Liz Houchin is an Irish poet from Dublin. She is currently the Poetry Ireland poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, researching concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Her first chapbook ‘Anatomy of a Honey girl (poems for tired women)’ was published in December 2021 by Southword. Her work is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland has appeared in several anthologies and journals, including The Stinging Fly, The Scotsman, Banshee and iamb.

***

I let you down

gently

like haddock into hot oil

standing back
in case you spat.

First Place in East Ridge Review’s Three Notch’d Road Poetry Contest

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The caregiver

Leaving her house
alone she met
a young wren
flat on the path
onyx eye
pert beak
splayed wing
arranged
as if for pressing
between sheets
of blotting paper
a feathered bloom
for winter pleasure
she was so grateful
it could not be saved

First published in Anatomy of a Honey girl (poems for tired women)

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cast off

When we cast on, years ago, knitting our love sweater
we followed our own pattern, starting with a slipknot
new needles click clacking as we found our rhythm
uneven at first, our threads pulled a little tight in places
—but too fine a gauge to worry about strangulation—
we counted stitches in twos, like heartbeats, watching
lines of plain settle smooth into our unthinking centre

automatedlovelives
machinedmonotony
perfectparallelpair

But there it was: a peephole, there, in line seventeen.
Who was counting after all this time? Me, I never stopped.
I wonder if you had already noticed the dropped stitch,
untethered, a loose loop ready to unravel us all the way
and perhaps you let it drop to allow some other’s light
illuminate your exit while I fumbled with a crochet hook
to ladder us back up again to make us look like new.

First published in Anatomy of a Honey girl (poems for tired women)

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Epitaph

I would like to be remembered for my forearms.
I noticed them the other day
reflected in the glass of a photo:
Jimi Hendrix by Linda McCartney.

I had my sleeves pushed up
—summer on a day trip to Glasgow—
and I thought they could with ease
have appeared in one of her photos

Perhaps not the one of Twiggy
(or Aretha or Yoko)
but maybe the one of Janis Joplin waving
an empty bottle of Southern Comfort at the camera

My forearms could have slipped in there
without someone pointing and screaming.

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