The Sound Of Bo Belle

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...