Cathedral

I love the freezing stone of you

beyond the rain, your bone damp

raising bristles on my flesh

 

I only know who they named

you after, eight hundred vaulted

years of grey, you waited for me

 

Why should you submit to what

they built you for, when my voice

echoes deep into your tombs

 

Loom over me, pull me inside

you again, they laid all your lovers

to rot within your walls 

 

Ring out for me, I’ll be breath

in your dead structure, the only

ghost you’re haunting back

 

Why should we submit to what

they built us for

 ————————————- my hot blood

thumps your every hollow cave

*

Biography

Aoife Riach is a queer feminist witch with an MA in Gender & Women’s studies and a postgrad certificate in Sexuality & Sexual Health Education. She has worked as a writer for BUST magazine in NYC and her poetry has been published by College Green Journal, Nothing Substantial, Sonder, Channel, Impossible Archetype and other magazines. She was a finalist in the 2019 Intervarsity Poetry Slam and was a 2019 Irish Writers Centre Young Writer Delegate. Her poem “Vancouver” was chosen for Hungering, the latest curation of the Poetry Jukebox currently installed at EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin.