Netta, Go Home

at Loch Staonaig, where the fairies roam free

The wind was sharp that day,
sea-spray licked the anxious yews.
When you cut into the turf with a bread knife—
did it wretch and heave in protest?

The faint blue light that
hovered above your naked form
winked at the men who found you
half-burrowed in the side of the fairy mound.

Mistaken for baobhan sith, perhaps
your black robe
a crick in the neck, your bruised crucifix
a noose—they all thought you so very strange
and wild in all the wrong ways.

Or perhaps not mistaken at all;
a terrible case of healing and the hollowed-out
moor, an elf-shot for the mortal girl
who dared challenge the unseen, dared
dig at the sacred ground with broken fingernails.

St. Columba would have protested your arrival
on the tiny island, banished you,
Crowley’s milk-maid, with no calves to eat
or cream to curdle

In this thin place you fasted
and fainted, you felled the ancient yew
with your unkempt hair and handmade cloaks
the island had to do something about you, Netta.
It wasn’t sorry then,
and it isn’t sorry now.

Pantoum at Gurness

From the sky the Broch is a cross-section of a brain
Spilling out onto bogland
But up close, the stones speak of home;
Oil lamps and woollen blankets

Spilling out onto bogland
The Broch is a placental beckoning, its
Oil lamps and woollen blankets
Its peat and its pelts a stolen comfort

The Broch quivers, mortar stealing it to the wind
From the sky the Broch is a cross-section of a brain
Something ancient and unknowable
But up close, the stones speak of home

Half Fish, Half Flesh

“We’ve seen it! What? Why that Mermaid! The mischief you have! Where? What is it? It’s twin
sister to the deucedest looking thing imaginable—half fish, half flesh; and ‘taken by and large,’
the most odd of all oddities earth or sea has ever produced.” New York Sun (Aug 5, 1842)

In the British Museum I sought what was holy—
the hall of gilded corpses and stolen glory,
scanned the cabinets for any indication of the divine,
a glimpse of royal blood sculpted in plaster and limestone.

But Nefertiti did not slumber in those echoing,
frantic halls— their ceilings tall as tombs,
the marble columns clasped around
this static performance, a petrified circus
of agony
and displacement.

No—I did not find her; the Queen
of my father’s tattered National Geographic Magazines
but instead stumbled into abject longing
a hideous miracle, wide-eyed and reaching towards me.

Leathery wonder, salt-stretched skin
stitched crudely to a fin, scales sloughed off.
A look of confusion etched on her sweet, sleeping face, I wonder
would she crumble like bone
or could I wield her beauty like an iron rod
against the thick glass of these cages?