Three poems by Eileen Hennessy

ABOUT MAKING MY HOME

About making my home
smaller and clearer:

I am past caring for your
expectations.

I’m rediscovering my secrets,
changing my views on pissers
in the streets. Have stopped
dressing for your
history, being a victim
of your benevolence.

Now that I’ve drawn a final
line under my vanishing act,
I bequeath to you the chance
to fold my clothes left
hanging on the line.

 

---

FAMILY LOVE IS

Masked agent of seduction
Storm of cold dreams

Sadness in a black coat,
hundreds of handkerchiefs

Stoned souls spent, stifled
in a sun-scorched fade-out

---

GPS

Behind the door
the blue room containing
waxen statues, boxed beads,
the world of things in which
we move and are.

Beneath our skin
the smoke of the soul.

Beyond the horizon
the vast machine
of the shadows we cast
in our search for our lost center,
the days of our future past,
our points of return
to shimmering bliss.

---

About the author:

Eileen Hennessy’s poems and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals. Her two book-length collections of poems are This Country of Gale-force Winds, published by NYQ Books in 2011, and Places Where We Have Lived Forever, published by Off The Park Press in 2015. She is a translator of legal and commercial documentation and books on art history into English from several other West European languages, and teaches  in the translation studies program at New York University.