Poetry by Joey Sheehan

I Knew I Could Live There

I wouldn’t know you if I saw you now
and time goes inland on an endless tide.
We could have gone anywhere
but wandering. I was wounded then
and scared against the skin of some foreign
love still unformed in the water of your poems.
I loved you because I knew I could live there
in the wreckage of the quietest moments.
No one ever asked what you had been through.
I depended on you to balance me in the seasonal
patterns of suicide and political upheaval, in the roses
growing in the storm’s rise, in the wonder of listening
to the inward depths of gravity and motherhood.
We were falling as the flame burned through
and no joy was born but the vision given by the poetry
of distant countries and some weeping pilgrim
with a voice to sing with.

​


The No Future Years

Our histories are marked
with the pathless trail of wishes and pictures
of Paradise promised to the God fearing
so many pools of tears
might bleed into

looking for a pulse in the symbols,
the crooked sidewalks, splashing stars, the crack
of matches against cigarettes, the mountains of powder,
our heads smashed in. These clubs and galleries picked you
out of a crowd and that was that.

I never paid the prices this scene cost you
and the streets remain places the morning would rather not see.
The city sees through you like secrets kept in hollowed out bibles
collecting memories from what the edges
have forgotten.

​


Bettie Page Bangs

What we do is secret
only after we’ve done it
and the morning breathes down
like an unabridged journal
or a suicide note

the space between us is trembling
and your absence is reflected
in the murder rate

I can hardly stand the music here
and the bright lights shining live nude girls
in place of starry skies
in place of open spaces

You were working as a dominatrix then
with a beauty common to the nature of our symptoms
like the summer skies of Dundalk

like my brief infatuation with heroin
that slipped away before I met you and all this
I knew was bound to happen someday
and you were already leaving

Baltimore Street for the fashion industry
and the contemporary art scene in New York

but I’ve stayed clean since

​


Stages of Prayer

I could collect our creations
of the past in quotations painting the fluctuating states
of judgment transformed into the cupped hands
of Grace. I relapsed into a whirlwind
of knowing

the feeling of the rain outside.
I thought it was only myself that was gone
the way the streetlamps come to signify something
deeper, the hurt going in to bring you into me,
the unchangeable poverty of faith. I remember you
now in the center of the silence in the miracle
of nightfall. Your simple eyes of blue in the wheel
of time. Your secret language in the flames
of the pentecost. This life of mine stretched
to a crucible of passing mentions of God’s name.
I wish I could be Catholic again
in the perpetual motion of all that might ascend
into the songs of the women mystics throwing night
onto the symbols of marriage.

You’re not aware of your beauty,
the words form a picture of you standing among the sacraments,
the law of gravity that bleeds the adoration of the holy women surrounding you,
their tears forming from the edges of the cross of Christ.
This is the life that’s been created
in the garden of changeless mornings.

​

 Bio: Joey Sheehan is a poet and essayist from Baltimore, Maryland. His work has appeared in Alien Mouth, Five:2:One Magazine, and The Cerurove. His first collection, New Queer Cinema and Other Poems came out locally in 2015. He is a graduate of University of Baltimore's creative writing MFA program.

---