Tanis MacDonald (she/they) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as seven other books of poetry and nonfiction, including the forthcoming Tall, Grass, Girl (Book*hug, fall 2026). She is twice the winner of the Open Seasons Award: once in 2021 for her essay of female friendship and music fandom, and again in 2025 for her essay on adoption and ancestry. She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Tanis was raised in Treaty One territory and now lives as a grateful guest on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe land, near the Grand River in southwestern Ontario.
“I wrote this poem after seeing the National Museum of Ireland’s exhibit of bog bodies, titled Kingship and Sacrifice, on a trip to Dublin in 2015—and additionally as a response to Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Punishment,’ written after he had seen seen photos of a sacrificed young woman in P.V. Glob’s book The Bog People.“
You were chosen as that year’s
sacrifice to a god who wanted redress
through flesh, or men who
wanted their fistful, they made you
into a ship and boarded, pressed
like a gang. Don’t be
afraid, though know that we’ll read
about your stomach contents and
nod like that’s a clue. It’s not.
No one knows your last thought,
and I am not going to guess.
You live inside the mistakes
that others make: glass box
with a plaque, peat water, noose.
These words are bone and skin.
Take and erode them, wind
on canvas or water on rock. Palm
brushing paper. We guess, we choose,
we polish glass. We are girls,
we are gods: these are the clues.
