From so far away
the fairground music fades
the carney's call echoes.
Were you sure you wanted to pay those pennies
for that stick of horehound candy?
String a song of sixpences together
And **** at them until they turn your mouth blood red
To hide your broken lips.

In the double wide that gapes into the evening
With its yawning broken windows.
The dingy feeling in your eyes
Refuses to fade with the dust
And the touch of sticky plastic stars on your bedroom ceiling
Keeps you company
In the bitter watches of the night

Jesus and John watch your father from the living room wall,
As the last flickers of a camel’s Pentecost flame
Are extinguished on your arm.  
Branded, you lie stained in sin
Your child eyes asking St. Peter
Why the gate is shut.
He breaks bread across the table
With your bones crushed to a fine flour,
Mixed with wine.
This is my body.
This is my blood.

Your broad forehead glistening--
kissed with salt from the sweat
of the sea you've never seen.
The clay is still under your nails
from molding the beaker beside you.
Meadowsweet on your lips
you lay down to die
with the softness illness brings.
Tonderghie copper hair
falls over your knees,
body curled as a new babe's.
Carry with you our songs to the afterlife
from this cold forest
to clearest skies.

The scrape of thought--
like the scrape of skin
on the bare threads of a sheetless mattress.
Limbs, like the first lines of a journal,
******, new,
waiting for the scars and the stories that follow
as bodies move together,
so slowly as to atrophy.
Memories echo in the silence
light careening through the window,
and words we can't remember teasing our tongues.
I could have asked you so much, and so little.
These are the stories we tell our inner selves,
the half-truths we justify
and the lies we ignore.
The moments we relive until they are frayed
beyond memory,
beyond repair,
the quiet brush of hands
over a tattered blanket.

Come away O human child
to the waters and the wild
with a faerie hand in hand
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.

Bridget,
Your pretty face,
was all they found in the peat
with the hoarfrost over your mouth
and your burnt skin curled in ribbons.
This, and your black stockings
he couldn't bear to remove.

Bridget,
Did you see the wildness in his eyes
that night he brought the priest
for last rites?
Did his hands shake
as he mixed the herbs with *****
and threw them in your face,
telling you to come home?

Bridget,
was he jealous of the sixpence in your apron pocket
the pieces of you he could never own
and the independent streak
that ran through your sensuous hair.
The hot iron at your throat
the only jewel he cared to hold there,
the slow smoke rising like a chain
'round your neck.

Bridget,
did you stare at the frightening faerie child,
his changeling wings beating above you
as he called you by his own name.
Did you scold him in the name of his aos si mother
to watch his strange eyes flare
as you choked on the dry bread
he'd jammed down your throat.
You were never his Bridget
you were your own.

Bridget,
You were never the last witch.
We are still hunted
across deserts and into alleys
acid and fists destroy the magic
of our bewitching eyes.
Angry, they reach for the pieces of us they can never own
and burn our hearts on hearths
across continents.
The smoke rising from so many fires,
unnoticed.

I feel so lost without you,
my north star,
my comfort at the end of days.
There may as well be light years between us
and that destroys me.

You're golden in the light of grief
romanticized, I know,
but right now,
don't care.