Erin Elizabeth Smith

Dechtire Gives Away Cu Chulaind

On what tiny wings this escape – a wink

of sky made endless as the slick ocean

we follow.  This fugitive flock a story

high of sound, a chorus of metal sinks

in the flood,  paper bags in the open

wind.  This door we open to you.  This key

shaped into our names.  What is it you chase?

I'm not your sister or your prophecy.

My skin grows round and tight with a new son,

the geis turned muscle and thick bone.  No trace

of our history

but birds I have been – kingfishers, terns linked

in a gold chain.  We are women again

when you find us.  We are music, a lee

in the form of a house.  Our warm, pink

light leaks to your bird-hunting camp; we lend

ourselves to being found.  Our memory,

biology of those three years erased

in the pale lick of night – no more family

or sickness of time.  Tell me who I am

so I can give this boy away.  To face

you newborn and free.

Emer & The Narrator Discuss Wait

Is it so different?  The tufted ocean impossible

to cross, the pale blue of a linked sky

that only women in flight can traverse –

bird bodies chained to their ominous drive.

Still you and I, we cannot change

into anything but the women we are,

staring at the walls that need hangings,

the too large meals cooled and sealed.

We wait while our willed bodies wither

like tulips each March, and hope

for a crack in the ceiling, a Grecian burglary

of rain. Or simply a man that presses

his calf into ours beneath a table, or takes

us in his room that's black as birth.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of the book The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008).  Her poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Crab Orchard, Natural Bridge, West Branch, The Pinch, Rhino, and Willow Springs among others. She is also the managing editor of Stirring and the Best of the Net anthology.