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Fuaite isteach sa Domhan

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 the entry point, the raw seam of your becoming,

Where the hormone-sting meets the ancient ache.

The sweat on your neck smells like rain on hot tarmac.


The Sídhe are ghosts in the wiring of the room:

They watch the way your hair spills like uncarded wool,

A black flood across the pillow’s white shore.

I am lost in the gravity of your scalp,

The scent of cedar and the salt of the day’s long war.

Your softness is a weapon they never saw coming,

A quiet strike against the hardness of the world.


We find the Dagda’s cauldron in the curve of your belly:

An abundance they swore was never meant for you.

I drink from the well that was supposed to be dry,

Your thighs are the gates to a Tir na nÓg of the flesh

Where the only law is the weight of my hands on your waist.

This is the feast of the unmade, the unrepentant,

The holy hunger of the body coming home to itself.


I press my mouth to the surgical line, the seam where you were stitched into the world,

no more myths, no more ghosts, just the salt and the heat of the struggle.

The state can keep its stamps and its sterile rooms:

here is the only history that matters,

the pulse beneath the limestone, the weight of the tide.

The rain can pound the glass until it breaks.

I am buried in the thick of you,

the raw, soft, unrepentant truth of the meat. 

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