Our Christmas Turkey

was a nine-pounder
from Grandad Mick in Longford,
whose right leg was severed
in a motorcycle crash.

Plucked from the back
of the green post van,
its box wrapped in a skin
of brown paper tied with string—
his yearly gift heralded Christmas.

Propped up by prosthesis,
he leaned on his cane and hobbled
all the way to the post office
to send us the fattest turkey in Ireland.

It travelled two hundred miles south
to our house, where it hung
on a ceiling hook for days,
tickling me with devilment
until, to satisfy my itch

I unhooked it, gripped its torso
under my right arm like bagpipes,
propped up its flaccid broken neck
and began the chase around the kitchen.

My younger sister screamed
at the white skin, dangling limbs and dark,
lifeless eyes behind her, the cold bare flesh
of the dead turkey closing in
as I embraced the ugliness of death
with two small arms.

Faye Boland won the Robert Leslie Boland Prize, 2018, and the Hanna Greally International Literary Award, 2017. She placed third in the Bere Island poetry competition, 2024. Her chapbook Fishing For Tea was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry chapbook competition, 2024, and she was highly commended in the Desmond O’ Grady competition, 2019. Her first poetry collection Peripheral was published in September, 2018 by The Manuscript Publisher.