"The Bottom of Le Bas-St-Laurent" & "Covering My Bases" by Graham Gammell

The Bottom of Le Bas-St-Laurent

And I feel it suck my feet down into mud-clay

comme la marée basse à Kamouraska.

Seaweed fingers turn over smooth stone,

unearth worms and crabs hiding underneath

whose homes crumble, flood yet again.

And our fingers did this together, interlocked,

falling into an expanding river bottom that would hopefully

entomb us, preserving this moment of mud under our nails

(the mud of my namesake), the elastic riverbed of your skin,

tugged into honeymoon by the moon itself:

notre sejour dans la Belle Province.

And I’m alone this time

yet the drawers upstairs still smell

like butter, the thick notes of cream, of lactic acid

never stored in humid birch woodwork yet still suspended in air:

milk of amnesia in this hand-built house,

the fading ghosts of family.

And I’m still young but infinitely older, a path traced

by fever dreams of mud clay kisses

and riverbeds nailbeds double beds

as if my body, warmed by sunbaked granite,

pressed against yours, sandstone-sculpted,

might forget what our shape was—

as if my memories, like smooth stones framing St-Germain,

were being shaped by seafoam and briny wind,

distorted like sarcelle calls over choppy water.

And I pull myself from mud clay memories

and I watch the men walk among the eel weirs

and I ache for you, but much less nowadays,

and I watch the tide come back in, back to home.

It leaves driftwood the whole way down the shore,

like it always has.

Covering My Bases

I am nice to Roomba when I go home to visit

and I move the chairs as it gets stuck

because when the singularity arrives

I believe Roomba will remember my kindness

and spare me from the horrors of the battery chambers.

Graham Gammell is a freelance writer and poet based out of Montreal. He is 24, was born in Calgary, and his favorite food is his mom’s sancocho.