Migrants
Strong boys to work on the farm.
The sad lot of migrants in the shadows.
The emaciated look of Mother Africa.
The uncertainties of the desert girls.
Irish Poets
Hounslow 1997
I am swallowed up in a red winter coat.
Dad is collecting me for the weekend.
Brother
though a child, you became a god
when you lit your first fire.
learning almost nothing to be unburnable
was how you learned love, finance,
the charms of delinquency, and war.
Binge
I make an excuse to go to the village. I grab my bag—the one with the zip-pocket stuffed with scrunched coils of undone Polo rolls and loose mints buried like eggs in a nest of popped blister packs, body spray, cheap lighters, and a bottle of that green Lidl hand sanitizer that eats all regretful scent except the chemical afternotes of itself.
Fykiaphobia
I write dead eels, limb, salt, choke. I write the stairs are steep.
I write Retreat, with a capital R.
Lessons in Survival
I’ve all but given up on ever speaking Irish again,
on playing the cousin to tones of a country once removed,
plucking on phrases I learned phonetically under
the nettled glare of a Christian Brother.