You do not need to know my name but:

I am Mary, Amina, Penelope, Brigid,

Persephone, Frida, Maebh, Makeda,

Sojourner, Granuaile, Cassiopeia, Nan

I am Hecate, Rosa, Lakshmi, Aphra

the X-Case Girl; the women given letters not names,

Sappho, Marsha, Maura, Edna,

Green Tara, Black Madonna

I am the first girl child they put in the septic tank

Come to the loud, feral

Herland, SheLand, Theyland.

A Queenopolis, Cisopolis, Transopolis

A Republic of personhood.

I am the map.

We are the map.

1

At the port of Slag Island

they asked for my papers

and took me to a room

as I did not meet the levels of

submission they required.

Levels they measured with

a taut strip of tape;

whose units were

the width of God’s finger.

After hours of interrogation,

they stamped my passport with a

black benchmark smudge.

So I went to Slag Heap

to seek out my sisters.

A pit, girls.

They offered you a pit instead of a universe,

a colliery of sin.

What do they get?

Wild oat fields.

What do you get?

An empire of dirt.

And you burn red

burn white hot

burn black ash.

Woodcuts of cloud, a sky feathered

like smoke from a fire

no longer tended.

2 Archipelago

The sky shouts in blues and greys,

white-capped waves bellow in teal.

The horizon’s language is

A mother tongue of the

sensible (horizon)

rational (horizon)

celestial (horizon).

The tongues of every bell wagging,

A campanile story.

*

Can you hear Wrens in the hedges

counting coins and pentacles?

Shillings in oiled hands.

Listen hard, across the city.

Hear pillows being plumped

to smother the Syphilis Girls

of the Locke Hospital.

3 Lilith’s Garden

We carve Fallopian furrows,

readying the earth to dig for children.

wearing crowns of Pomegranate twigs.

Infants nestled in velvet peat

not tanks or graves,

Thanks be to god.

Responsorial, hypocritical.

This land of labour,

of women’s fingers,

crooked and worked

to the silken bone

a choreography of wax

on parquet floors,

scrubbing in globes.

Diurnal, Nocturnal

on the moons of their knees.

Arthritic offerings doomed to fossilise.

Waxing, waning,

Did you know gibbous means hump?

You could fuck the moon if you wanted to -

But only when the floor gleams moonbeams.

4

On Ráth na Marbh

they tied women to horses,

then tied them to steering wheels

and forced Sunday drives

to checkpoints.

A Semtex queen.

Bombs go off in women’s

bodies all the time.

An era of walks

by the Metaller,

A dog stranded on the weir.

Maelruan, Glenview,

A plague grave place.

Green hills reclaimed

by tenement heirs,

the factory girls of

Jacobs and Avon.

5

A hermitage of women live near

Rosary Bead lakes

A pastoral, prolapsed land.

It’s said they have wings

but fly only at night,

lifting off like violet zephyrs.

6

In the Bone Yard

we are our magic selves

among the noise of sermons.

Casting a gauze veil

over the bride of the moon.

How much of our bones

are rock, crystal, sediment.

Nacre in the marrow

holy mother of pearl.

The sacred dust of rocks.

The sea arpeggiates,

pawing at the hem of a wave

you know you want to…

7 The Great Wall of Silence

Audre Lorde wrote

your silence will not protect you.

Every time a mouth snaps shut

— a purse clasp decision,

solidarity evaporates.

Words as immurement.

8 Niobe Basin and the Channel of Tears

You have your mother’s bitter waters,

your mother’s hidden depths,

who avoided a bell-jar landing.

Washed away her anger,

the anchor of disappointment,

turning the linen pink with blood.

They would open us up (if we let them)

Snuffling like pigs in the troughs of our wombs -­–

If we let them.

9

On Uaigneach Island a grand ballroom

oozes marble. There’s monkeys on cornices,

gilt-faced tigers, pale girls on plinths

taking orders, fetching drinks.

Waiting like the Galligende

to turn into bears and lionesses

when the night empties out,

restless like Io,

white-flanked and

tormented by a gadfly.

10

Terra Incognita is a place of two lakes

Mater, Pater, bodies of water

I came from theirs,

I came from the silt and knapweed

bed of marriage.

Wives among weeds and pike,

the lake night-mirrored, hiding Ophelias.

11

In the waters of Sentence Strait,

a dervish of waves

dump foam on deck.

Madness spewed from the depths.

Save Our Souls

as stars replicate,

watermarks of light.

Before a fuchsia dawn,

stained yellow-orange;

iodine on pre-surgery skin.

