Hennessy New Irish Writing: April 2017’s winning poems

Follow Your Leader

I cannot now hear the word essay without

Being transported back into your bed,

That bed in that cold mint-green eight-bedroom

Kip house half-way up Highfield Avenue,

Where hormones heaved from walls and ceiling,

Where we heard all the gossip, all the hook-ups,

Where your mother once walked in on me, alone,

Pining while you were away,

Needing the home-smell of our dreams pooled in one pillow.

Sitting up in that single-and-a-bit bed,

I wrote and wrote that March night,

It was my last hand-written essay and no small trial.

I woke you, once, lamenting my deadline.

You mumbled some sympathy, then slept again.

Your sympathy was always a mumble,

Muffled by you saving all your feelings for yourself.

Needing you only amplified my feelings -

I hyena-laughed, cried and wetly came them.

You slept soundly while I scribbled,

Words lit by a 40-watt cheap lamp pegged to the headboard,

The twin lamp on your side stone cold.

I fought full-scale mutiny with Melville’s dense story,

But the word count somehow grew.

Introduction. Tug-of-war paragraphs.

Brittle conclusion. Endnotes.

All the bits were there.

I did not think to write what I knew,

Owning and owned by need, love’s slim consort.

At 5.00am, stapling the cover page,

Tethered to my lame last minute conclusion,

I realised - I finished things badly.

Neck aching, I moved down the bed,

Hugged your cold back and followed your lead into sleep.

Your foot nestled mine at the soft arch;

Your hand latched mine. A murmur.

And even now, I still don’t know, ten years later,

Which of us was slave and which was master.

Small Talk

How do you feel today?

Faded. Jaded.

Somehow hopelessly out-dated.

I feel like flesh gone cold and old and sad,

Knowing it’s been had and had again

And is not wanted.

I feel like a battery chicken,

Half-plucked, grey and hobbling,

No relation to a normal laying hen.

I feel like a goose pimple, all horror and hair,

All hair and horror, half-stood in horrid protest,

No smooth, calm zen.

Much the same as usual, then?

Sarah O’Connor is from Tipperary and studied in University College Cork and in Boston College, Massachusetts. She has worked in publishing (including for Oxford University Press) and in politics. She now works in corporate communications for a PR agency in Dublin. Her poetry has been published in Wordlegs, The Weary Blues, Skylight 47, Poethead, and Headstuff. She is working on a young adult novel called The Ghost Station, set in Berlin in 1989. She tweets @theghoststation