Waiting For My Clothes

This stumbled Dead Beat's way - Young Irish Poet dangerously making waves

Blurb from Billy Collins: "What is remarkable about Leanne O'Sullivan is not that she is so young--how many of us reach 20 without attempting a poem?--but that she dares to write about exactly what it is to be young. A teenage Virgil, she guides us down some of the more hellish corridors of adolescence with a voice that is strong and true. For that alone, she deserves our full attention."

A Map of the World

I remember this woman who'd sit

for hours in the TV room, staring through

the window at the days and nights,

her winged arm hanging over the sill

as if she were in a car travelling

at a great speed. Once, after I was

forbidden to walk on the grass,

I sat beside her in a shaft of sunlight

as she told me how she had loved

the silk shawl of her garden back home,

walking barefoot there at night. T

hen she took my hand in hers, the way

you would touch a flower, and slowly

traced each line of my life,

her fingers moving upwards like blood

from my vein, to the hollows of love

in my palm. I felt myself come alive

with her touch, as if continents were

pulling together inside me, the core fluid

with tremendous magma. My hand,

a landscape of earth; I walked it,

caressed the map which felt

like birth, death, heaven on earth,

the heat of hell, the blue stems

like labyrinths under a valley of flesh.

I was the ocean orbiting the shore,

a drowned man kissing the land,

surrounded by that strange smell of air.

How to move, I was not sure, my feet

spread on the ground like roots.

I leaned forward to kiss this woman's eye

and stood up, taking my first step towards

something that would survive me.