Poems by Katie Donovan

Millefeuille


Many petalling into herself
my daughter has enough
to be contending with -
but men in offices
plot to woo her distrust:
you are not a flower
they tell her, you are hairy,
dirty, you have flesh
in the wrong places;
you are a vehicle 
we need to overhaul:
too slow, too dull;  
not shiny, not cool 
– and you smell.

They need their wages -
who will pay? Me,
with the small money
I give her – that’s their hope.
Meanwhile they cajole a model
to do their work – bamboozling
my girl to buy the lying layers
she does not need.
She is already
a vision of beauty,
rumpled in her fleecy pjs.

The model girl
will get her cut
of what her bosses extort
from my pocket.
Hence her glazed look
of  having swallowed
a smug secret.  
She is the traitor cow
who is allowed to live
if she will lure her sisters
up the plank 
to the abbatoir.





Familiar


Nine thousand years ago
a man – or what passed then
as human – preferred 
to be interred with his. 
We have the bones.
Was it a lynx,
all feathery ears and grace?
or a fishing cat,
tabby and fierce?

Now some sad boy
is wondering 
how to torture
a ginger tom, 
how to trap and burn
a mother tortoiseshell.
Hell to pay
for any black feline.

My son whimpers, 
fever simmers.
Beside him curls
his familiar - 
once a kitten
cupped in his hand -
now, long and sleek,
claws - sharp as a snow leopard’s -
sheathed. Five years
they’ve shared,
loyal as brothers.

From the tufted throat:
the throttle of a purr.
From my red-cheeked son:
the silence of tears, drying up.

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Katie Donovan was educated at Trinity College Dublin and The University of California at Berkeley. She has published four books of poetry, all with Bloodaxe Books: Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997), Day of the Dead (2002) and Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010), with a new collection, Off Duty, due from Bloodaxe in 2016. Born in 1962, she spent her childhood on a farm in Co. Wexford before moving to Dun Laoghaire, a suburb of Dublin where she still lives. She has worked as a journalist with The Irish Times, and a Creative Writing Teacher at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (in Dun Laoghaire). She is an Amatsu (osteopathic therapy) practitioner and the mother of two children, Phoebe and Felix. Her work has been widely anthologised, most recently in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Peggy O’Brien, and in Bloodaxe's Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley. She is the author of Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? (Raven Arts Press, 1988), and has co-edited two anthologies, Dublines (with Brendan Kennelly), published by Bloodaxe Books in 1996, and Ireland's Women: Writings Past and Present (with A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly), published by Kyle Cathie (Britain) and Gill and Macmillan (Ireland) in 1994.
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Weblinks:
​http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/21182/30/Katie-Donovan
https://poethead.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/poems-from-off-duty-by-katie-donovan/

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