Nine poems by Kate O’Shea

Kate O’Shea lives in Dublin. Most recently she was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2012. She has been published in Icarus, Acorn, Electric Acorn, Poetry Ireland Review, The Burning Bush, Riposte, Poetry on the Lake – Silver Wyvern Anthology (Italy), Poetry.com. Shamrock Haiku, Poetry Bus, Outburst Magazine (issues 8,9,10 & 11), First Cut, CANCAN (Scotland), LucidRhythms (USA).

Nine poems by Kate O’Shea

The Trout

He gripped her
like a trout
from a running dream.

Pressing fingers
there, between
clammy gills.

Hanging above her,
slow-moving
as the evening sky.

Her body surged,
gulping him
like mayfly.

Fish

She wanted to be shaped
like a beer glass.
Round and bulbous
foamy at the mouth
and mouth.

Something he would dip
finger into.
Leave dints in her
skin like blisters.
Only deeper.

She wanted to be gulped
behind lips and teeth.
Slide down throat,
then in belly
become fish.

Howth

Stuck in between a rock and a hard place.
The weather as grey as the outcrop
where we perch just around the corner
from Citric, after dining out
on lobster and sea bass.
My head giddy with white wine
blinking at lights like blood oranges
on the not-so-distant headland.

We imagine living in one of the houses.
Staying in, looking out. The sea sighs.
You have beautiful eyes.

I am here under false pretences.
Whispers fall among the waves.
There are no kisses just tarallini.
Hot desire winks from caves.

Bottle Blonde

Act 1
Scene Dublin pub

A crinkled man
with breasts
chews cigarette,
sags into
tired glass.
He cries
because the blonde
who drank his drink?
(all night)
Went.

Staggering.
She left no address.

Only lipstick.
Lip service.
That eventual
patronising
kiss.

Not drunk enough.

Act 2
Scene quayside

Lovely Liffey
turns her head.
He endeavours
to touch her hair.

She is tired
and desired.
Broken bottles
her spine.
He cuts himself
in despair.

Act 3
Scene coop

Homer Pigeon
finds his coop
then reassumes
creative
stoop.

Ascends
musical stairs
unlit.
Gropes banisters, walls
smeared
with shit.

An electric light bulb
bald and dim
illuminates
him.

Slobbers tea,
chomps
heel of bread
with cheese
then farts.

Fed,
at ease.
Opens paper
reads:
“I’m glad it’s over.”

Proceeds
to obituary.

Act 4
Scene Dublin Street

Neon on wet faces.
his crony
eyeballs glowing
embelches.
“Her roots were showing.”

Two women and the sea

Two women embrace on a beach
and toes burrow the sand
to reach god.

A head waits on a knee
for answers to congeal
in a sea, bald as liver.

Seaweed with bladder sacks
round and pregnant,
pissed out and dry in the sun.

Slop of waves.
Screech of gulls
snapping fishguts.
Umbilical cords.

Pebbles are organs.
My heart, her heart.
Dead babies’ hearts
percolating in our brains.

Meditation on Life after Kahlo and Dali

Sand flats seek like fingers
into the arsehole of the sea.

This is me. This is me.

Half-awake watching.
I am tumbling dunes.
Eyes sunbursts
vastness of grey.
Empty of sea and sky.

I am old as ruins
at the end of August day.
Rooted with giant rock.
Performing arches and pillars.

My clumsy tongue
a fishing boat’s rise and fall
licking out the armpit
of a wave.

That groin of beaches and groan
with the slap and throb
of universe.

My ear hears caves.
A note from primeval mouths.
I recognise the sound of hunger.

It is a palsy of echoes.
The answer is parabolic.
Diabolic with hooves
leaving pockmarks in the sand.

God. God. God.

Stuck dry to a rock
like a dead gull’s wing.
An apology for every
human thing.

The heart is a jellyfish
that dissolves and
dissolves in the sun and
those razor shells that whiten
in air are bones.
They carry the coded messages
of lost sailors, fishermen
and children mollified
by the sea.

I shriek the praise
of fishy flat fertility.
A horn measures distance.
The mackerel grins at destiny.

Knuckled cliffs, arthritic,
grandmotherly, are really
claws scratching at the gnashing
jaws of water.
This leviathan shaped
like a pregnancy
terrifies me.

Grass tops and a heap of rocks
become a cemetery.

Fecund Female

Sit on it.
The egg.
Two eyes like piss holes
in the snow stare up
the Anubis of a crouching jackal.

The frotteur rubs against
an ample rear from here
to Goldenbridge
But no golden showers
drown Leda there.
Swanning about town.

Laid up under the bridge
yawning over the Grand canal
the brackish whiff of broken bottles
and used condoms weigh heavy
on every Ophelia wannabe
like unwanted kittens in a sack.
Never coming back.

Sit on it.
No.
An audience of down and outs laughs:

“Go on. Jay put manners on her Mister.”

A twisted sister sits poker straight.
Too late. The weight. Keels over.

Sit on it.
The egg.
Infernal hen.
The baffling bravado
ovary me over do.
Over you.

An ice-cream van on fire.

Infuriating. The piss-whittle of rancour.
Mr Whippy the whimsical raconteur.
Spinning her words inside her.
A raceme of ice cream and 99s,
flake, raspberry ripple and phallus.
Dripping dairy and fat into
her pharmaceutical petunia.

The audacity of suburbia,
little children and lactating mothers,
to impinge on her vernacular.
Enough.
Persephone never had so good
a role since The Tempest.
This din enough to make
her come above ground.
She plays Rachmaninov
loud and foul to counteract
the tinny pling of that thing:
the ice cream van.

Spiteful little man, innocuous
behind the wheel, his insect eyes
blink, a repugnant rodeo.
He stirs the air with Yankee Doodle.

The pipe bomb is here.
There is her bazooka.
A glock secreted in her undergarments –
to rid this barren landscape
of so hideous a mechanical monster.
A beastly bedpan on wheels,
syrupy gizz of a penis hole.

BOOM.
Take that. And again.
A kaleidoscope of knickerbockers glories,
choc-ice, brunch, fizzy drinks.
The flavour of disaster.
Hallelujah.
The driver kneecapped and slumped
over the wheel,
an ice cream van on fire.

Bouquets
The only bouquet these days
are asparagus from Mexico
gone past best before date.
The buds hard and green
with a hint of blush,
mock her from the fridge
when the door is open –
vegetables strut their stuff
in bright light.

That image of Kahlo
in bridal attire haunts her,
perspires with Rivera droplets.
She slams the door shut.

This is the fortieth year here
she will celebrate it as thirty-seven
art is a spectator sport
but runs on when eyes
die behind the skull
and guerrilla gardeners
plant seeds in sockets.
The only bouquet these days
are asparagus from Mexico
gone past best before date.
Masked and naked ladies
parade on rooftops to
offer themselves to men
dispossessed by the system.

All men are Diego Rivera.
The light is on, even
though the door is shut.