Catherine Kelly: 'There, there'

St Brigid, when she was making the maps,
threw a scarf that covered the whole world

in consecrated ground now trembling for new foundations.
From the air, from the land, roaming surveillance

and metal detection. Somewhere between the birdsong and the time spent
something real. Between the tissue and the document

tanned and straining, letting some image of a backstreet,
some monument to a soldier, fall through the hairline

fracture, some spool of information missing but doing its best
impression of a whole. We all have

an ‘I’ like a thumb in our mouths. I will/you
will/all of us will have to bear these duds of an anti-music

music, the way you have to start to talk again about being
watched, and being fooled, and being discarded

Catherine Kelly is a second year PhD student at KCL, studying lesbian feminist literary networks. Her writing can be found in the Cardiff Review, the Dublin Review of Books and Datableed.