Abridged 0-26: Rust

Abridged 0–26

1992 - 2012

Abridged 0 – 26

Contents David Hepher

01

David Hepher

28

Gerald Dawe

05

Graham Nunn

30

Joanna Karolini

06

Sarah Mixtapes

31

Shelley Tracey

08

Gerard Beirne

32

Maurice Devitt

10

Dan Harvey

33

Fiona Ní Mhaoilir

11

Afric McGlinchey

34

Joanna Grant

12

Gráinne Tobin

35

Rachel McDonnell

13

David Hepher

36

Gerald Yelle

14

Vanessa Gebbie

38

Kristin Abraham

15

Conor McFeely

39

David Hepher

16

Benjamin Norris

40

Moyra Donaldson

18

Anne-Marie Glasheen

41

Dan Shipsides

19

David Calcutt

42

Joanna Grant

20

Aideen Barry

43

Dan Shipsides

21

Joyce Parkes

44

Brian Kirk

22

Annette Skade

45

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

23

Denzil Browne

46

Barbara A. Morton

24

Elizabeth Welsh

47

Theo Sims

25

Blaine O’Donnell

48

Kimberly Campanello

26

Contributors

49

Becky Kilsby

27

David Hepher

56

Cover Images: David Hepher, Aylesbury (Homage To Robert Gober), 2008-10, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery www.flowersgalleries.com

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Abridged 0 – 26: Rust …there’s a voice in the distance quiet and clear saying something that I never ever wanted to hear….

We are reluctant to acknowledge Rust. We are reluctant to see it and reluctant to face it, letting it consume the space framed in our sightline. So we push it to the edges, and avoid the contradiction of our control that is Rust. The waste of our existence is pushed to the edges of our cities. We see them on the periphery, dark figures cloaked in the brittle residue of deterioration. The human world is rusting; people, places, things, rusting and rotting on the periphery. Our backward glances leave us unnerved by the sinister image of grey carcasses seeping with orange reds. Tattered forms, broken, fragile, finished. There is an eerie resemblance. A premonition. We know this eroding virus, it is routine enough to name. Rust is in our skin, the passage of time making abrasive records on steel flesh. The air whips our iron bodies, breaking our sense of power. Steel razors are muted and frayed under time’s persistent grind, objects of strength peppered with the omnipotence of rain, of wind. Our fickle illusions of permanence are skeletonised. They become ghosts of crumbling orange in an obedient return to the earth under nature’s tyranny. The body electric fails and falls. And nature is adamant in its weight, a hard and physical heaviness. An absolute presence. Rust, an elemental weapon of mass demoralization, confirms the unutterable reality that we are merely passing through. In the context of nature we are a small movement, temporary occupants. Rust forces us to dispute the significance of our industries, our wars, our structured societies, our manufactured supremacy. They are fossilized dreams, unnatural fossils flaking to dust. Rust is our mutability. Rust is our diminution. The natural translation of colour and state.

An evolution of the elements.

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Next: Abridged 0 – 28: Once A Railroad

Abridged 0 – 26 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 (www.onthedotmultimedia.com) at Verbal Media A division of the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry/Londonderry Tel: 028 71266946 verbalmedia.co.uk

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Promises, Promises Over the rusty sky cranes lie idly by forlorn estates where grass spikes through patios and abandoned electrics hang like wasps’ nests in rooms and halls that no one moved into after all, like the half-lit caverns of office blocks with the reflected moon in walls of glass.

Gerald Dawe

Overleaf: Joanna Karolini, Kafka’s Love Letters to Felice, (Works on Paper, Dimensions Variable), 2003

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Bell

At Dachau, a rusted bell still tolls, swinging wild and clanging in a cage of steel.

Footsteps between the barracks harsh down gravel corridors, dissonance of past and present, guard, commander, prisoner, visitor, soldier, guide.

So easy to get lost in here, my father texts me.

So much of it, and all the same.

He texts without abbreviations, spelling out the facts so hard to comprehend.

The SS guards were trained in here. A school for cruelty.

Three years my dad lived here till they killed him.

They slept shoulder to shoulder on hard and rotting bunks.

They say the grass grew rusty red on Execution Ridge.

I see my father pacing slow behind barbed wire, marking out his father’s absence.

He will bring back a postcard of the sculpture at the entrance: splayed skinny limbs and heads tossed back, a Guernica in steel.

He will place his memories and imaginings side by side, shifting and rearranging, nothing making sense.

His lost father is a face repeated in an album, decayed by fingerprints and years.

A tiny form, a blur of charcoal hair, An arm around his bride’s small shoulders, Tall behind his seated wife, my infant father shawled upon her knee, only a few months before he went to Dachau, a dissident transported for his thoughts, the words he spoke, his name.

I see my father on the train today from Munich to the camp.

I see him thinking, not thinking, perhaps nodding, but not speaking.

My father seldom speaks. He is an old man in a stiff grey coat, His hard cracked hands bunched on his knees, tannin of the garden in his nails and on his skin.

His eyes narrowed from years of planting, measuring out, scrutinising growth and change.

Every Sunday in the churchyard at my mother’s grave, weeding and amending, the trowel, still gleaming eight years later, standing cleaned and ready during the week, hissing all through winter into hardened soil.

