10/7/2017 Poetry by Tara Mae MulroyGhost The daughter holds her fingers to the sun and reads the shadows cast through like pictographs. Her skin contains a portrait of riverbeds-- untapped fissures she finds on the insides of her elbows. When her father sings her a lullaby, his voice mingles with the nightrut of beasts. A bitten ear, the moon in her bedtime cup. Bye, baby Bunting I We met on the clean sheets of our bed and pressed our bodies like palms held in prayer. Elsewhere, children were dying. Fished out of frozen rivers, choking on their own spit in sleep. We listened to their names on the radio, read them on our newsfeeds. I said them aloud every morning-- a benediction, an invocation—feeling the syllables of each one in my mouth. I picked Lily for a girl, not for the one the cops found strangled with her own woven necklace, but for the way it slipped off my tongue, how it sounded like a promise. II I dreamt that Lily was born with hair the soft brown of a wren’s wing. Grown, she fled into the woods, the pines slashing my face and hands, but she was nowhere. III When our first one died, we never got to hear its heartbeat. She or he lived too short. I didn’t cry. The sky wept for me. IV I collected all my red clothes-- the panties and shirts and silk work dresses-- and burned them in a pit in the backyard. I bent their wire hangers and hung them from the ceiling fan blades in our child’s bedroom. Baby’s first mobile. One day, they were gone, and he never said a word. V I walked the trails in the woods, collected candy wrappers, nails, string, but then a jogger found a girl, a Ziploc of sandwich crusts in her jeans pocket. Our second one, a girl for sure, vanished. Fat birds peck feed from my exposed hands. VI When we turn to one another again, we muscle like a budding tulip. Outside the window, a child skirts a kite through the air. I see children so rarely now. Early curfews, indoor play times. Her bare fingers feed the line until it dances. I buy a white crib and, in our child’s room, pencil, “Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up-- we love you so!” VII I tear the posts off the bed snap the slats fling them into the yard Could God want us not to have a child Could God be so cruel God VIII IX X XI Nothing grows here anymore. Not even the wind. No one can draw water from a cinder. The crows line the electrical wires, caw into the open window, but there’s nothing but bones for them to collect, and they don’t like how they don’t shine. XII Zoe is the newest missing. Age 9, blond hair, green eyes. I read her stats over and over, too hollow with longing to move even though he’s left the bedroom light on every night and waited for me to come to bed. XIII The wind whistles through the bones of all those mothers’ children, found gone from cooling beds or too still, left to be buried in coffins the size of a shoebox. XIV True faith isn’t scared to let God answer prayers, he tells me, so we touch each other with our eyes open. ![]() Bio: Tara Mae Mulroy is the author of the chapbook, Philomela (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poems, stories, and essays have been published in Ruminate, CutBank, Juked, Waccamaw, The Journal, and others found at www.taramaemulroy.com. She currently edits Nightjar Review and teaches Latin. Comments are closed.
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