Poetry by Maeve McKenna

                    ​  Richard P J Lambert CC



Cat Mirror

They clung to walls in places we called home, 
plotted revenge, like the claws of that feral
we tamed with scraps of food 
and a newspaper bed. The shards we could 
never piece back together, bodies unfolding
inside coats hanging in halls, the fickle latch
shadowed in fatherless homecomings 
as the evening sun settled over other houses.

The slap of morning water smeared itself 
across our attempted childhood 
and each sunrise her smile froze; 
compacted glass face glistening in a handbag,  
beside her lipstick, in the follicles of a hairbrush. 

Once, she invested in a life size one. 
We crawled about, contorted, watching our bodies
be other animals; all rickety bone, matted hair 
and little else, while she flounced under 
the reflective plume of a French cigarette, cradling 
the cat like a new fur coat, in the pose 
of a dinner-dance goddess.

​


Deleted

We better not talk of it anymore; this chalky blue tab gagging 
at the back of my throat.  Now I’m barely breathing. 
Your social vice-grip on my middleclass mediocrity 
is insidious pain and my heart has less than seconds to flat-line
into one of the withered, but lauded, apples 
from your orchard, photographs of which you flaunt 
beside anaemic diatribes on vaping and consumerist unbelievers.

Your callous blocking swipe I will bear, and worse, know 
how little you care, as if we might never meet, 
be just cartoon eyes, glancing past the narrow lanes 
we both travel, little room for both of us here, and in steering 
our guzzling machines (your spiel),wing mirrors touching, close 
as we’ll ever be, we must stop, have the grand day moment 
and I won’t have the second account to follow with so, how are you,

because you have silenced me. A farmer you wave to is cutting 
the hedgerows too early. A Yellowhammer, another cause 
for your perfect, protest life, is happily tweeting outside our
inch-open windows as you scurry by and home to post horrified 
one-click opinions on artistic bursaries and the catastrophic level of plastic 
in the Ganges River and my fingers are tapping the steering wheel,
urging the bone of my thumb into another deleted comment.

​


Bullet Proof

You strut about packing metal, 
lipstick smeared
across your collar, like the blood 
of that kitten you hunted

and double checked for a flat-line
 heart; eyes like marbles 
glistening in fluid, motionless
in disbelief at your fatal handy work.

Later, you can’t remember 
the reason you became it,
just that you had to be like them, loaded 
in all the right photographs, even 

as you slept at a certain angle 
so tears wouldn’t retreat 
back down your throat or congeal 
in your stubble. But they have proof; 

a square bullet, its trajectory your 
decimated heart and a thousand likes 
on your story as evidence 
you don’t give a fuck. 

​

Maeve McKenna lives in Sligo, Ireland. Her poetry was shortlisted, highly commended and longlisted in 2018/19 in several international poetry competitions.  She has been published in The Cormorant and Sonder Magazine and widely online. Maeve is working towards her first collection of poetry.

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