"Selkie" & "Banshee" by Ashling Meehan-Fanning

Selkie

The women at the docks say she ate the man who stole her skin, mashed his bones between aragonite teeth. His vocal cords she added to her lyre, an instrument made from the debris of sunken ships. Such a woman I wished to know, so I went looking for her at the beach head, close to the caves where it was rumored she dwelt. I waited until twilight, sun cresting over the shoreline, my hands pink and raw from the cold. She emerged from the wave foam that crashed against the cave mouth, dressed in black-green gown, threads stitched with thick sea-grass taken from the ocean floor. Virescent jewels were sewn into her salty hair, and she regarded me curiously with pebble dark eyes. I stayed with her that night, and the night after, told her of the man who killed my sister. She smiled, her mouth a dark maw of seabed and fishbone, kissed me softly on my bleeding lips. All will be righted, little one, her voice that of an ocean god, men forget often the retribution of the sea.

Banshee 

I will tell you what a haunting is. It is a girl,

dead and buried, put to the ground. She is 

face up, she is face down, she is naked, is dressed

in someone’s clothes. She is pale, she is dark,

she has auburn curls or corn silk tresses. 

Her mouth is open, her mouth is sewn shut. 

Her fingers are bloody, clean, callused, 

and her skin holds every secret and knows

nothing. Her body is folklore, her body is

a forest, her body is in the ground. The maggots

have eaten her now. She is eternal, she is nothing.

She is dirt. She is a memory.  She is regret.

Ashling Meehan-Fanning is a poet based in Wisconsin whose work often includes themes of magic, ancestry, and the American Midwest. She spends a lot of time thinking about ghosts and trees.