Tim Morrissey is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts living in Brooklyn, New York. He writes about the Irish American experience in the twenty first century and is pursuing a graduate degree studying the influence of Old and Middle Irish literature on the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, as well as the impact of the Irish language in the Americas. His interests include translation, the Japanese language, illustration, and creative writing, among others.

The Waves

From the wake we watch them:

Up all, in genuflection
or gospel stance, they bow,
contract, commune on starlit jetties,
blossom foam and brine up to the moon,
flush back together and
sink between our toes.

We sink into an inch of coast.
Pearly feet that blur into the sand.
Some cry, unmoored, in darkness.

Like moonlight, my kin is all reflection
in the genocide of waves.
Even at night, we castle build
to keep them off the shore.

We forget how, once,
they carried us across.

Reuse

for Jim Morrissey

I’ve done
a butcher job
reattaching
your
tongue
into
my mouth,

the one you kept
in the dirty box
of things you horded
by the mitochondrial records
and a photograph
of Ronnie,

all dried out
like a leather
glove, unused
and inflexible,
no hand to bend
its fingers,
a beached whale
on the rough wood,
gasping
in the salty
air.

Each needle
pass I made to sew
it in beside the other
caused part of it
to fall away.
Each wince that shook my throat
was like a curse you’d
never said, and never say again,
a frankenstein frogleg,
kicking in my jaw.

“It’s a hard one,”
you’d muttered,
when I mentioned
that I wanted it.
“I never really learned
how to make it
work for me.”
You were
living then, old man.
Your hopes hadn’t
gone yet with your
heartbeat.
“Why do you want it?”
my father asked me later.
He hadn’t been
the first to shrug
it off. “Because,”
I said, because I
had no answer.

How far
back in my throat
did I reach to get it in stuck?
The mirror wouldn’t show. It was
my father’s father’s mother.
She used to whisper into shells
on Long Island Sound,
and put the shell up to
his ear and let him
hear its song, and before her,
it licked dishes
in the kitchen
of a New York
socialite and echoed
in long tunnels beneath
the city harbor, and before, it
smacked at salty lips like mops
and sang in swaying cots
of lords who’d stuffed it
well up in their holes, a writhing
thing all on its own, the
utterer of all taboos
that kissed the tip
of each lover’s soul
and wailed
like a child
crying
in the arms
of the mandible
that rocked it.

I could
have
buried it
in the sand,
or cast
out to sea?

But I’ve made
an appendage of it
instead, and it
hangs
there underused
while this one
flaps away.

Except,
in the shower,
when the steam
sinks into its skin, and
suddenly it croaks
Éamonn-ana-
Chnuic and
my roommates have
to ask me how I can
speak a single age
between two
breaths.

I lie and say
I got it from you,
just like you lied to me.

Big Anthony

Maybe it’s just
like a novel
under pressure,
sediment metamorphed
in a skullhead cauldron,
ten thousand
pages left to simmer
so long that the string
matter spills over
and floods
the townlands
with word
upon word.

Big Anthony,
you greedy boy.

The “R” word

She says it
with such
force

it sends
me back to
days of
unstung youth.

“I’m so…”
“You’re so…”
“He’s so…”
Each time I say,
“You shouldn’t say…”

“It’s a free country.
you can’t tell me
what I can and can-
not do.”

But why
does she keep
at it, as if it is her
only turf.
She fights me
like a spear
shaker, with a tremor
in her hands,
the remote control
wagging
from her
palm.