The Sound Of Bo Belle

i. you named the thread count of my sheets from the feel of them before you'd opened your eyes you are like that ii. some people love the way they rehearsed it from a script they didn't write in a room that was never theirs you love with the lights on you love having already mapped the room the frequency the exact pitch of a thing before you speak its name there is no performance in it i didn't know where to put my hands iii. and then i did the way you go still when something is exactly right not translating it not performing receiving the direct line from the nerve i learned to wait for that to want nothing until it iv. i have watched you trace the seam in the ceiling plaster where the damp came through last winter and the landlord never fixed v. you arrived not became arrived the person you always were walking in out of the weather sitting down like the room had been waiting it had it had vi. your heart is not a closed room and some people call that reckless some people c...

come here I said it once and the city heard it the pavement heard it the man three doors down pulling the shutter down heard the cost of it the specific frequency of a woman calling to another woman in the dark come here the street at 2am is sodium light on the curve of a shoulder on the deliberate walk of a woman who has paid to be standing here moving towards exactly what she wants your hands already moving before I finish the sentence your hands knowing without asking the curve of the hip the held breath the place where the skin runs warm and thin and answers I have your collar in my hand I am not gentle about it you don't need gentle you need the other thing the honest thing the thing I've been thinking about since the bar since the cigarette since the first time you looked at me like a problem you'd already solved and I looked back like I'd already said yes and thought nothing more of it which was everything your weight against mine worth every year it cost every q...

The Morrígan claws at the hollow of your throat: A hard insurrection of spit and salt. Your hair is a thicket of night, heavy and uncombed, A dark, tangled fleece where the old gods go to hide. You are the girl the peat could not finish, Dredged up, heavy and shimmering with black water, More visceral than the dry myths they traded at the altar. Your skin is limestone worn to velvet by the Atlantic: A softness achieved through the violence of the tide. It is the same grey miracle of your breathing, Skin worn down by the grit of the struggle, By the friction of the laws and the clinical stares, Until only this impossible tenderness remains. I sink into the weight of your thighs, Those white pillars where the Cailleach left her thumbprints, Broad and certain, a geography I claim with my mouth. The clinic was a cold stone, a winter without a fire. They wanted you quiet, a specimen in a jar, But here the Bog Queen rises in the dark, Thighs like white thorns, a mouth like a wound. I find th...

The Lee is a black gut, a slick trench of ancient silt where the tide comes to die against the concrete,  and I love it for its refusal to be clean. I love this city for its damp, rebellious lungs and the way it exhales salt and coal dust over the docks. The rain is a communal levy we pay in shivering bones and the slow rot of damp wool,  a grey currency that buys us the right to belong to the mud. Look at the Northside. Look at how the hills crowd the river like a mob waiting for the word. She brings the city in with her. The grime of the Quays is a fine silt in the creases of her elbows,  a salt-crust on the new architecture of her neck. She stands in the centre of a room that smells of cheap gin  and the sharp, clinical sting of the vial on the bedside table. A small, glass insurrection. The skin is a graft. It is a borrowed coat that has finally begun to pulse with the heat of her own blood,  smelling of the sharp, metallic tang of hormones and the sweet, he...

 This is for the phallic monument built on a foundation of female teeth. This is for the patriarchal idiocy that confuses a biological urge with a mandate to govern. This is for the leaking vessel of senile lust in the White House. This is for the walking autopsy held together by the starch of state secrets and the grey fluid of the unprotected. He doesn’t just sniff the hair of the future. He licks the sweat from the brows of the condemned to see if the meat is seasoned enough for the slaughter. This is for the geriatric infection presiding over a hospice of empire. This is for the dark bile of every drone strike swirling in his gut like a toxic weather system. He is the grandfather of the mass grave and you are the ones who keep the oxygen flowing into his necrotic lungs. This is for the glowing colostomy bag of the television. It leaks the image of the celebrated predator into your living room. This is for the fighter in the centre of the ring. A god for the boys who want to be ...

For Caffy I think all my friends are from Tir na nóg the sideways people with a silver branch in their hands the ones who don’t quite fit the skin they were born in sitting on the edge of a western sea on another planet of water where the tea is brewed from the dew of the hazel of wisdom And the sugar we share is the crushed bone of a dead empire. We are looking out over to Rocklands where the grey stones are beginning to breathe and the moss is whispering secrets to the soles of our boots. They are the rulebreakers the ones who forgot how to tell the time on an iron clock The artists who paint with the sap of the rowan tree the outsiders with wings tucked under their thrift store coats. I see them, and I see the Tuatha Dé Danann drinking cold coffee and talking about the moon. they lean back Changelings left in the crib of the city there to remind the concrete how to dream carrying the health of Tír na mBeo in their marrow while the rest of the world decays in the grey light. An other...