‘Prayer to Saint Monica’ by Isobel O’Hare

I’m sitting in a café where two women are discussing
their long friendship, their alcoholism, their need for non-

codependent coping mechanisms, and I want to be their friend,
but I also don’t want to be a weirdo.

the landscape shifts so suddenly.
lightning strikes the top of the mountain and burns it bald.

I shine a flashlight down the dark road
to warn off the skunks, catch their eyes in the glow.

when I was a child, I heard my mother crying at night.
I wasn’t supposed to know about it.

when I was a child, my father held my mother by the throat
and said, ‘If I have to stay married to you any longer, I will kill you.’

the mountains so pink they look like slabs
of rare beef discarded by a giant

while the wind blows leaves to the ground like dust
from a tabletop.

even this landscape is a domestic nightmare.

the first time my mother saw her father drunk,
she thought it was funny. she was the youngest

of an Irish Catholic eight and she hadn’t yet learned.
always falling to a different surface.

this time to a field that smells of chilies.
this time to a mound of sand white as salt

that I want to fist into my mouth.
the doorway of my house is framed by moths

and daddies-longlegs. the sun sets in the eyes
of a chatty magpie. all these gentle formations.

does it matter that we play such a beautiful game?

From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017

About the Author
Isobel O’Hare is a Pushcart-nominated poet and essayist who has dual Irish and American citizenship. She is the author of the chapbooks Wild Materials and The Garden Inside Her. Two of her poems appeared in the anthology A Shadow Map, published in 2017 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press.