Abridged 0 - 23: Desire and Dust

Abridged 0–23

Abridged 0 – 23

Contents Shlomit Migay

01

Janet Smith

26

Geraldine Mitchell

05

Giles Newington

27

Clare Samuel

06

Vong Phaophanit & Claire Oboussier

28

Maeve O’Sullivan

07

Christopher Barnes

30

Therese Mac an Airchinnigh

08

Jason Lee Lovell

31

Frank Sewell

09

Simone Haack

32

Fiona Ní Mhaoilir

10

Kelli Allen

33

Simon Jones

11

Clare Samuel

34

Simone Haack

12

Simon Jones

35

Jessamine O Connor

13

Ackroyd & Harvey

36

Miriam de Búrca

14

Kathleen McCracken

38

Kate Braverman

15

Heather Gray

39

Moyra Donaldson

16

Gerald Dawe

40

Howie Good

17

Sarah Stevens

41

Ackroyd & Harvey

18

Nicholas Bielby

42

Fernando Smith

20

Theo Sims

43

Sarah Stevens

21

J. S. Robinson

44

David Mohan

22

Helena Nolan

45

Eleanor Bennett

23

Jenny Keane

46

Kate Dempsey

24

Kate Braverman

47

Seamus Harahan

25

Simon Evans

48

Front Cover: Shlomit Migay: From the Dutched by the Old Masters Series Photographer: Mark Janssen, Makeup and Hair: Shlomit Migay Model: Sanne, for Max Models NL

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Abridged 0 - 23: Desire and Dust …the lone and level sands stretch far away…

Unleashing the words ‘Desire and Dust’ into the ether of unsuspecting poets and artists has provoked a reaction so instinctive, so guttural and so intense that the mere perusal of submissions felt almost like smutty voyeurism. We wanted to look away but we wanted to see, we wanted to give these words an audience before they evaporated into dust.

Desire, being such a tenuous concept, does not allow us to hold it in the palm of our hands and we dare not look too closely at its source, for fear of being burnt. Yet it can bring us all to our knees. It feeds our soul, drives it on and then devours it whole. Once a railroad, now it’s done indeed.

In this edition of Abridged, we see how the dust mites of time will eventually consume desire. However, for a while, a small window of time, desire reigned supreme, it conquered our days and consumed our nights.

It created legends and dissolved empires. And what we wouldn’t give to touch again those halcyon lust-filled days…

PDFs of this and previous issues are available on our website www.abridgedonline.com free to download. This issue is the last for our long-time Editor Maria Campbell who is moving on to pastures new. We wish her well.

Her involvement made Abridged what it is today. We’ll continue apace and the upcoming months will see Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare 0 – 25: Silence and 0 – 26: Rust.

.

abridged 0 – 23 no part of this publication may be reproduced without permission copyright remains with authors/artists abridged is a division of The Chancer Corporation c/o Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry - Londonderry BT48 6PU Designed by Fiona O’Reilly (designbyfiona@gmail.com) at Verbal Media A division of the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry/Londonderry Tel: 028 71266946 verbalmedia.co.uk website www.abridgedonline.com facebook abridged zero-nineteen Telephone 028 71266946 Email abridged@ymail.com twitter @abridged030

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Typewritten A sequence in the thrush’s evening repertoire - a rattle of staccato among the juicy riffs and in the time it takes the clicks and ticks to come around again your message hoofs its way across a page, divots fly, the metal keys colts’ feet, the ribbon beaten to within an inch of its already faded life, now red, now black, now blank.

How we all beat out our longings in those days like linen on a rock, embraced the distance metal brought, pounded the molten alphabet as if by force alone we could gain access to an alien heart. Or, lovesick, typed more languidly, morosely tipped each key, then pressed the sleek steel lever; heard the cogs engage, the ratchet flay emotion down the dented page.

We laid bloodied envelopes at one anothers’ doors: yours at mine, mine at someone else’s and so on.

No more controlling our stuttering desire than the thrush its song.

Geraldine Mitchell

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Trench Map Red is stubborn. Red is stuck.

Red is a hothead.

Blue is busy. Blue is sharp.

Blue is untrue.

Red lines skirt the asylum.

Blue borders the nail factory.

They meander across the page, dug in, dug out, not joining – a cruel cardiograph.

In this savage landscape where terrestrial loss or gain is measured in inches, some landmarks do not translate well from occupied into allied.

Red is a hothead. Blue is untrue.

Maeve O’Sullivan

Opposite: Clare Samuel: 08:32:26 from Otherwise Than Being, 2011, three channel HD video, approx. 20min loop

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Pen-names On the back page of an old jotter, the history of us in crossed-out letters.

