Maureen O’Leary

Issue One

Fire Season

We sip your bones through our lips mouth breathing

We take our Eucharist through the lungs these days

Your body and your blood

Suffered by a fire impossible to conceive

You rolled into yourself

Spine skin fur hoof claw

Fingernails teeth eyelashes

A memory of being a cub with other cubs

In a burrow last spring

Or dropped from womb to ground splat

On spindly legs that were solid once the blood flowed

Or wings that finally feathered and flew

Or emerged from a chrysalis withered and shrunk until they bloomed

Or of a child’s hand in yours

Your child’s hand

Your child’s heartbeat

I tasted them all in the back of my throat

My own lungs grieving for yours that I was breathing,

About Maureen O'Leary
As Maureen O’Leary, I am the author of the urban fantasy novel The Arrow (Geminid Press). My adult literary novel The Ghost Daughter released through Coffeetown Press in July 2016.