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14th Anniversary Edition, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five Nov-Dec 2023.
On the Night Louise Gluck Died I Reread Averno, poem by Maeve McKenna.
On the Night Louise Gluck Died
I Reread Averno
after Averno, by Louise Gluck
I am seconds away from posting All Hallows.
Maybe she’d prefer Averno? It’s too late.
Bombs reign down on Gaza.
In the Negev Desert party-goers dance on sand the tone of dying.
In Bethlehem there is no Mary with Three Wise Kings
and a living baby.
It’s too late to post — all the chairs in the world won’t help you —
and this is true, because I’m sitting here,
in this all-world death.
In her poems she was ready, she said —
you have to prepare.
I remember, for now, the word for chair.
© Maeve McKenna
Maeve McKenna lives in Sligo, Ireland. Her work has been placed in several international poetry competitions and published widely, including Mslexia, Rattle, Banshee, The Stony Thursday Book and Live Encounters. She was one of three finalists in the Eavan Boland Mentorship Award 2020. She was part of a collaboration with three poets which won the Dreich Alliance Pamphlet Competition, 2021. Her debut pamphlet, A Dedication to Drowning, was published in February 2022. Body as a Home for This Darkness, a second pamphlet was published in September 2023. Maeve is currently a MA student of Poetry at Queens University, Belfast.