Mary Mulholland: Is this where it begins?

Photograph by kind permission of Xavier Bonfill

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Mary Mulholland is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in magazines like Magma, Poetry News, Under the Radar, Stand, Mslexia, and Aesthetica. She has an MA in Poetry from the Newcastle Poetry School and is the author of two pamphlets, what the sheep taught me and the elimination game. Mulholland founded Red Door Poets and is co-founder and editor of The Alchemy Spoon, a poetry magazine that especially welcomes writers who came to poetry after other careers. She has also worked as a journalist and a psychotherapist, and she offers readings, runs workshops, and edits manuscripts. Her poems have won and been placed in many competitions. Mulholland has a debut collection forthcoming from Nine Arches in 2026.

Sudeep Sen, Poetry & International Editor

Where to start a story of migration and loss
after Joy Harjo

I was fourteen, my mother at the sink, fingers stained from peeling carrots as she sang, O Mein Papa, though her father, Portuguese by birth, was a British barrister. And the sepsis that glowed him orange and took him, so young, so quick.
No, this isn’t where it starts.

Afternoons of listening to my mother’s stories of British Guiana, all the boys at her feet: Jack, Arlindo and John queueing to be her beau; people bowing as if her father was a king.
Not here either.

The singsong shout of my mother and sisters at family parties, all talking at once as if silence was dirty. I sat afraid to open my mouth, my voice so different; history theirs alone to frame.
This is not the right place.

My mother’s family had migration in its bones. We kept moving to wherever there was war. Every home had a hidden shrine with her demigod father inside.
No, not here.

I studied law, to be like my grandfather. My mother said I could never be like him. He was brilliant, the voice of a people. I was mortal and shy.
Is this where it begins?

Or does the story start when I pick up my pen to tap his heartbeat back to life, to trust in this meeting place where the past will seep through the pores of my skin?
Yes, here.

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within a dark wood the straightway was lost
Dante Alighieri

from the sky it’s a broccoli field, and in this land four-fifths tree my family made their home. here so much lies undiscovered it’s easy to hide beneath a canopy of a thousand species, their green broken only by rivers, silvering a forest of hearts: purpleheart, greenheart, spiny fiddleheart, and palms that walk by themselves, shift-shape, and the towering silk-cotton devil tree, one hundred years to reach maturity, the jumbie tree that houses bad spirits, is felled only by the mad, bad or brave for canoes, cricket bats, coffins, and my family looking back over their shoulders, trying to unsew their own shadows.

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harpy

child of wind-spirit
hound of zeus
dispatched to snatch
the living
sudden, mysterious

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Sweet

In the spider caves
a woman eight thousand years old

harvests comb from a tree –
the tears of the sun god promise

a honeyed life & sweet death
& a taste of what the bees eat

but sugarcane has a uniform flavour
& the reed that gives honey without bees

made addicts of the world.
People crave it like poison, call it

sweet, call it perfume, white gold,
along the tasselled banks of the Demerara

rose-scented flowers to stuff pillows,
sword-shaped leaves.

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invisible ink*

a line across the page divides sky
& sea the way a child doesn’t know

horizons are illusions
a father’s moustache traced

in ink ten hundred years –
a mother’s past drawn

in lemon juice on paper
held too close to fire –

only a fragment remains –
like frankincense

razed to the ground
leaves something

in the air until its roots
yield new life

*Invisible Ink was first published in the Stand Magazine. All poems published here are forthcoming in The Dodo Stories (Nine Arches Press)