Joan Houlihan

AS IN A SACK

AS IN A SACK held shut by cord,
what wasted you, hid in you,
fell quiet each day, ready for us.
Your pain wasn’t physical, hadn’t taken you.
Your body wasn’t yours but a made one.
Nothing pierced far enough to matter.
Drip, and a softening torture
brought us together.  Stretched-out arms
felt with fingers for a way out.

STILL HEARD

STILL HEARD in her head: They burn what’s left.
And then he is there again: hands to face,
shut off and steeped in no.  His terrible angle of shoulders,
her insistence, sham of control, as what couldn’t be cured or fed
turns wasting from a bowl.  She serves him as mother, as wife,
forced to bear up his frame, collapsed.  Stand up. You can do it.
His trying to do what she asked.

BREATH THEY COULDN’T

BREATH THEY COULDN’T catch, motion that fell
as a run of shadow on their window
folded into one wish.  Time—what was that—
flung over mountains where sun could blink and waver it off.
Clouds muscled in to not let them see the bald sky lying.
The knife-cold privacy exposed a man, and from his window
no motion, just New England birch, stripped limbs in late light.

Author: Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan is the author of six poetry collections, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest, winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. Her previous collections include Shadow-feast, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the New Issues Green Rose Award; The Us, named a must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book; the sequel Ay; and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays.

Her poems have been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries; The Book of Irish American Poetry, 18th Century to Present; The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins; and The Eloquent Poem:128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making. She serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is the founding director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.

Plume: Issue #76 November 2017