Killarney — Blackbird Archive

← v18n2, Fall 2019

I lied I was a local

but the red deer knew.

When you’re given anything

in the deep of night

you must take it or leave

even the gift’s memory

to liquid chill sleep.

Leaving gives headache,

burn at the sides of eyes.

I was never from Killarney.

Not even my library card

could teach me honesty.

I was sharpening

a bone to pick the lock

of the library where brave

sinners lived long after

finishing, vivid in rhythm

or figure while I sank

in the bog of my lie,

shaped to its mold

like cold porridge,

petrified by passage

of time. At the lake,

deer waited for the ancient

elk with its ghastly gray

skull, with its rock-like

rack, to rise; waited,

milk-minds behind coal

eyes, for me to find

my true tongue,

ears twitching to catch

—if ever—

its first trim

syllable.

identity place folklore

Kathleen Winter

Kathleen Winter is the author of two poetry collections: I will not kick my friends (Elixir, 2018), which won the Elixir Press Poetry Prize; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir, 2012), winner of the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in AGNI , The New Republic , The New Statesman , and Tin House . She has received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Brown Foundation at Dora Maar House, James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the 2016 Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2015 Ralph Johnston Memorial Fellowship at the University of Texas’s Dobie Paisano Ranch, and the 2014 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize. She teaches at Sonoma State University in Northern California. Photo by Greg Campbell