Sadhbh Uí Chonaill
maybe you'll see me around town when I get out
in my make-up. there will be nothing
beneath this suggestion of a woman.
it is a sheet, or an animal with a head
quietly bowed, or a contemplative moment, or
tight cross-winds that envelope the world, or
an iron-stench on the pall of wine.
maybe if I blotch my skin
and under white waters
wrap my head in smoke
I will love the tight crop,
bunched like an anus in the soil.
have I come back from
collecting peat to burn?
have I finished reading down
the floss-thin white world?
have I prepared my points
to spear the old, deep-washed things,
spitefully bricked and created,
and to foist them into the fire,
the eye-spattered pits of time?
have I come back out from beneath
the genres of my body?
maybe if I bludgeon my skirt,
my plastics, my dream figurines.
maybe at night I make
myself a promise.
maybe at night I transform
myself into a promise.
maybe at night I am just
barely promised
an existence. a promise on a womb:
I will go under white watersheds
and wrap my headland and land
in smouldering wounds like coal-pits,
acne in the open earth,
and ring my grassland in braces,
chokers and laces, images of denial,
I will lug the tight crossing
bunched centrally like an apex,
like a pinnacle, like an apologist,
like I've been caught, or like shame is bunched.
maybe if I scale my skin,
maybe if skins are like rapids,
maybe if I can track my seeds
and trample pained birth
across the world in cobblestoned placentas,
maybe if I fall as the body crumples,
bent in sudden pain, and never rise,
maybe if I gore my eyes
and defy all these dreamy satires
cooking in my skin,
maybe if I gore my eyes
and gore the image,
and bury the conspiring pair,
maybe I give up now,
maybe is not a word,
after all, but maybe
my blood will prevail,
my head will be healed,
maybe by my words I can pull myself out
from beneath the wreckage of history.