In other words

The car was a frosted red ornament,
Mother rose early to start the engine,
boil kettles, pour warm water on the windows,

ice cracked, and the car burst into hum.
In the backseat, I fogged the glass,
refusing to look at my sisters waving me off.

Alone at the school gates, I pulled my socks up,
smoothed the pleats on my stiff, grey pinafore,
hurried by the wall where big boys loomed.

Nobody told me what I was doing there
or how long I’d have to stay. Nothing made sense:
who to be without my sisters, the alphabet.

I couldn’t say L without MNOP or understand
how separate things might sometimes form a whole,
that letters lived both inside and outside of words.

Nobody told me there were two languages,
or they did, and I didn’t know what language meant.
Suddenly, there were two words for everything—

window & fuinneog, door & doras, Alvy & Ailbhe.
All winter, the first name shook me from sleep,
and in the car, I slipped the new name over my head.

Alvy Carragher is an Irish poet based in Toronto. She grew up in Galway and Tipperary and has since lived in Louisiana, Dublin, and South Korea before moving to Canada in 2018. She’s published two books of poetry: The men I keep under my bed (2021, Salmon), and Falling in love with broken things (2016, Salmon). Her children’s novel, The Cantankerous Molly Darling (2019, Chicken House), won several reader’s choice awards in Irish schools. Her work has been archived by the National Poetry Archive and she’s currently working on her third full-length poetry book with the support of the Irish Arts Council’s Literature Bursary Award.