I dream of you Matt Damon (in the radiotherapy suite)

Cáit O’Neill McCullagh

& we are on the Ullapool bus. Pale-famished, rough

folded into seats once-plush. Velvet, red burnished

to rust. Uncertain, like the ringed blue of your eyes.

Uncanny you: spacesuit silvered, brow pressed

to a wheek-skelpt window. You doze—I soothe, say

it is October & in Massachusetts (which I can’t spell)

it is Fall & yes, I know, Wester Ross does seem

like Mars. We waken (having never slept) watch

the bog burn ungodly. Crimson, maple. Scarlet

the hills, still waiting their own shadows. Dawn

is but a scratch in the lift above the Fish Road, when

I begin my confession—that I am like you now Matt:

plucked from gravity, fixed in a beam of linear

acceleration. This weary ship, only the shape

of rotated air. I’d like to tumble too; flee

these robotic arms, turn Earthwise with you.

In an hour, our eyes will soar with the kite, see

steam breathe through the flitted peat; hollowed

as hind’s hooves quicken the moss. At Glascarnoch

Loch, the moon is a flipped dime. Her sisters sink

to fill the spills between sphagnum & silence.

We’ll drink them Matt (in cobalt glasses), let

Strath Dirrie lean its healing into us. Each star

a radiant abscission, in the arms of an unclad birch.

CÁIT O'NEILL McCULLAGH has been writing poems at home in the Scottish Highlands since 2021. Winner of The McLellan Prize, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, in 2025, she's also honoured that her debut collection The Bone Folder (Drunk Muse Press, 2024) was shortlisted for The Saltires: Scotland’s National Book Awards.