SP Mulroy
The thresher like a wicked god calls children to its mouth,
gnashing locust teeth to taste the fingers in the grain.
What passes through the graveyard gate can never walk back out.
Beneath the feet of working men, the horses and the plow,
the plundered land, a virgin sword that hungers for a stain.
The thresher like a wicked god calls children to its mouth.
The dread machine sends bodies to the grass without a sound,
Their small hands, curious, erupting blood from severed veins.
What passes through the graveyard gate can never come back out
and must instead lie cold and still beneath the winter ground,
and listen to the crickets making love in summer rain.
The thresher like a wicked god calls children to its mouth
and whispers to them like a kindly ghost, Come closer now.
I’ll tell you of the field where Abel felt the knife of Cain.
What passes through the graveyard gate can never walk back out,
but on the other side it’s said that paradise is found,
and while it waits inside the barn, it listens for their names.
The thresher like a wicked god calls children to its mouth.
What passes through the graveyard gate can never walk back out.
Writer, actor, multi-disciplinary artist, and faggotry hauntologist Sean Patrick Mulroy is an internationally recognized poet and performer. An award-winning professor, Mulroy recently completed an international tour of Europe and SWANA in support of his debut poetry collection, Hated for the Gods (Button Poetry, 2023). A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, 2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project in Orlando Florida, winner of the 2019 Margaret Reid Prize, and winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mulroy’s work has appeared in The Journal, Assaracus, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, among many other publications. Born and raised in the American South, Sean has since lived and worked all over the world, in over 25 countries on 4 continents. At present, he lives in NYC.