First, her name wedded to mine, the ‘Mrs’ and surname with a line through them as an afterthought.

Next, in her own sweet hand, she wrote my name coupled to hers, the ‘Mr’ and surname like a scored-out mistake.

After that, a dizzying gap, miles of margin and years of foolscap until, waiting at the foot of the page unseen, unheard for over a decade, the word ‘Seul’. A nom-de-plume.

A sign of all that was to come.

Two wedding bands never worn.

On her finger a skull and cross of bone.

Frank Sewell

Opposite:Therese Mac an Airchinnigh: Mortality, 2011

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A part of me I was in the back seat of a car and I could see the sun was rising The back of the driver’s head was still he sails a red and stormy sea A tree flashes by against the gray sky cold leatherette beneath my hand I saw the head of a girl she sleeps alone dreaming of a sphinx in a far off land wears her grand-mother’s ring on her upturned hand And the service station lights shine against the darkness of a hill.

Winding down the window I feel the air of morning slack and gray The girl opens her eyes and stares into the day her pale face is wondering how she can get away A small face in a vast land a small house behind her stands in green daisy fields that swallow it and her and leaves only her strangers eyes but part of me she keeps.

Simon Jones

Opposite: Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, Spectre says so, 2011, Watercolour and drawing.

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We’ve come to see her She’s hitching up her skirt Pecking it with dried out fingers Pulling back the speckled wool to show tan brown tights Knees apart under a fold-up TV table when we come in.

My grand-aunt minds the invasion She’s brandished her legs in challenge – I wince She turns a thinning scalp to us and curls away Eyes fixed on her lap.

The aproned woman who’d let us in, Smiles wide, shakes her arm -You have people to see you Miss KentI’m already sitting and the children stand straighter Poised, to mime through her silence Maybe squeeze her hand.

But Miss Kent is icing us I see the family face The same stony disgust She hasn’t got the strength to get up and we still crowd around.

I brought the baby, A notion I’d had about connection, But when the little groping hands reach out for the woollen skirt I yank her back

The elderly eyeballs have spun round, clear and hard She’s going to swipe.

The tallest child looms awkwardly His sister teeters with pinking eyes The box of chocolates going off in her hands.

I want to sayWe didn’t put you here They took care Like you wouldn’t notice The difference between your kitchen window Out to the garden you played in Then aged in for eighty-odd years, and this; double-glazed Doorless View of a hedge.

I stumble up Swing the baby far side and we jostle to stoop in crookedly Mutter normalities she can’t hear No kisses for her papery cheeks this time.

You used to smile when we came in.

Jessamine O Connor

Opposite: Simone Haack, Nase, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 125cm x 90cm

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The Thrill of Ruin You were nervous, sentimental, spoiled.

You drank too much, craved the soiled night too much and all it implies.

The thrill of ruin.

The 4 AM’s in jazz dives not sleeping for nine nights and waking Vegas hotel suites with marginal redheads.

You had jet set criminal pals a tailor in London, shoemaker in Milan and an Aussie pilot you called staff.

You left your Maserati in tow-away zones showed me Thai trinkets rendered in ruby and Euros and Yuan in impossible layers of tape like infants in rows, swathed and veiled.

It’s always a season for masks and mysterious epidemics.

Wild fires acres from nuclear reactors.

Volcanoes, tornados and rumors of worse.

It’s always two minutes to out.

In Del Mar you let me name a racehorse and taught me to stand for royals while their national anthem plays.

1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

A Mozart opera and Princess Anne.

You could lie in three languages scratching an itch with a blowtorch. you had style.

A contrived grace cold and random as a vandal, quite the reptile you under all that expensive bridgework.

I loved the flying lessons and your imported high tech watch with a thousand year guarantee.

I bought lace gloves renewed my passport and planted rose bushes again.

Your greed for inexhaustible Saturday nights confused me. I gnawed inside to find your core deserted, fraudulent, the beast to be not yet formed.

Still, I miss your kisses on the Palm Springs in August tarmac.

And your faux British accent whispering I own Tina Turner Tanqueray gin on your breath and how losing you was a bullet wound a gut shot I never forgot.

Kate Braverman

Opposite: Miriam de Búrca, Dead Deer, Drawing, 2011

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The Flayed Horse I am unmade to the point between tension and stasis movement and equilibrium I am no beauty I am no name though I have a half remembered dream of a voice calling me of fingers tangled in my mane Moyra Donaldson

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Neural Ten years or more of pills and ashes and the endless black windows of empty streets.

