By Savannah S. Miller
To get to the Cliffs from Galway,
you must take a path called the Wild
Atlantic Way. As the name suggests,
narrow lanes weave up and down, left
and right along lush hillsides, past broken
castles, abandoned abbeys with
gravestones clouded by age and fauna—
life growing over the dead. Penny walls
reach skyward over centuries, reminders
of the brutality of humanity, a genocide
orchestrated by petty brethren
jealous of the gorse. People have forged
lives here in the rain and the wind
that, no matter how strong, cannot blow
the damn rocks away, knock the walls down,
and when you finally reach your lookout
point, awash with green and crashing
waves, you may find yourself
grateful to exist in the same time period
as chlorophyll and limestone, carved
by acid precipitation long before you were
a thought in the mind of the Universe.
Savannah S. Miller (she/her) is a queer and disabled writer, theatre artist, and converted Memphian. She was the inaugural Young Playwright in Process through Young Playwrights’ Theater in Washington, D.C., as well as a two-time winner of the Eleanor Frost Playwriting Contest. Her works have been published or are forthcoming with Modern Language Studies, Jelly Bucket, Flash Fiction Magazine, the Sierra Club’s North Star Journal, and others. Read more at savannahsmiller.com.