Three Poems by Nuala Roche

Gyrification

There will be time for waiting
Enough. Too much
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa watching.

Consider the river’s meanders
that more and more resemble
the contours of your insides.

There will be time for unfolding
the unwieldy map of your brain,
Aasaaaaaaaaaaaaaa unpacking

the lobes—cerebral streamers,
the peaks and troughs
that are the undoing of you.

There will be time for making
trails along the riverbank,
Aaaaaaaaa cutting the slack,

mapping the cortical folds that
maypole past the furrowed fields
you fashioned from your guts last week.

Lumber

I have reverted to the axe, hacking days
from the year, roughly split sun-up to sun-down,
I purchased the cleaver between closures,
the brief opening, the waiting in line.

A trickle of us crossed the outer displays,
masonry, roofing, interior paints,
going about our business, then a frisson:
the labyrinthine aisles spiralled inwards,
pebble lights dimmed under plastic topiary,
and I was seduced by the solstice gleam of blade—
its polished edge promising nights of labour,
needling and tweezing splinters from thumbs,
palms, foot pads—a forfeit for its heft and swing,
the pendulous pantomime arc of days.

Child’s shoe in a floursack bag

I recall you storming through the house,
busting doors wide to bellow into rooms,
claiming space. AaaaaaAaaa Now

I picture you wearing this leather shoe,
slumped against a door, knees locked hard,
rigid as your tin toy—a Whoopee Cowboy,

the other shoe, somehow the undoing of you.
Questions grow, glass-eels in your child-mind,
quickening bubbles in a rain barrel, unformed

as glimpses of snout when a toothy pike nibbles bait.
How will you make sounds for pictures, things?
That claggy mud on the harrow’s tines,

a nettle’s tingle, silver eels’ magnetic odyssey,
swarming, eddying towards the Sargasso Sea,
your sense of the shoe swathed in their metallic sheen.

Learn more about Nuala on our Contributors’ Page.

(Photo: Duncan Rawlinson/flickr.com/ CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Nuala Roche

Nuala has been writing for over twenty years. She won Dromineer Literature Festival’s poetry prize in 2017, and was awarded an Arts Office Bursary to publish a chapbook, Fish-Speak. Her work has been published in The Cormorant broadsheet and anthology, Doghouse Press journal, Pendemic.ie and nine editions of the Kilkenny Poetry Broadsheet. Nuala is currently pitching her first novel, Hello World, a story set in a near-future Ireland.