The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For August, we are delighted to publish new work by Shauna Gilligan.‘Self-Butchery in Two Parts’ is published today with another new poem to follow on Sunday.

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Self-Butchery In Two Parts                   

 

(I)       A woman initiates her own butchery

 

when she whispers ‘It’s just too much.’

Her thighs inside dark trousers are sticky, yet again.

 

Firstly, realise: Unacceptable levels of blood are present.

 

When she stands to leave the doctor’s office she

turns away from the blooming red stain

she’s just left on the worn chair.

 

Secondly, admit: Your body has failed you.

 

She remembers how she once lived for the throb

and the angry creativity before

the release of bleeding.

 

Thirdly, resign: Your womb no longer functions, as it should.

 

She knows a modern woman

should not and need not tolerate

constant flooding, the insistence of blood.

 

(II)        She opens her legs for healing

 

and lies gowned and unconscious

when the masked surgeon approaches

 

a burning stick held aloft,

the cure of fire in his steady hands,

the certainty of knowledge behind him.

 

The after-weeping he promised arrives

in pretty yellows, browns,

and pale pinks flowing for ten weeks.

 

Afterwards she aches so much for

the mud-red mess of menstruation

she sobs every night onto her white pillow.

 

Shauna Gilligan is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre who facilitates creative writing in community and prison settings. Her writing has been widely published and she has received numerous awards for writing including the Cecil Day Lewis Literary Bursary for Literature (2015) and a Creative Ireland Grant (2021). Recently awarded a Brigid 1500 Grant (Kildare Co. Co.), she co-edited the anthology of writing and visual art, Fire: Brigid and The Sacred Feminine (Arlen House: Dublin, 2024) with Niamh Boyce. In 2025, she was awarded the Irish Writers’ Centre / Tyrone Guthrie Centre Jack Harte Bursary.