Is it me? Is it?

Or is there really a bird with a broken branch for a beak?

Howie Good

Over: Ackroyd & Harvey, Burning the Bone from the making of Polar Diamond, 2009.

Supported by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK

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The price we pay The dancer I could not be you became, catching applause on a roll of the hip.

The tree I planted reached out to your window dropping leaves onto the kitchen floor, taking eighty years to find a cheek.

This is the price we pay for the lives we lead.

The war ended empires fell rose and fell again legends lost in collective forgetting.

‘Who goes there?’

‘It is only me, my friend, passing through the night, living and dying marrying your daughters whispering in the ear of power disappearing your sons from street corners and classrooms taking my turn to dance around your roses.’

Fernando Smith

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Opposite: Sarah Stevens, Boutique Hotel, from The Derelict Nation project, 2011

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What Once Was Gold What once was gold, resolves in time to black.

Our dark history, the one we fought, began, once told, in light.

This unmade bed, the crushed sheet, once folded, immaculate.

This house, so full of dust, was once the place we kept.

All of our years’ receipts are overflowing pockets, but once our lives balanced like sums that match.

And all this ruin was still in bloom, and all this ash was flame.

David Mohan

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Eleanor Bennett, Bitten Dust, 2011

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Appropriate Gift I chose a monogrammed handkerchief in a lace shop in Bruges an over-and-done-with gift, the rest of the day lost smoking in a café waiting for the last train out.

You shouldn’t have, she said.

Too good to use.

It lies in her drawer, patchy brown as if it were held too close to her fire.

The lace still perfect but the linen folds crack as I take it, fragile as puddle ice, releasing lavender and dust.

There’s an imperfection on the M blurring the join.

I worry the loose thread, making it worse.

Kate Dempsey

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Paola Bernardelli, Loaded, 2010

Seamus Harahan: The Garden of Daisies (Cold Open Series), 2011

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Pacific I Today I saw the willow tree, branches written in your hair today I saw the sea painted in your tears today I saw sandy reaches in your skin, sable toned a smooth gradation from white to brown close up resolved to multifarious speckle, tiny jewelled glistenings dissolving like the pores in your limbs, to meaningless pixilation an overblown portrait obsessively enlarged.

II Today, thin black wooden posts stapling together your body your bones, the beached drifted logs tumbled together, jointed loosely by frayed plastic rope, blue sky hazed white by sunlight your hands, by bent rusty wire twisted in grotesque shape beside dried out bladder-wrack, crackled and almost black flotsam and jetsam, debris of the magnificent Pacific, dazzling III Today the sand grit reddened my eyes and the raven’s croak confused me the coastal tang of your skin once again, the wind whipping your hair raising the swell of the waves, a white spray drenching everything the rhythmic tail thud, the steady breathy blow of the grey humpback nearby And far from sight, white against a white sky, a crane unfolded herself above a distant tree-line; her eyes clean glass floats, tumbled across the water through Kuroshio and Oyashio to North Pacific drift landing on Alaskan shores, ocean green-tinged, depthless.

Janet Smith

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Storm warning The hurricane recalled (and your drowning) from that drawing, now fading, you later made of two figures kneeling, backs and heads framed by a charcoal window.

Two smokers, unceasing, tangled in plumes of pastel smudge, still grip that window-frame with fingers made of chalk and spit, their unseen eyes still goggling at the hidden ogre, unpredicted, baying, moaning, lurching, flailing in alleyways, squares and shuddering streets.

In that picture, still hanging crooked on a future wall, two heads of coarse crayon crane to see plane trees, undrawn, thrash shadows in lane and courtyard as trash does cartwheels on dusty waves of whistling air.

In that drawing, slowly blurring, one figure of the sketchy pair, whose cursory arms are still touching, tilts in towards the other (the more absorbed in the storm’s labours) as if winded by a warning vision, a forecast of a knockout blow.

Cropped lives, unformed, lie stillborn within that scrawl you later made of two people, childlike watching the bedtime tale of the great storm, gnawing, rending, clawing, upending, monstrously wending through city-centre tower blocks.

All this was long before your deft enfolding by the swaying sea, your kidnap, unscheduled, by a nameless swell; long before, aged twenty-four, your wrecked return to the sated shore.

Giles Newington

Centrespread: Vong Phaophanit & Claire Oboussier, Towards Forgetting, 2011, Courtesy of the Artists

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Substitutes (after Theodore Rothke’s The Meadow Mouse)

The blastocyst squirter probed what ilk of kiddie I’d welcome.

