M. F. McAuliffe’s work initially appeared in Poetry Australia, Overland, and Australian Short Stories. She co-authored the poetry collection Fighting Monsters, with two-time Red Earth Poetry Award winner Judith Steele, and the limited-edition artist’s book, Golems Waiting Redux, with Portland artist and sculptor Daniel Duford. Her other titles include the novella Seattle, The Crucifixes and Other Friday Poems, the story cycle I’m Afraid of Americans, 25 Poems on the Death of Ursula K. Le Guin, and The Fires. Co-founder and -editor of the Portland, Oregon-based, completely multilingual journal Gobshite Quarterly, she also edits titles for Gobshite’s offshoot press, Reprobate/GobQ Books.

The Agenda

Half a world away
I could see the wrath of Poseidon building

There wasn’t much to point to:
disembodied gaze,
turn of the head,
steely sheen on the sea

I tried to warn them in Troy,
told them about the army of boats blackening towards them,
the cold undercurves of the light

told them about the fires,
the screams, yelling, flesh,
how the flesh howls for dying even after it’s dead
the trunk decapitated and the howl still standing
in the air

about the wrinkling of the earth
like an apple rotting after,
ridges of unburied dead

told them about the city’s final mouldering

I flew home and said it all again:
went door
to door, street
to street, to all the squares of the city
fingernails snagging in sleeves, anything
to get their attention and make them listen

while the light grew colder
and my brother sickened
and would not leave.

The Trojans said
You have an expatriate mind
said
Shouldn’t you be discussing this somewhere else
said
Look: nothing but thin blue air.

They locked me in the tower.
I heard my brother and the city
burn

and when the Greeks smashed the doors and dragged me
I saw him,
disembodied gaze
turn of the head

a Greek standing in his brains.

If I could have plucked my heart out
and my eyes and tongue
and given them to him

or given them to the gods
to unwind the clashing sky and turn it back
I would have

But the sky fell and the gods were deaf

The ground and the air and the hills were deaf

Poseidon in his dull steel greaves
stepped onto the fallen sky
the hardening sea of blood

lightning bolt, trident;
staring
daring the red and level dark to be a womb.

Published in The Fires, Reprobate/GobQ Books, Portland, Oregon, 2024

Towards sunset a hint of red sun on their grey feathers, a hint of the vulnerable flesh beneath, flight suddenly imaginable. Bone, muscle, heartbeat, a kind of long, airborne running

And the earth trivial, easily travelled.

Published in The Fires, Reprobate/GobQ Books, Portland, Oregon, 2024

Crucifix I

If you want a forest you’re going to have to pull it out of my feet,
out of my skin, out of the veins jumping with exhaustion,
out of the hollows of my bones (the chalkiness of them frightening):

you’re going to have to stand my body on a rock,
nail my hands to the wheeling stars (let my tendons turn and twist and knot)
let the wind and standing dark
solidify for centuries;

unzip the glueskin around my fingernails,
dangle it sidewise in the sun,
nick and pluck and pull
my chest, back, neck, arms, thighs;

bundle the glimmering collection of ribs that hang now dry as rattles,
score them lengthwise,
bury them parallel and parallel and parallel;

lie me on the earth,
go back in with twelve-inch needle-nose pliers
cast aside the spleen and liver and calcified mush,

go straight to the cracked black stone of my heart:
re-water and restore it,
warm it with your lips,
hope it still contains the soft, complex stemcell of the world.

Published in The Crucifixes and Other Friday Poems, Reprobate/GobQ Books, Portland, Oregon, 2017

Crucifix IV

So here I hang or stand
lashed or nailed to this fine piece
from Bethlehem Wood & Steel,
and there you are, Centurion.
I’ve seen you before, a guest where you shouldn’t’ve been.

Most of those eyewhites
puddling out from my feet
have seen me before, too.
They’ve come to watch the death of God,
come to see what saw them as they are

squirm in his turn.

And the rest have come to see the marvellous
Artist-Carpenter-Architect (founder of the Dead Sea School –
all-organic heat-treated mud, the very bend and flow
of thought and water,
glass like air made visible)

and cry out at the final cessation of the contract
as though they’d never complained
about the cabinet-joints when the villa was finished

Oh, no, we can’t pay for that.
Genius doesn’t work for love or money
it works because it must

as though I hadn’t seen the whisk
of Roman cloaks around the corners,
figured out the highholyday scams

and kept my mouth shut anyway
genius works because it must –

as though the spirit of God could never, finally,
stop transforming the world and possibility
no matter what they did
to God, the world, and possibility.

If you put me to death
you put me to death.

And inherit the noontime:
the sun a circle of unhappy wives
the cliffs carved stairways of vision-twisted saints
howling for God
while rivers of blood and marvel continue to flow within them
and wives and heretics continue to burn above them
and wind and sand continue to blow around them

Oh, let me die alone.
Your God is a lie you tell each other
and so your touch is pain.

Published in The Crucifixes and Other Friday Poems, Reprobate/GobQ Books, Portland, Oregon, 2017