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Kate Caoimhe Arthur
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the poet
Though Kate Caoimhe Arthur lives now in Co. Down, Ireland, she spent several years in England's Cambridgeshire fens. There, she won the Fenland Poet Laureate Award in 2017, collaborated with fine art printmaker Iona Howard, and did a lot of fen walking with Meg the dog. Kate's work has featured in The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly, Blackbox Manifold and After..., and in 2023, she won the Spelt Magazine Poetry Competition. Kate is currently working on her debut collection.
the poems
MOTHER ...
After the Studio Morison installation
MOTHER ... at Wicken Fen (2020)
I am coming back inside / you the hayrick oikos I’ve been looking for /
I know there are some changes I should make / need stilts now to lift these
hems off the hostile earth / my basal body temperature dropped as my skin
puckered up / I felt my skin ripple to a sheen in its tansy beetle phase / I
made for the haywalls but the light fell on my oil-spill flanks / I knew myself
reflected in the eye of a bird / braced and pushed files of keratin / -like needles
along my back and sides / grew down and feather fold over fold / I flew up to
a rafter near your apse mother / but all I could taste in my throat was beetles
beetles / in my hunger I could feel my leg muscles extending / my claws
contracting into nubby pads / I didn’t know what I was any more / but my lips
wrenched back so my face was all teeth / at least part of me is shadow and
needs to be dragged / I will be ready when the next one comes through
Bewildered Mothers
like a nuclear facility in a suburban zone
to an Artificial Intelligence operated drone
is the nutrient-dense squalene-rich liver
of the Pacific Great White Sleeper
tucked tenderly by its other vital organs
behind the plate-glass reflection
sheening a baby-plump underbelly
to the taste of an orca, specifically
the Flat-Toothed Ecotype or
the North Pacific Offshore
these same Killer Whales who can pinpoint
the precise location to disjoint
unctuous purple lozenges
slow-releasing of potency
are those bewildered mothers
propelled through coastal waters
say, off San Juan Island,
Washington, pushing and
holding aloft its dead baby
regardless of the state of decay
for seventeen days bearing the carcass
offering the ocean a chance to witness
squint
I entered the cell slowly and delicately cringing to fit
the space this action accorded with a version of myself
I admired 4ft x 6ft subfusc but for a cross
shaped slit through which meaty drops of candle flame
or is it god steal either way I lap it up
opposite a puckered flap through which food comes
and shit goes I always wanted to inhabit
another body and now here I am
a woman constantly on the edge
when the host is held to my tongue I swoon it burns
through my body licking at the tips of my numb limbs
they say I tether the church to the earth on which it stands
Publishing credits
MOTHER ... : After... (Dec 8th 2022)
Bewildered Mothers / squint: exclusive first publication by iamb