Finicky DNA, the universal shebang of gene splicing, everything graphic to man.

It was his claims of conscience he said to jog along with nit picking guard-duty to those on the thin ice list.

A humanoid fledgling would be self-gratifying, wouldn’t play midwife to larvae polysome techniques.

Hellbent on suckling I plumped for a baggy face, a Lumpsucker.

Spun off from a weakness to toe-dancing I aimed at a rump, a Red-billed Streamertail, fabricated tutus nine months.

The nativity was not quite ABC, most quaking of all my failures.

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On my mama’s mammary Lorinda thrashed, her fish-poppet eye a smiling aquamarine, sprung lips to make and ex-wife puff.

Her tailpiece, gossamer-feather finespun, black-stuff, elegant, ink.

Swooning but so-so I flaked out, tickled awake by snaffles.

My snuggle-love girl was deleting rearwards into her craw.

Gobbling so ravenous she’d gone in six crude gulps.

Christopher Barnes

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All of the Seasons After Rothko’s Red on Maroon

A war dance, that’s what it is- pure, bloody fury a battle field where lines are no longer drawn, where rules of engagement are the lingering order left for us to negotiate each stroke of war.

It draws us into its breast and smothers us, as the tempest engages the fisherman’s boat in an endless battle to stay afloateach ignorant of the moon controlling them both.

The slow steps towards it feel natural as selecting a stick to beat a woodland path, waving at people on a passing train or thumbing the ripeness of a peach in your palm.

As when Bernini stood back and saw his Bell Towers tilting against the blackening skyline of Rome, watching cracks form in the unscripted mess, did you lift a smoke from your carton and, lighting it, know that womb-like, it could swallow a grown man whole, creep on him slowly like a cancer- full of rage!

A gateway to the centre of the evening sun that refuses to part from its beloved day.

Jason Lee Lovell

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A Shrine of the Natural Burlesque Watching straps lick her ankles, reaching for a dollhouse cave sheltered behind apricot knees, I am suddenly insignificant, wrapped in tiny useless hairs.

Crinoline winds her waist as a nest must shelter fine soft birth, wet with new feathers.

There are no margins.

Lamp-cast awareness is little like waking, rather too much light throws every detail back into dream. My hand curls in the same glove I use to collect bullets and sand for one after another glass jar. She and I are the rings left in the dermis when pressures Kelli Allen

Opposite: Simone Haack, Untitled, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 170cm x 120cm

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Untitled My face is here in the wildfire Myself alone breathing in the night wind My face is here where the moonlight wanders And the periwinkle grows I can hear the rooks in their light sleep crow My face is here in the storm wave Hiding in the ditches and the holloways With the pebbles beneath my feet Shining softly like dying stars And the dogs bark far from here My face is here in the maelstrom My fossil bones jutting out in the night air And the insects, sacred Whirling through my green black life-riddled hair My head blows in the wake of plunder obscene A ghost wilderness of pollen and seeds.

Simon Jones

Opposite: Clare Samuel: 13:32:24 from Otherwise Than Being, 2011, three channel HD video, approx. 20min loop Over: Ackroyd & Harvey, Burnt Bone from the making of Polar Diamond 2009. Supported by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK

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My Father’s Hands My father’s hands drew forms from living wood.

No sceptic, he did not believe in death, instead put faith in everything intently on the move a world electrified and quickened.

In his shop oak beams achieved the balanced planes required of sideboards, bookshelves, dining tables.

On well-oiled lathes crude timber turned to bevelled bowls and spindles and in the grain of pine and ash he found the pattern for a daughter’s throne, a son’s articulated train.

My father’s hands plied saws and blades, manoeuvred pulls and tillers, untethered hounds soothed skittish colts, healed and hewed and harvested.

Those workman’s palms made offering of russet pears, a nest of maple keys.

Wind tanned and dappled they were wild birds coasting at ease in any air, maintained the gifts and temperament of some high wire act, dextrous and fluid.

Watching them I thought of Blondin at Niagara, that kind of fearlessness.

When at the last he could not speak his hands impressed a dying language hard against my grip then settled and were still, but kissed and kissed again by ash blonde suns, their talk of conquest and escape.

Kathleen McCracken

Opposite: Heather Gray, Untitled, 2011

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For Sale Pigeons fly in and out of stone-sized gaps in the broken windows of the old lady’s home where she lived most of the time alone.

