Creative Writing – Page 8

Fiachaire — Shannen Malone

“We can’t take it all,” her brother had said, tossing memories in a bin bag like kittens for drowning.

Bright rays reflect, shape, shake her portrait on the water skin
and it’s broken, burnt, soon gone.

Get some hens
dig up the garden
sow and plant.

From the yew-dark wool you pulled
over my eyeball,
knit one, maul one,
you made a beam

But Jesus never saved the birds. A bird
has never sinned. They have no need for grace,
salvation, guilt, contrition, holy words,

I walk along the beach; I find a bad thing so beautiful
That now it’s a good thing

But Krakow, why am I in Krakow looking for size eight shoes
following a strolling man with a hand-shaped dent in his hat?

sharp as a thorn.
I held on
to whatever

it had been
at the start of existence,
a stem cell

I am a maze of swinging doors.
Catch me, I’ll fall. Feel my ink.
Lost in the torn pelt of my wounds,
I’ve dabbled in sores and spirits.

Fruit of fungus
feigner of fauna
fusion of puck and protoplasm

I am 12 years old, looking over the precast-cement fence of my neighbour’s house in Chatsworth, South Africa.

pale sun after rain,
shadows come back shyly—
they’ve been washed