losing our grip on purpose

By Eoin Flannery

When we meet again –
though not apart that
long –
you are thinner.

It is as if anxiety has peeled
back layers, shaved years,
with each stressed heartbeat
back to here.

Like a river looking
for its source,
your eyes cannot settle,
they turn
against the strange currents
of the familiar.

Too many hands try to hold
yours in place,
they reach out
to cradle your fear.

Weeks later, leaving the city,
heading south, I remember
a sweltering riverbank and can
feel the cool folds
of a yellow dress.

You are held in a photograph
under the shade of a linden
tree, and there are motes of reflected
river light eclipsing my memory.

Eoin Flannery is a writer and critic based in Limerick, Ireland, where he is Associate Professor of English Literature at Mary Immaculate College. He has published 12 books of literary and cultural criticism. His poetry has appeared in The Galway Review; Prairie Home Magazine and Vita and the Woolf Literary and Arts Journal, and is forthcoming in The City View; The Red Ogre Review; Inkfish Magazine and The Hog River Press. He is working on a collection of poems entitled, Unshadow.