The kids shout and gather at the spot she’d look down upon from the landing, seeing god-knows-what – a coal man’s lorry, chimney sweep, delivery boy? – and in the rooms stripped bare – gas mantle, iron fireplaces, the stair-rods like twisted joints – nothing gives her life back to this place but the number 70, exactly as it was when she moved in first, stripped sunblind across the front door and the trees made it seem just right.

Gerald Dawe

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Sarah Stevens, Dream Home, from The Derelict Nation series, 2011

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In the Laksmana Temple, Khajuraho Salabanjika stands in high relief in the deep gloom, high on a ledge within the temple. The shallow valley of her spine sinuously twists as if her slow exuberance expressed itself like climbing vines around a tree or like those roots of jungle trees that coil and snake round ancient stonework. On her shelf, her head half-turned in profile, eyes downcast, her breast so swells beneath her half-raised arm you’d think the stone itself was soft and warm.

With two plump creases at her waist, she looks serene. With her clear brow, straight nose and an archaic smile upon her lips, she has her inwardness; and yet her hips are smooth and rounded, sensuous in the reflected glare that models them, highlights the loops of beads that guide the eyes around the contours of her buttocks, thighs, the fullness of her fertile form – the perfect form of what desire seeks, a something unattainable beyond fulfilment; something for the sensual mind to contemplate: its paradox.

Nicholas Bielby

Salabanjika is one of the Celestial Beauties in the Hindu pantheon, responsible for fertility and the growth of vegetation, especially in the jungle.

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Opposite: Theo Sims, Untitled, 2011, from the series Derry Portraits (Photocopier, Central Library).

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Muse Imperfected After Cassandra Fedele by F. W. Burton, National Gallery of Ireland She’s penciled on vellum, fingertips marked with lead.

As she moves graphite flows

of silence. Not flesh, no life pulses in her veins because she’s drawn and I’ve torn it

over the paper, her hands drawn across the neck of a viol. She smells the bay leaves in her hair,

again, ruined another good picture.

My blood mingled with her anaemic fluids, sheet torn, milk

hears the strings vibrate, tastes the artist’s spit as he smudges her pursed lips. Muse in Venice

spilt, project abandoned on the table, everything gone to the bad, a mind lost in an instant, swallowed

who doesn’t exist, she’s paper and pencil, shadows on snow, down-cast eyes listening for a note

by ghosts, the self left somewhere beside a foreign road, dislocated, enjambed, not making sense.

J. S. Robinson

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The Glass-Blower’s Apprentice Sometimes love is like glass melting, Taking the solid thing back to the source – The first glance, the first kiss, Raw ingredients in a fierce heat, A furnace that creates as it destroys.

When it shatters, search the floor in vain For what you started with – The lead, the flint, the quartz, All are lost, even the memory of his breath, The dust running out through the hourglass.

Helena Nolan

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Jenny Keane, Chord, single channel video, 9:32 min, 2010, production still. Image courtesy of Catherine Devlin.

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Ladies of the Shrine For William T. Vollmann Autumn is, after all, a fiction. An acquired taste like opera and shellfish. Some women need a pimp to open their eyes, show them the ropes, tricks, turn them out. They were good girls once

They remember March. They were still cotton panty girls with Internet and collections of butterflies and shells and a drawer for just bows. Now they’re breathless calling from public phones on boulevards above subways.

Too much noise, static on the line but it’s better than a beeper.

didn’t do drugs, smoke, or conceive of the hills between Ravello and Amalfi. Big Sur to Mendocino seemed implausible. Prague and Shanghai were glue in their mouths. They were afraid of capitals, simple as stones

Now they bring their accidents with them.

Their coats contain a sadness that needs no translation. Even their wool is contagious.

or bells. They smelled like glass on October afternoons.

Less than a thumbprint. They didn’t wear make-up, want to learn French or see the Parthenon.

Spandex and bronze did not occur to them.

There’s a drama, a crisis. They don’t know what to OD in, evaluate stained slips like precious ornaments a crystal vase or new syringe. Let’s shoot up while we’re both in the mood. Not yet? OK.

Lush are the ladies of the lamps, lit from within, heads dyed copper like coins. They belong in a shrine.

Then came fall. They were terrified, needed a razor scar on the cheek, a fractured arm and one black eye was all it took. You’d be surprised.

Forests turned a tinny tease of henna rinsed maples flaunting slim stripped limbs and practiced tongues announcing the season of renegades. It was a mirror.

I’ll tell you why this landscape chose me.

I’m wearing an apricot silk shawl, see?

The air becomes charged, engineered.

Lamplight is calibrated an elegant 14 carat tinged with pear. Such lights burn in deserted rooms for years, no fear of suffocation or fire.

