The Map/We Are The Map
Sinéad Gleeson
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.
