Prop
Little Edie Bouvier Beale
Case in hand, she reaches the door
before Mother wails for something.
She stares hard at the world before her:
there is nothing she wants more; to sing
its repertoire under a new sky,
why, the sun is her own follow spot…
What are you playing at, Edie?
She has opened the door this time
but she can’t leave without her fur,
glamor the world will understand.
Suitably dressed, still her strides decline
the shining doorway, an empty space
for the house to settle back into.
She looks around. Cats all gone. Edie?
I’ll die, I’ll just die. She awaits
silence, lifts her case, finds it empty.
Mark Ward is the author of the chapbooks, Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020) and a full-length collection, Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2022). He was the Poet Laureate for Glitterwolf and his poems have been featured in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Boyne Berries, Skylight47, The Honest Ulsterman, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, Softblow and many more, as well as anthologies, the most recent of which is Hit Points: An Anthology of Video Game Poetry, forthcoming in 2021. He was Highly Commended in the 2019 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and in 2020 he was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. He has read his poetry on RTÉ Radio 1 and Lyric FM. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its fourth year.