No. I don’t want your name. Just lay down.

Shut up. Now we can both die here.

Kate Braverman

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Contributors Ackroyd & Harvey make time-based interventions that intersect disciplines of sculpture, photography, architecture and biology, exhibiting most recently at the Void (Derry), Hangar Bicocca (Milan), KHOJ (New Delhi), MACRO Testaccio (Rome), M.A.D.R.E (Naples) and the Royal Academy of Arts (London). They were chosen by the Olympic Delivery Authority to produce the largest public art commission in the Olympic Park for 2012. The work in this issue used technology to accelerate a process that usually occurs naturally over millions of years, to grow a diamond from graphite extracted from the cremated ash of a polar bear bone. The artists were given the bone by the Governor of Svalbard in 2007 and the diamond was grown with the support of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. www.ackroydandharvey.com

2 Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry, 5 California Arts Grants, 3 Best American Short Story Awards, 3 Pushcart Prizes, O. Henry Prize, Carver Award, and Tennessee Williams Fellowship.She teaches a 3 day workshop from her home in Santa Fe, NM.

Kelli Allen is an award-winning poet and scholar. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Blue Sofa Review, Women Arts Quarterly, The Caper Review, It Has Come to This, Lily, Lugh Review, The Chaffy Review, Euphony, “Tea With George,” and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks (Applied Cryptography; Picturing What Breaks) and has served as the Managing Editor of Natural Bridge.

Allen also serves as Director of Development for The Missouri Warrior Writers Project.

Gerald Dawe’s Selected Poems will be published spring 2012 by The Gallery Press. Conversations: Poets & Poetry has just appeared from Lagan Press. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin.

Christopher Barnes’ first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer. He is a participant writer for www.stemistry.com and recently read at Poetry Scotland’s Callender Poetry Weekend.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic, The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science, Fennel and Fern and Nature’s Best Photography.

She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian, RSPB Birds, RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash, Alabama Coast, Alabama Seaport, Taj Mahal Review and NG Kids Magazine (the most popular kids magazine in the world). Youngest artist to be displayed in Charnwood Art’s Vision 09 Exhibition and New Mill’s Artlounge Dark Colours Exhibition.

Nicholas Bielby, a retired lecturer in education at Leeds University, is now editor of Pennine Platform and his third book of poems, Crooked Smoke, was published this year

by Graft Poetry. His first teaching job was in India and the poem here recalls that time Kate Braverman was co-director of the Venice Poetry Workshop and mentored 2 generations of writers at UCLA. She has published 4 novels including Lithium For Medea and Palm Latitudes, 6 books of poetry and is best known for her short stories Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta, Pagan Night and Temporary Light. She has been nominated for

Miriam de Búrca lives and works in Belfast and the borderlands of County Fermanagh. She studied at Glasgow School of Art, and in 2010 completed a practicebased Phd at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, such as London, New York, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Warsaw and Berlin.

Recent exhibitions include Holding Together – Douglas Hyde Dublin, Sacred – Enniskillen, Spatial Relations – Berlin, and My Home is His Castle – Catalyst, Belfast.

Kate Dempsey’s poetry is widely published in Ireland and the UK. She won The Plough Prize and her dinky poetry book was published this year by The Moth Editions. She runs the Poetry Divas collective who read at events and festivals all over Ireland.

Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator. Her fourth collection of poetry, Miracle Fruit was published in November 2010 by Lagan Press, Belfast.

Moyra lives in Co Down and recently received an Artist Career Enhancement Award from the ACNI. Simon Evans’ delicate text-based works are collaged and assembled from prosaic materials including found paper, scotch tape, pencil shavings, coloured pencil and white out. They describe a world poised between two poles of earnestness and irony. With his anxieties laid bare and his wry brand of melancholy, Evans presents us with a veritable laundry list of drawings that take the form of diagrams, charts, maps, lexicons, diary entries, inventories, cosmologies and epistolary entreaties that plunge the viewer into alternate states of pathos and hope. Simon’s work is in several distinguished private collections and in the permanent collections of the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Simon Evans currently lives and works in Berlin.

Opposite: Simon Evans, Letter To The Future, 2011, Handstitched embroidery, 11 3/4 X 9 1/2 inches, Photo: Jason Mandella, Copyright the artist, Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

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Abridged 0 – 23

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing, To Shadowy Blue from Gold Wake Press, and Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press.

Heather Gray is a Visual artist from Dublin, Ireland.

