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Mary Mulholland
© Xavier Bonfire
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the poet
Mary Mulholland's poetry has been published in Mslexia, Magma, The Interpreter's House, The Rialto and Under the Radar. Highly commended in the Bridport Prize for Poetry and The Rialto's Nature and Place Poetry Competition, she was also longlisted in the UK's National Poetry competition. Mary founded and co-runs Red Door Poets, and is co-founder and editor of The Alchemy Spoon. Formerly a transpersonal psychotherapist, Mary holds a Newcastle University/Poetry School MA in Poetry. Her published works include What the sheep taught me, two collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell (All About Our Mothers / All About Our Fathers), plus a new pamphlet is on its way from Broken Sleep Books.
the poems
Heading to
the swamps
The fruit bats flew off at dusk.
I went to the harbour, bought a prawn salad,
but a gull snatched my first forkful mid-air.
Now, heading back, empty, to the Airbnb,
seagulls yeowing, chuckling over my head
my phone rings: you’re in a coma.
I stop midway across the bridge, the sea far below
dark and cold, so many stars, and all I can think
is where do the bats go by night?
At first I’d thought they were a cloud of crows.
I force you back to mind, wonder if you’ll survive,
but we all die sometime, and this’d save
divorce. I’m having an adrenaline rush.
It’s as well we have a half-world between us.
I’m no good with invalids. And hearts need
to be looked after. Mine can’t be broken.
You say love’s a basic need. I don’t need needs
like that. Yet once we had dreams. On a beach
you read me Jonathan Livingston. We were so young.
After that, seagulls divebombed me, followed me
home, waited on my sill. Seagulls have this wide range
of sound and elegant social behaviour. I don’t
like seagulls.
When I broke with you, the first time, you argued
your way back. It was autumn.
Even fruit bats get amorous in autumn,
making love, feasting in the swamps until dawn,
then off. Like us. Always coming and going.
And you now drip-fed. The cold rips through me.
Does it take this for me to learn I love you?
What the sheep
taught me
All day I have watched the ewes,
Trying to see as they do, everything at once.
I think best sequentially:
it’s getting towards evening.
The sheep know this too,
they’re starting their sunset corral
of the field perimeter,
practising for the national,
leaping like antelope,
even the large one bearing triplets,
she soars over the electric fence,
she’s made of spring.
All those fences I could have jumped.
I take a run. The shock sends me flying.
Flypast
He hands me a canister decorated with sunflowers.
It is November. I peer into a hole, the size of a fifty-pence
piece. Inside is just over half full, its weight approximate
to a bag of flour. Pale grey, the cremulator has produced
a texture more silt than sand, and I am lost in staring:
that speck is her laughter, that’s her at the proms,
dressed for a ball, with a fractured skull on her way
to the point-to-point she’d invited me to but I was busy revising
the middle ages. That dark fleck is her holding babies,
never her own, and that, ‘if you’re cold put on another jumper’,
their chilly lakeside house. My brother-in-law clears his throat.
Last night he said he gives wood-ash to a neighbouring potter
for the kiln; it creates a fine sheen in the glaze.
Has anyone used ash of a loved one?
Three fighter jets burst overhead, fast and low.
We look up. Cloudless blue, after a wraith-like early mist.
He circles the cherry, scatters her lightly, and each of us
does a round of the leafless tree whose base flickers
with tea lights. She’s a circular skirt of powder.
A breeze lifts her briefly, almost a flamenco, then drops
to silence. Overnight drizzle will vanish her to earth.
Publishing credits
Heading to the Swamps: Fourteen Poems to say I Love You
(Candlestick Press)
What the sheep taught me: What the sheep taught me
(Live Canon)
Flypast: Mslexia (Issue 105)