What Remains of Her

(for display at the Poetry Brothel Séance)

Maureen O’Rourke escaped the hunger of Ireland— the famine, the poverty, the endless grey. She and her husband crossed the ocean, chasing the promise of a better life. They found it, for a while, in the rough gold veins of Colorado. He worked the mines; she kept a small room, their hands stained with dust and hope. But when the mountain took him— as it took so many— the world offered her no gentle place to land. She lived by her wits and her will, an Irish woman surviving on the edge of Denver’s boom-town nights— where women traded what little power the world allowed them.

When the world turned its gaze toward younger faces, Maureen simply stepped out into the cold. And there, the frost took her. Buried in potter’s field, unnamed and forgotten.

For more than a century she lay in silence— until a séance called her name. And when she spoke, it wasn’t in terror but in fire. Her voice rose through the veil: I was not empty. I was not gone. You simply stopped seeing me.

This painting is her ghost — and mine. Maybe it’s yours as well. Because how many of us still carry that same fate? Told our worth withers with age, that our bodies betray us, that we are vanishing.

What remains of her is not beauty lost, but presence gained. Her eyes burn on. She lingers as a question: Will you see her? Will you say her name? — Bridget I. O’Brien, 2025