Tracy Gaughan lives in Galway. A former poetry editor at The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, Tracy holds an MA in International Literatures from the University of Galway and is the recipient of two Arts Council Awards. Her chapbook, What it Costs, won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Prize in 2023. More information about her work can be found on her website.

 

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Mother Jones’ Colorado Prison Blues

 

Alone in a dark cellar under the courthouse,

her eyes swam in a broken dish of tea. Her limbs

ached with the misery of raising hell. They said

she couldn’t go South, but her shoes were addressed

 

to Colorado, and she marched to the black quarries

of America, defending mill-racked bodies dreaming

of sleep; coal-dusted spirits haunting the pits of their

fathers, mining money for the monied.

 

Copper, steel and culm stack were the elixir of rebellion.

Creekbed, road and junction, where she fought for liberty.

A revenant in black gauze, rebuffing the rifle,

sleeping in her clothes on dark nights in woods

and barns, raising her voice for the region's miners,

 

lowering tariffs for peons and widows perjuring

themselves for scraps. Mother of God, she was.

She hoisted the flag of hope, and thousands followed,

riding the railroad north, east and west in a whirl

of whistling bullets. She climbed up out of Blackwater,

 

found herself, eighty years later, in a cold place

with a young girl’s face in a saucer of tea.

Fighting off sewer rats with a beer bottle.

Fighting like hell, until she got to heaven.

 

 

A Rooftop in Bühl

 

The first time my skin burns in Europe,

You spread Greek yoghurt on my neck

You make a breakfast of cut strawberries,

In your orange sweater & corduroys, stack

Smoked cheese, rye loaf & black forest ham

Onto a salver and carry it up to the roof.

My fingers stick inside your belt, and together

We push the fire door out into August.

We sip coffee under a make-do awning

Of white cotton sheets & sisal string, that we

Can use again, to coax our clematis, blue

And perennial as the sky, nicked here and there

With contrails, lingering as we do, over ourselves.

From here, I can see tomorrow on the turret

At Windeck Castle, where your clover-soft lips

Don’t say, Come with me, but I’ll be back.

That impossible bottle we slip into, with its

Half-timber houses and flowers in the Linden,

Crying when you leave like the Bühlot for Berlin,

And take my photograph with you instead.

Beyond the roof, labourers lie in a vineyard

And wait for the forgiveness of rain that might

Not come. You re-find my neck and say I smell

Off. I wonder if they feel it, those berries, bleeding

In the heat.