Dangerously Making Waves

This stumbled Howl's way -

Young Irish Poet dangerously making waves

Blurb from Billy Collins: "What is remarkable about Leanne O'Sullivan is not that she is so young--how many of us reach 20 without attempting a poem?--but that she dares to write about exactly what it is to be young. A teenage Virgil, she guides us down some of the more hellish corridors of adolescence with a voice that is strong and true. For that alone, she deserves our full attention."

A Map of the World

I remember this woman
who'd sit for hours in the TV room,
staring through the window at the days
and nights, her winged arm hanging over the sill as if she were in a car travelling at a great speed. Once, after I was forbidden to walk on the grass, I sat beside her in a shaft of sunlight as she told me how she had loved the silk shawl of her garden back home, walking barefoot there at night. Then she took my hand in hers, the way you would touch a flower, and slowly traced each line of my life, her fingers moving upwards like blood from my vein, to the hollows of love in my palm. I felt myself come alive with her touch, as if continents were pulling together inside me, the core fluid with tremendous magma. My hand, a landscape of earth; I walked it, caressed the map which felt like birth, death, heaven on earth, the heat of hell, the blue stems like labyrinths under a valley of flesh. I was the ocean orbiting the shore, a drowned man kissing the land, surrounded by that strange smell of air. How to move, I was not sure, my feet spread on the ground like roots. I leaned forward to kiss this woman's eye and stood up, taking my first step towards something that would survive me.