12 Sinners Cove /The Green Island

There is no true north in

the Eye of a Needle,

the compass truth of hidden things.

Be like spears, a goddess told us.

Or the Two of Swords

blindfold and balancing

in front of an archipelago.

Silly Isle Viral Isle

Utopia Heterotopia

Myopia Dystopia

Hysteria Amnesia

Melancholia Oogonia

Colonia Gordonia

The Isle of Shits

The Dreamery.

Forget Ptolemy or Mercator,

ask Mary Ann Rocque or

Joyce Kozloff — who makes the map?

The Raspberry girls long to

escape octopus greetings in

The Ballroom of Romance.

Outside up against a wall,

tongues hot,

breath pluming in iced air,

slick Arctic skin.

A glacier breaks off in the night.

Turn from things glimpsed through

portholes.

Windows as eyes

as nipples

as cunt.

13 Bloody Foreland

Is shingled with witches’ teats

lime rockpools slimed endometrium

on an island where it

rains only blood.

14 Swamp of Transgression

I don a mantellum as big as the sky,

like Mary or Brigid, the shepardesses

of Sundays Well.

A grand oak at the entrance,

each veined leaf, a leaflet.

A minor manifesto.

15

In the Wood of Twisted Desires,

I plant seeds.

Girls as saplings.

Women are dendrochronologists.

A chlorophyll chorus.

16

In Little Ireland,

there are sermons said by pillars,

words in dark green shades

vowels of olive bile.

And afterwards, there is silence

as fear is pushed down throats.

Mouths ferrous, cut lips

all metal, among

copper-domed churches

basted in Verdigris.

17

The Furies

The Goosegirls

The Skate-girls,

The Ray-girls,

The Hake-girls barnacled

to the land

limpeted by laws.

Instead of a ghost town —

the echo of how a place used to be —

Banshee villages are filled with

the sound of women wailing;

not as augury, but for

all they’ve lost.

Swallowing history,

Learning to be what they’re not.

18

At the Hound and Harlot Inn,

we talk loudly about the law.

Our mouths stained purple,

and we drank until our lips

were an advent shade rejecting

the holy spirit.

In the snug of tobacco-yellowed walls,

we opened our grape mouths,

our burgundy mouths,

our Eve-of-the-vine mouths

saying no, no, we will not.

19

In Coventown we burn it all down

and chant until dawn

with

nostrils full of soot, our hearts

already blackened before

flames lick our breasts.

Soon the sun appears,

unfolding long arms of heat

The quartz in the path

Pixelates, all flirtatious.

20

The Three Marys in Pemphredo Lane

started a petition;

Grey Sisters with a shared tooth and eye,

Cyclops triplets taking on oligarchs.

Da svidaniya Vlad, with your Lenin-waxed lies.

Formaldehyde views

All putrification.

Tell the Raspberry girls,

who know all about rot

and Capitalism.

21

From Slutside to Cuntside

we march with our banners

and pink lozenge wombs.

Keep step with bog women,

long sacrificed and

clawing from the earth

through the whistling grass

Here we are to remake ourselves,

To say never again,

Never.

22

The women tell stories of white things:

Autocrat wimples over

soured-lemon hearts.

Bridal veils that could have

kept them out of here.

A tundra of sheets

washed in shifts.

Pre-carbolic skin,

Lay on linen where once,

you felt safe — or desired.

23 The Winds

They told me to wind down,

devolumise myself,

be less blustery

Quit yer monologuing

But they kept on speaking,

tchk, tchk, tchk,

a click-track of dismissal.

The sound bled through breeze blocks

Menstrual notes of birth and confession.

You could almost hear the tears in the wall.

Or the sound of a voice, shouting:

“God doesn’t want you… You’re dirt.”

In the Fields of Salome,

women work the soil.

Raspberry, Strawberry, Blackcurrant girls,

With curved spines like scimitars.

In the laundry, the unwedlocked, padlocked

scrubbing floors post-birth

in smocks,

a lacunae of stitches.

24 Constellations

White bones of stars

light the path,

Bulbs strung like a ship’s rope.

The starry plough needling the land,

looping, looping through

all of those pasts.

We move past erasure,

fabrication

A Scold’s Bridle of

locked documents.

In the Imaginal Forest,

gather paper from

witch-armed trees.

We root ourselves

to fill up cellulose pages,

with an eternal genealogy.

We keep writing

our histories

in contour lines.

Come closer,

I want to tell you:

You are the map.

We are the map.