Leanne O'Sullivan –Leanne O'Sullivan is still in her early twenties, but has already won most of Ireland's main poetry competitions and had poems published in many of the magazines - when no one knew her age. Her first collection Waiting for my Clothes, published by Bloodaxe 2004 traces a deeply personal journey, from the traumas of eating disorder and low self-esteem to the saving powers of love and positive awareness. She has been writing poetry since she was 12, and began these poems not thinking they would ever form part of a book, but 'writing down the reasons I should live for' and then 'becoming addicted to looking at things to find the beauty in them'. 'What is remarkable about Leanne O'Sullivan is not that she is so young but that she dares to write about exactly what it is to be young. A teen-age Virgil, she guides us down some of the more hellish corridors of adolescence with a voice that is strong and true. For that alone, she deserves our full attention' - Billy Collins Leanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983 in Cork, and is currently studying English at University College Cork.

Poetry

I can never find a pen when you come,
when you snap me up on your lizard tongue,
and wrap yourself around me as if I were a spool.
Vague as metaphors you tease, trawling
rour shadows as feathering clouds do,
shedding infant vowels in your vaporous image.
You will never be perfected,
and while you are half-born I will never sleep.

In pickling ink I preserve all your fruits;
perhaps you are a prophecy,
a mouthing of the boundless,
or some God or other Minerva festering
like secrets in empty lines.
Years gone now, labouring to drain
the reddest blood from your throat,
and I am none the wiser.
 

Earliest Memory


My memory is of her mouth moving
my name, syllable by restless syllable,
as my feet drum the foot-rest of the high—chair.

The apple—rind lies beside her elbow, curled
like cigarette smoke as she leans
forward on her stool, and the core,

scooped out, rests carefully in
the yoghurt-streaked carton, its pores
stand there gleaming and wide—eyed.

We are snapping sounds from the air —
the honeyed ‘L’, the pure mineral of the ‘E’,
the drone of ‘Annnnnnnnnne’.

She throws my name upwards, her
throat like the neck of a lily,
she clears it and announces ‘Naaaa-Na’.

I see myself in the well of her pupil
and rock desperately in the chair until
she piles the spoon full of yoghurt,

cleans the bottom and sides
with her peony lips, then
it chugs towards me. I lap it up,

balancing the spoon between my lips,
and again she folds the fruit and yoghurt
onto my spoon, lick by lick, mothering it

as if draining an egg of its white,
pouring from shell to shell, leaving me
with the pure gold, soft and tender as a breast.

When We Were Good

The girl and I face each other.
She is twelve years ago,
her little body framed in long,
looping curls, her torso bent
under the load of her schoolbag.
I see her goodness,
her ruddy face flushed, beaming.
I want to tell her
bad things will happen;
fingertips will rove spirals around
her chest, starting at her tummy,
kneading her pleated breast
like a cold stethoscope,
and she will conceive
it before it happens,
will allow flesh to web
all the silky threads of her,
and she will close
her eyes while it happens,
going back to novels, mermaids —
back to Nana,
to biscuits in bed —
back to the beginning
of the world
when everything was small
and so far away;
and she was all goodness,
looking up at the world
blindly, like a girl under a boy.

Mirror

The image grew there,
just as a child would grow,
a private hope in that tunnel skin
of my mind. I saw I existed.
I saw two where there should
have only been one.
Divided, the image
climbed into my head
and that foetus flooded
my guilt, until nothing explained
my life better than these
clothes falling to the floor.

I was caught in her eye,
caught red-handed.
I called her the skinny saint.
I called her the beautiful bitch.
Then she took my real eyes
and tongue and made them hers.
I could barely name myself.
I wear black, because black
is what she wants to see —
a hole, a cover, a hatred that
goes in search of something hateful,
going in search of a mirror.
And I stare, and scorn,
and pinch, spitting through tears,
Woman, I know you not.

Waiting for My Clothes

The day the doctors and nurses are having
their weekly patient interviews, I sit waiting
my turn outside the office, my back to the wall,
legs curled up under my chin, playing

with the hem of my white hospital gown.
They have taken everything they thought
should be taken — my clothes, my books,
my music, as if being stripped of these

were part of the cure, like removing the sheath
from a blade that has slaughtered.
They said, Wait a few days, and if you’re good
you can have your things back. They’d taken

my journal, my word made flesh, and I think
of those doctors knowing me naked,
holding rue by my spine, two fingers
under my neck, the way you would hold a baby,

taking my soul from between my ribs
and leafing through the pages of my thoughts,
as if they were reading my palms,
and my name beneath them like a confession,

owning this girl, claiming this world
of blackness and lightness and death
and birth. It lies in their hands like a life—line,
and I feel myself fall open or apart.

They hear my voice as they read
and think, Who is this girl that is speaking?
I know the end, she tells them.
It is the last line, both source and closing.

It is what oceans sing to, how the sun moves,
a place for the map-maker to begin.
Behind the door, nothing is said.
Like dreams, my clothes come out of their boxes.


The Past


I look on it now as I do the people
whose names I can never remember.
The people I knew in that past
are skeletons. They spill like milk
from room to room in some unnameable house.
Even now I cannot remember them well.
I know the empty townlands they contrived,
the epitaphs on the headstones.
But memories have a strange lexicon,
like the old English plays I studied
at school but never understood,
except for the comma, the period,
the exclamation, the aftertaste of emotion.

Sometimes I go back to that unlit house
where bones and ribs gather to sit
and stare. Their hearts have escaped
from those mouldy prisons. I see,
through darkness soggy with calcium,
the bare room, coffee tables wall—to-wall,
the drunken labyrinth between them,
heavy doors that blow open like sudden breath.
But there is no breath in this ancestry,
we do not mention life here, only smile
maniacally, leaving doors hanging,
the bath running, the cupboards
empty, perishing in the memory
of warm blood. And the sickness,
whatever its poison, was a lover.

 
Say Goodbye


My grandmother’s death was everywhere;
it was the absence of traffic, the lone walker
stepping along the path of his torch.
I felt pregnant with the moment
it took for her last breath to grasp us,
uttering something from a great distance,
forcing us to hear. My brother and I
walked outside, around the hospital,
like birds who’d flown away at the sound
of thunder. We walked, hand in hand,
across the car park, the life—blood
ebbing away from our grandmother.
We could have been walking away from death,
stepping across the blocks of concrete
like continents splitting between
our grandmother and ourselves.

And suddenly we were standing
in front of the ward where I had tried
to die. My eyes closed with shock,
as if I’d arrived there like a meteor before
it hit the earth, pulling with it roots
from old soil.
I wanted to break a window
of that casket, smash the artery full of poison.
I fell heavily against the cold pillars
and howled, as if grief itself
would haul down that grey house.
But my brother took my hand, led me back
for the last time to our grandmother’s body.
Like a cat with her immutable lives,
I stood up. I felt it was time
to leave that coffin.