Poetry
Night in the Boxer Rebellion
In the crimson room there are seven sweet buns that have risen from dough spiked green by mugwort juice, and eleven letters from our family in Liverpool. A sepia diploma from St. Anne’s hangs on the wall, an American barricade stands outside the window. Next to thirty-four strands of hair oiled in lavender twisted through …
A Promiscuity of Spines
You have a synecdoche dream. “One day, my dear, it would be sweet; It would be very fine indeed, one day, If all your books and mine Were stacked against the future, Packed on the same set of shelves Under the same star-proof ceiling Somewhere with a mountain And maybe a lake.” …
How to Eat a Quince
Note its pregnant portliness, as if beneath the skin a blinded bee bothers the inner skim of pulp and elbowed room. Say to your lover’s face that she is not a fruit to be betrothed to, other honey apples or shapely pears take that win. Then you will see the quince for what …
In Glasnevin Cemetery
The ground is heavy clay and the heavy spade a live thing in my grip as I cut the ground. Pale sky, pale rushing clouds, a sister’s hands sifting your father’s ashes on your mother’s grave. Your sisters stand and watch, their lovely daughters gathered in close as this one last time you gift …
Hy-Brazil
The island glitters in the middle of the ocean, an arcane city built on a living form submerged at the deepest part of the Atlantic, a green star flickering, only to vanish and reappear somewhere else. I have seen its other side —the dark side. It moves along the ocean bed, occasionally coming up …
The Day Is a Poem
after Robinson Jeffers Rain on the window and thick cloud over the mountains. Gulls dive blackbacked at fish in mud. On the radio they’re making the long hard choice about emigrating and a girl is coy about the Leaving Cert. The estuary fills and unfills, brown sand morphed to tempered-metal with the …