and The Fiddlehead. A Board member of The Rowers Reading Series and co-facilitator for The Platform Reading Series, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and has read her work at numerous venues including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Her forthcoming collection, Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects, will appear Fall, 2013 with Wolsak & Wynn. Visit her at www.catherinegraham.com.

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