Dinner for Anarchists

We are Christmas cracker royalty
in pretty paper crowns
and Penneys jumpers,

wielding our disposable youths
like weapons of defence or offence,
depending on how much we’ve had to drink,
and why we’re drinking:

to forget why we’re afraid
when our fathers raise their voices,
or why we’re afraid
when they no longer can.

We drink vodka out of
plastic wine glasses,
Bing Crosby the soundtrack to our adulthood.

And when the sun tells us that
she doesn’t care where we go,
but we can’t stay here,

we end up picking
bits of gravel from our hands and knees,
blessing this new city with our blood;

this city that has adopted
a family of problem children
and black sheep.

In Shades of Blue

In December
the sun sets at four in the afternoon,
and if the wine is mulled
then this melancholy is festive.

In Christmas jumpers
thrown on over tiny dresses,
we make Twelve Pubs a pilgrimage

and turn carols into drinking songs –
sleigh bell laments
to a year unwisely spent.

With the help of spiced rum and Michael Bublé,
we might forget the names of those
magnificent, beautiful bastards
we still love with all our crooked, savage hearts.

Probably not,
but something about the season
feels like it might be miraculous.

Later, we step out into
the early gloaming
with more liquor in our bodies
than blood.

With our shoes in our hands,
and holding each other up,
Christmas lights guide us home.

Limerick’s Wishing Tree

There used to be a tree
that children would stuff
every copper they could scrape together into,
absolutely sure that the hard-earned payment
would grant them a wish.

The other day,
I found out that that tree had died,
and I have to wonder
if it was because it stopped being able to cope
with all the unfulfillable hopes:

their parents brought back to them from the brink;
a real home for the first time in his life;
somewhere Santy will be able to find her.

Aimee Godfrey is a disabled undergraduate student at NUI Galway, but lives in Limerick. Her poetry focuses primarily on themes surrounding disability and its impact on other subjects.