Gray trained at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, graduating with a first class honours in Sculpture. Exhibiting around Ireland and abroad; Gray’s practice includes installation, video, drawing, prints and paintings. Heather’s work is based in China at the moment but will inevitably return to Ireland at a different point in time. www.heatherjgray.co.cc Simone Haack was born 1978 in Rotenburg/Wümme (Northern Germany) and studied Fine Arts from 1997-2003 in Bremen, Auckland and Paris and lives as a freelance artist in Berlin. She won several Art Prizes and artist residencies and is shown in galleries and Art Institutions internationally.

Seamus Harahan was born in London in 1968 and grew up there and in Tyrone. He holds an MFA and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, both from the University of Ulster in Belfast. His work is exhibited and screened nationally and internationally and is held in both public and private collections. He lives and works in Belfast.

Simon Huw Jones is a vocalist and lyric writer. He was born in Birmingham in 1960 but grew up in a hamlet in rural Worcestershire where, in 1980, he formed the alternative rock band ‘And also the trees’ with his brother Justin. Since then AATT have released ten studio albums and toured extensively in Europe and the USA. He now lives in Geneva, Switzerland where he is working on the next AATT album which will be released early next year.

More Information about Simon and the band can be found at www.andalsothetrees.co.uk and www.facebook.com/ pages/and-also-thetrees/71836477700 Jenny Keane is a visual artist based in Belfast. Her practice is focused on the word ‘horrific’. Through video installation and performative drawings, the work explores the self-portrait in an attempt to investigate the dichotomy between fear and desire, its relationship to language and connection to the (female) body.

Jason Lee Lovell is a Londoner, living in Derry. He’s a third year English student at University of Ulster, Coleraine, where he enjoys the role of Poetry Editor for the creative writing anthology Reflexion. He’s a founding member of the UUC Poetry Society, and has recently received the Walter Allen Prize for Creative Writing (2011).

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Therese Mac an Airchinnigh was born in Dublin, but currently resides in Belgium. She is an art historian by training, having received a 1st in the History of Art and Architecture, with Drama, from Trinity College Dublin, in 2003. Previously being signed with Morgan the Agency she now works as an expat in Brussels. She lives with her husband and young son, exhibiting works locally and in cultural magazines.

Kathleen McCracken is the author of seven collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College (Penumbra Press, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1992, A Geography of Souls (Thistledown Press, 2002), Moonclaves (Exile Editions, 2007) and Tattoo Land (Exile Editions, 2009). She has held several Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Grants, she was runner-up in the National Poetry Contest (1998) and shortlisted for the Canadian Poetry Chapbook Competition (1999). Her poems have been published in The Malahat Review, Poetry Canada Review, Exile Quarterly, Poetry Ireland, The Shop, New Orleans Review and Grain, and she has given readings in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Shlomit Migay is a fashion makeup artist, body painter, designer and a choreographer, an Israeli native who’s currently living in Vienna, Austria. Her work has been published in magazines worldwide and exhibited in countries such as South Korea, Lebanon and Austria.

She is the creator and manager of The Alternative Paint Cabaret, a new and unique concept group which combines a cabaret show with body paintings and alternative music. www.paintcabaret.weebly.com www.shlomitmigay.com Mark Janssen (1975) graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts St. Joost in 1999. After working in several fields of photographic expertise he now has found his muse and specializes in largely scaled, staged, theatrical photography. Besides assigned projects, giving life to non-commissioned series is a big part of his activities. www.markjanssen.com Geraldine Mitchell lives in Co. Mayo. Her first collection of poems World Without Maps, was published by Arlen House earlier this year. Her poem Magnolia, which appeared in the Abridged issue of the same name, was displayed this summer at the South Bank Centre, London, as part of the Festival of Britain commemoration.

David Mohan is based in Dublin and writes poetry and short stories. His poetry has been published in The Sunday Tribune, The Stony Thursday Book, Abridged, The Moth and The Cathach. He has also won numerous poetry awards including the 2009 Over the Edge Writer of the Year Award and the Hennessy 2008 overall New Irish Writer Award.

In 2011 he won the Gemini Poetry Open competition.

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Fiona Ní Mhaoilir (b. Dublin) is a visual artist who has lived and worked in Belfast since 1997. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has work in public and private collections. Recent exhibitions include STRATIFIED, Ulster Hall, Belfast. Forthcoming book projects include 21 Proposals for Turbine Hall’, edited by Peter Morgan and Judy Kravis, published by Road Books.

Fiona says of her work: ‘I sometimes look to the absurd as a method for clarification,’ extract from her notebook (2011) Puns and Parody.

