Ar Scáth na nDeor

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, heavy vapour of the change.
It is soft, terrifyingly soft, a velvet friction against the rough, damp wool of a city that never learned to touch.

I watch a mouth that is not mine trace the new architecture of her hips, 

the soft, rising evidence of her own becoming.
It is a victory of the cellular.
Her hair is a riot of Irish curls, 

dark and wet as the Atlantic, 

coiling like the maps of West Cork around my fingers.

They are the only things in this city that refuse to be straight, 

refuse to be tamed by the wind or the law.

For years she was the sump.
She was the open drain for the city's grief, the filter for everyone else's sewage, 

catching the runoff of a thousand broken lives until her own pipes were choked with the grey sludge of self-sacrifice.
She gave her marrow to the concrete until her lungs were nothing but cold ash.
I want the ash of the dead name on my tongue.
I want to taste the grey residue of the sump you used to be, 

a silt-heavy flavour of the Lee at midnight, 

bitter and thick with the history of giving too much.

Your mouth is a wet insurrection of cheap gin and the flat, sharp rasp of a Northside winter caught in the throat.
It is the only common truth we have left to speak.
Now the hearth is a riot.
The fire is not a metaphor ; 

it is a physical debt we pay to the cold.
I watch the others orbit her.
I watch them witness the bloom of her, 

and I do not feel the sour rot of possession.
I feel expansion.
I watch another’s palm find the same geography I have mapped in the dark, 

and I love that you are loved.

I love that the hands of another know the same soft insurrection of your skin.

It is the way the river holds every lamp on the Quays:
the light is not halved by the water, it is made infinite.
To see you seen is to know you are finally real.

She is the 226 to the airport,

a shuddering box of diesel fumes and rattling windows, 

the desperate hum of people leaving and the heavy thud of those coming back home.
She is a recurring trajectory of departure and arrival, 

the only thing in this city that moves with a purpose I can trust.
The collective heat of the street is a furnace,

we are the fuel, and the bed is the forge where the street's fever collapses into the sweat of the mattress.

I love this city because it breaks my heart every morning, 

but I love you for the way you mend the breach.
You are the home I found in the rain,

the bitter, burnt-coffee weight of a Beamish on a Tuesday night, 

the floor tacky with spilt stout and the faint, sharp sting of the urinal in the lane outside.
It is the only place where the gravity finally makes sense.
To be here with you is to finally stop looking for the exit.
You are the city and the shelter, the grit in the eye and the hand on the heart.

I want the salt of her.
I want the scent of gorse and diesel 

and the heavy, humid musk of a body finally coming home to the wrong house.
I want the staccato rhythm of the radiator clicking in the dark.

The friction.
The sweat.

The way her thighs tremble not from exhaustion 

but from the abundance of being witnessed by the constellation of us.
Skin on skin.
The unwashed smell of the Lee at low tide on the backs of our knees.
Three of us in the dark, the radiator clicking like a dying heart.
I taste the gin on her lips and the gorse on her thigh.
It is a mess of limbs and the smell of old coats and new estrogen.

We are all pulses in a room built for one.

Ar scáth: your sweat on my ribs.
A chéile: her hand on your throat.
A maireann: the breath we steal from the damp air.
Na daoine: the shelter found in the tangle.

I want to be the shadow that holds you.
I want to be the wall that takes the wind so you can finally put the hammer down.
I love this city because it taught me that nothing survives alone.
The stones of Cork are held together by the damp 

and the shared breath of the dispossessed.
She reaches out a hand, scarred by the forge of the "not yet", 

and for the first time she does not offer a self-sacrifice.
She offers an empty palm.

It is heavy.
Her arm aches with the phantom weight of the hammer she has finally dropped, 

the physical throb of no longer being the only one holding other people up.
The terror of the gift is the weight of the help.
She is learning to let the water hit the parched earth of her own throat 

without apologising for the thirst.
We are the huddle in the doorway.
We are the thatch in the storm, weaving our queer, knotted limbs together 

until the wind has nowhere to get in.
There is a lust in the survival.
A hunger in the way we cling to the wet wool of each other's lives.

She is the creature stitched together from the skip behind the English Market, 

a patchwork of discarded silks and industrial plastic, putting herself on while the city watched.
It does not fit yet.
It is raw at the seams.
But I love the stitch and the seams, the tissue and plasma
I love the way the black gut of the Lee pulls us both down into the silt, 

and how my heart has become the only trench deep enough to hold the weight of you.

I love the blood-warm reality of you,

the way your heart beats like a heavy fist against the cage of this city.

I love the scars of the sump and the raw, unpolished truth of the skip,

the way you are still learning to breathe without asking for permission.

You are not a project to be finished or a debt to be repaid:

you are the only revolution I have ever wanted to win.

I see the seam. I see the stitch. I see the being you have fought to become,

and I love the way you finally let me hold the weight of this arrival.