Ollie O’Neill
I too have mistaken my good hand
for a slammed door. Carried my own blood.
When they asked where? I was too tired, trying
to hammer a nail into a ghost, to think about specifics.
I’m aware I was a girl once but I felt
more like a choir, a chorus of murmuring.
I didn’t say anything. Or I said something
about an old school house. How soon the wound dries out.
Maybe I soft-tongued a seed from
between my teeth. Dislodged meaning
from the boned space between –
Godmother. God. Mother.
I am not beneath the act of naming.
I can be the one who decides in language.
One thing looks like another thing, is another thing.
This is the mathematics of poetry.
Patron saint of
the upturned table.
My sacred heart.
My two bruised knees.
Ollie O’Neill is a writer from London. Her debut collection What We Are Given was published in 2020. Her work has been published in Magma, Fourteen Poems, and Bath Magg, and read at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, on BBC Radio, and others. She is working on a new collection.
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