Category: Poetry
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All Ireland.
sky turning dark with sports all gone over; the football and hurling put away for a year, a final show of the end of summer and decline to slow october. all of us decked for the matches, singing the songs and very drunk, all blue like tiny flowers celebrating oncoming frost.
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African cattle.
driving toward home and late after work; shunting over motorways like logs upon a river and we plunge forward, up against pilings of light. ahead, hills shine with breaklights like campfires or fake gold necklaces fallen from an overstuffed box. night falls; it falls before closing and everyone around goes forward past office hours. african…
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Nickel, Unformed
A blue square, a house to live in against a yellow smear of sun how ugly it all seems to me now this safety, the facade of big hands tongues thickly budded with cysts full of lost ambition, a frozen lens of reason, bulky and transparent in their loving if unmerciful gods. No, I will…
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Ruined Pears
“and then be reckless, be reckless, and resolved in returning gratitude.” Gertrude Stein There is a cool cup in my hand held out to you a patent of pears and of ripe, green forgiveness which I must only hope you will drink down, a down comforter for all the sleep that I have cost…
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Sugar Rations
Why would you ration out your love as though it were rare packets of sugar in wartime, brown paper squares wrapped in string, passing hands with paucity and a whisper or glance, stored safely in a cellar by a large brass key, rather than a fresh stream cascading down the mountainside in little pools and…
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Pádraig Ó Tuama Holds Me in the Bed of the Poem
Pádraig Ó Tuama tells me the person is prayed into being by the direction of the light. At least, I think he says this, but I’m distracted by the soft breath of H that he pushes out from the click of his tongue while we bake scones in the house of the poem, while we…
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The Year We Became Stars
The satellite photos of cities at night let us believe human hubs are neurons – firing, sparking, all the lights melting into a honey broth the way people won’t quite flow into a solution, suspended equally as walls dissolve. From far away the seaboard bleeds, pumping. Can astronauts hear our whoosh, stethoscopes pressed…
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But Did You Do Your Part?
unintended, not unexpected / in the deep woods, a pretty little girl / wandered / & when she saw / the fire, she leapt to action / no hesitation / she knew little of fire / O yes it must be dangerous / best controlled by smothering / she decided / she ran towards it…
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In Grief, In Beauty, Intention
My own body has been trying to get me to understand, telegraphs dots and dashes, down, there – clench of kegel, of sphincter: yes yes yes – Noooo. Noooo. Noooo. Yes yes yes – help, I swoon, help, I wander over to vomit, in the dark when I am as close to alone as one…
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Pantoum for the Tension
a cento the arc of every origin story and account of how we came to be is rife with tension between chaos and order maps in space and time that we are continually improving what is there and seen but also what is there and unseen rife with tension between chaos and order all visible…
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Visited
We missed the star charts speckling the eggs of crows – a commission that worked well for the birds, who have no interest in ruling, yet on occasion love to upend our hubris, when we notice the joke is on us, pointed as a well knapped flint. The bees danced the coordinates wiggles and hops…
