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Róisín Ní Neachtain
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the poet
Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva, and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection.
the poems
Memory
I held my dreams in my palms
Though they were bleeding
A soft tremor against my skin
Some were shallow
Some like a cave
Some pricked my conscience
Their threads tethered to my flesh
And I chewed their weights to set them free
My teeth wore down
I fell in a haze through our memories
When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth
And fell past my lips
You bit my tongue and hummed
The ebb of nameless laughter
A cadence of sorrows
Spinning a steep melody
Now I am unfearful of pain
A slow praise of closeness
Breathing blue
In midnight songs
Tightening my pulse
Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance
To unworded lyrics
My last need stilled
Remembering Without Believing
Remembering without believing
The stars appeasing
Against their obsidian abyss
Heat and light unseamed from dust
Remembering without believing
Questions pressed in psychosis
And promises which feel no shame
Illegible hypergraphic promises
Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence
And undivided sounds and realities
And reproached pain and laughter
And dissonant dreams
Which lead to my repossession
A petty heresy of Silence
Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails
Our language measured by prayers
And lumen a measure of their glare
Look at this skin scored by hate
Their unfamiliar eye
Rooted in fear
All truths unchanged in time
The Edge of Reason
A room
Like a trite cage
Between these four walls
Where prodigal sons and daughters return
And are rejoiced and bound once more
A spiel read like a dead poet
A bastard pain
The object of such a conclusion
Perhaps an accidental gale?
Swept and tendering our bones
Archaic songs of sorrow
That lull us in their readiness
Black on white
Black on black
White on white
Letters made barely visible
And nonsensical
A few steps closer to the edge of reason
A past and future arrested in a photograph
What will happen if we awake again
To see these passings going beyond that edge?
To the beginnings of someplace?
Someplace more of a sedentary mind
A hollowed space in each Man’s chest
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb