Sean Patrick Mulroy

         Each time I came to visit him beside the riverbed,
he clapped his hooves together in wet pleasure,
and the fish that shivered through his hulking shape
                           shone silver bright as coins.

We’re friends, he told me, in a voice as dank and frigid
as a well, and since we’re friends, would you mind
bringing me a few things from the house?

                                                                                               I did not mind.
Each thing I brought him, he devoured,
                          his jaws gnashing like a waterfall,
and always he demanded, more, more. Always, more.

Then one day, he just wandered off,
        although I loved him
and I served him faithfully,

and gave him everything he asked for:

                  honeycomb and lavender;
a lamb’s ear and a goose’s heart;
        my father’s ring;
my mother’s favorite dress;
a shorn lock of my sister’s hair;
my sister

Bio

Writer and multi-disciplinary artist SP Mulroy (he/they) is an internationally recognized poet, performer, and award-winning professor. Mulroy has given lectures on history, poetry, politics, and queer rights, as well as readings of creative work in bars, museums, schools, embassies, theater festivals, and underground clubs on 4 continents, in over 30 countries. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, 2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida, recipient of the 2019 Margaret Reid Prize For Formal Verse, winner of the 2015 Christopher Hewitt Award, and winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mulroy’s work has appeared in The Journal, Assaracus, The New York Times, Peach Fuzz Magazine, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Filling Station, Radical Faerie Digest (rfd), and Muzzle, among several others. Mulroy’s debut poetry collection, Hated for the Gods, was published by Button Poetry in 2023. Born and raised in the American South, he presently lives in NYC.