Two Poems by Maeve McKenna

A Dedication to Drowning

Stretched like a drum
a coating of me covers
my skeletal frame.
For now, I am crouched
at the shoreline, the night
grips, my back a fist.

Out past the cut of land and sea —
where everything
was once you and nothing
was me —
a kind of balance prevails.
Not here, though. Not among
the creeping pull lapping
at my toes, luring me back
inside the silence of water,
the idle current a mouth
full of promises, echoing closer.

Now, I can’t trust my feet,
they are traitors, like my mind,
like your face.

Sand is under everywhere you are not
as I think of you then, swimming to shore,
your wide shoulders an Orcas
tail slicing the surface,
your head rising through
the ripples.

You asked me once
why I never swim.
I told you; drowning
twice takes dedication.

Waking Is November

The weight of waking — compounded
memory — an inheritance of empty vodka bottles

and your favourite faux-fur coat. One unframed
wedding photo. An empty ashtray. Beneath the bed, inside

the zipped pocket of a handbag, rolls of twenty pound notes
tied with elastic. There, too, folded neatly between

the blank pages of a bank deposit book in your maiden name,
two handwritten letters; replies

to an advert in the personal classifieds.
Night is living hours away and it’s November again.

Maeve McKenna’s collection, A Dedication to Drowning, was published by Fly on the Wall Press and is available here.

Learn more about Maeve on our Contributors’ Page.

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(Photo: Sean X Liu/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)

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Maeve McKenna

Maeve McKenna is a poet living in Sligo, Ireland. Her work has been placed in several international poetry competitions and published widely. Maeve was a finalist in the Eavan Boland Mentorship Award 2020, third in The Canterbury Poet of The Year, 2021, and a Pushcart nominee, 2022. Maeve was part of a collaboration with three poets and their pamphlet won the Dreich Alliance Pamphlet Competition, published October, 2021. Her debut pamphlet, A Dedication To Drowning, was published in February 2022, by Fly On The Wall Press. A second pamphlet is forthcoming from Rare Swan Press.

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