She slept above the creamery, her dreams

rising into the neck of Dublin’s bottle

until she herself slowly separated

out of the thin milk of a dead mother.

She told me her father did not drink

though the chill of iron tankards ruled his hand

as he doled out love, cheating his daughter

by a farthing’s weight for every quart,

ladling on the beatings like a man

dumping the spoils into a stone gutter.

Once he shattered her eardrum, then left

for Liverpool. She, unaccountably, followed,

the harsh buzz of his constant fault-finding

planted permanently inside her skull,

badgering her across a greased Atlantic.

–Richard Broderick (for Evelyn Case Hassard)