Giles Newington: Born in London, he moved to Ireland in the 1990s and now works as a journalist at the Irish Times. He began writing poetry three years ago and has been shortlisted in a number of competitions. He lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons.

Helena Nolan’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Abridged 0-23 Magnolia and she is a regular contributor to Poetry24. Last year, she was shortlisted in the Strokestown and Fish International Poetry competitions. She has a poem forthcoming in the Poetry On The Lake winners anthology. Last year she came Second in the Patrick Kavanagh Award and this year she was the overall winner with her unpublished collection The Bone House, the title poem of which appears in the latest issue of The Stinging Fly magazine. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UCD. Jessamine O Connor came to rural County Sligo from Dublin 12 years ago. She has written zines and poetry, and recently her poems have appeared in Leaf Writer’s Magazine and anthology Balancing Act; New Irish Writing; and she has just won this year’s iYeats International poetry competition.

Maeve O’Sullivan, a Dubliner, has published her poems and haiku widely. One of her poems won first prize at Listowel Writer’s Week in 1999, and a number of her haiku have won awards and / or been anthologised. She is a member of Haiku Ireland, the British Haiku Society and the Poetry Divas. Maeve’s first solo haiku collection, Initial Response, was launched in April 2011 by Alba Publishing.

Vong Phaophanit (born 1 January 1961, Laos) and Claire Oboussier (born 10 April 1963, London) are artists based in London who have collaborated for the past 25 years.

Their studio encompasses a wide variety of media including films, books, large-scale installations and photographic and sculptural works. They have created a number of ground-breaking public commissions. They have recently completed Mute Meadow in Derry, a major public commission and the largest artwork in public space in Ireland. Currently they are working on a laser installation for Weymouth Esplanade in time for the sailing Olympics in 2012.

J. S. Robinson lives in County Wicklow and has published in recent issues of Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Census, Southword, The Sunday Tribune and Magma.

Clare Samuel is a photo-based artist from Portstewart in Co. Derry, she holds a BFA with Honours from Ryerson University in Toronto and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. She has exhibited internationally in group and solo shows, most recently at Context Gallery in Derry and in the Belfast Photo Festival. Her work examines the idea of borders; between people, places, or states of being, and how they define where and to whom we belong.

Frank Sewell’s poems have been anthologised in The New North (Wake Forest Press, 2008, 2011), Magnetic North (Lagan Press, 2006), and New Soundings (Blackstaff, 2003); and have appeared in many journals, inc. Poetry Ireland.

A translator and co-translator from Irish, Japanese and Russian, he is also a literary critic and Course Director of English at the University of Ulster.

Theo Sims is a multi-media artist who creates site and context specific work. He received his BFA from Brighton Polytechnic in 1992 and M.A. at the University of Ulster in 1994. Recently he resigned his position as Director of the Context Gallery to pursue his career as an artist in a full-time capacity. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally with reviews and articles in Circa, Irish Times, Sunday Times, CMag, Beijing Today, Border Crossings, New York Times and Macleans.

Fernando Smith was born in 1965 in Bury, Manchester and has worked across disciplines as a climbing guide, singer, art lecturer, therapist, and factory worker. Now living in Cumbria dividing his time as a poet, artist & performer and running support and therapeutic services for Shelter Scotland.

Janet Smith, originally from Yorkshire is a scientist and poet living in Birmingham. Her poetry is found in the small press, on the radio, a Warwickshire poetry trail and at readings across the midlands. She is currently working on her first collection.

Sarah Stevens is an artist living and working in the north west of Ireland. She is currently working on the Derelict Nation project. This is an on-going project that documents derelict spaces in order to honour their stories before their hidden histories are lost to us all. www.derelictireland. blogspot.com Abridged Personnel Maria Campbell is at the end of an era. We’ve taught her well. She may not be our editor any longer but is we hope still an abridged person at heart.

Gregory McCartney is developing messianic tendencies with a reckless and wild abandon. His scale model of Versailles is at the planning stage.

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Artist Residencies at the intersection of art, rural archives, & agrarian industries

Maria McKinney Spiral garlands designed for champion Belgian Blue cattle: The 15th National Winter Fair, Stranorlar, October 2011 The 99th Inishowen Agricultural Show, July 2011

David Farquhar Autumn 2011 -Summer 2012: a collaborative project with the National Fisheries College, Greencastle and the broader community of the fishing industry in Greencastle: an Artist in the Community Award from the Arts Council and CREATE

Artlink, Tullyarvan Mill, Mill Lane, Buncrana, Co. Donegal T. 074936 3469 • info@artlink.ie • www.artlink.ie