BY Deirdre O’Connor

“1849,

Galway City, Ireland,

Redmond Molloy, Aged 28: Being Of A Party Who Stole Eleven Bags of Meal From On Board

A Boat That Was Conveying A Cargo of Meal From Galway to Round Stone The Property The

Vice Guardians Galway Poor Law Union (NB. Irish Famine)”

from the Irish Prison Registers, 1790-1924

Only yesterday I discovered my great-

great grandfather hijacked a boat for cornmeal

during the famine, steered it toward what must have been

the hovel where he lived, islanded in the Atlantic,

and was later sentenced to be hanged.

Somehow, he got off, and that’s the turn

to here: coffee, a/c, peonies in vases,

my white body in pajamas choosing not

to watch the news, instead to play

with languish, language, anguish, ambush –

Deirdre O’Connor is the author of two books of poems, most recently The Cupped Field, which received the 2018 Able Muse Book Award. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets.