Poetry by Tara Mae Mulroy

Ghost


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.

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