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My mother faded like a wine-red rose turned to paper, bleeding black into the petals’ edge. Dark mouth, crumpled paleness.

I’ve lost my sense of her. She comes so seldom in my dreams, a phantom at the edge of things, like a language I’ve forgotten through disuse.

For years my father scrutinised all those crackling films about the war, translating history into family narrative, making meaning from a time beyond all meaning, seeking his father’s face in all those stacks of corpses, grey skin on forms as long and hard as giant reptiles, noses sharp as beaks, hands curled like claws.

In the crematorium, oxblood red bricks and a heavy chain before the ovens, corroding at the links.

The memorial stone tells a story: “Ashes were buried here.”

The last fact that he texts me: “We waited for the train back in McDonald’s.

I had some tea. It burnt my tongue.”

When the message comes, I am drinking coffee in the Ulster Museum, tired of puzzling over images of the Titanic wreck, trying to distinguish moss from rock from hull from shadow.

A haze of water murks the truth.

Then the cinema in the art gallery, Bill Fontana’s Silent Echoes.

An old bell swings as easy as a flower on its stem, silver turned to green and bronze, found poetry in the dark.

Shelley Tracey

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Yesterday’s Mirror The city wakes to a transcript of metal and stone cast for posterity across a twisted sea they search for life ignore the arrogance of time till, in the ink of evening a shout breaks the faulty silence and frames the cracked reflection of bare hands clutching sky.

Maurice Devitt

Opposite: Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, HIPPOCAMPUS, Extracts from my visual studies notebook, Paper corroded by the use of oil, turps and other materials, 2012

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Hard to Say Where the Figure Ends and the Background Begins Helmand Province, Afghanistan The earth is the color of the sky which is the color of the dirt

In the blackouts our grey-booted feet learn the dark and the rocks.

One of my boys brings me an old dead bullet.

They tell us we breathe the dirt up here. Moon dust and dried-up shit.

I bored a hole through the top, he says, so you can wear it on a chain. With luck the only one you ever stop.

With intake of breath the silt. Coats the spongy pink of the lungs.

Children, I tell them in my lecture, many thousands of years ago the people here believed

On the dustiest days we cough up mud.

in a place they called the House of Dust.

If it ever rains it streaks. Dirty tears.

Some days there’s a mountain tipped with wisps of snow off on the horizon. Some days just a flat grey scrim. Haze over the ghosts of old dead rivers.

The place where all our souls went down to wait for who knows what. Slowly feeling the change. Some said the waiting ones began to sprout soft doves’ feathers. As if maybe to fly. One day. Wings the pink and gray.

Of the swirling dirt.

Joanna Grant

The dust chokes out the satellites.

Unusable, your dish becomes a nest.

No internet for days—laptops turn to paperweights.

We rediscover writing. Tracing the shapes.

Opposite: Rachel Mc Donnell, Nighttime stirs, Gouache on edited found photograph, 2012 Page 12

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HAIRCUTS NOT DISCOVERED BY ACCIDENT Ice,

wedged

under

roof tiles under pressure pushing moisture right hand corner facing the bowl, impossible not to see given the ceiling’s pitch: cracked and water stained, dried and discolored, so I have to keep an eye on it especially in winter.

The roofer’s sure the only cure involves your sister’s daughter pulling tops off crèmes, and the one digital hole in all six walls, and the paint, the smell of boiling cabbage, of my father’s rented kitchen, imitation of his mother’s

There should have been poems, a parade called Death to Headache, bands judged from a platform from which we leap to new enigma.

Backers reneged when Allies won the right to a march.

There’s a breach in the crowd wide enough to walk through, and I’m bringing my camera. I want that corner in a saffron veneer.

I want that erstwhile peace -loving Lilliputian on the common to open the Ferris wheel lying half unfolded in its glossy valise its pond-like stillness glinting in his gaze.

Gerald Yelle

with its bathroom off the kitchen which we’re not ashamed to drown in smoke. Let’s forget it.

Hit the pavement. The streets crowded with that indoor look though quiet despite it.

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In Which His Pilgrims Suffer a Feast of Reason Dear Prophet— you have canary lungs, sensitivities no one can bear to witness, sallow pockets under your eyes, your knuckles grind like gizzards.

Dear series of concentric circles—you are plagued by the voice of an oyster shell—we no longer see, we die, we follow your wagon—your God is not you, but we hitch and listen.

Dear apology—you are a series of souls; you know pretty words, curiosities. Fear is the root of prophecy, you say, but the root of infinity, too, we know.

Dear in the world but not of the world— you have never been such kissed-off light; burned or not burned we will never know when to unlock. No one has a psalter for tongues or notions.

Dear thumbprint— Dear egregious tree— How does truculent come into the world? Tucks in its body as a bird does?

Just before flight— Kristin Abraham

Over: David Hepher, From Aylesbury (Homage To Robert Gober), 2008-10, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery www.flowersgalleries.com Page 15

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Red Comb of cockerel, oriental poppies, winter berries, robin’s breast.

Speck of life in the yolk.

Blood beetle rubies crushed for crimson, death in it; mordant alum fix.

Vermilion from the mingled blood of elephant and dragon mercury and sulphur dug from the earth.

The hand of Ulster, hand of history.

Red rag to a bull.

Caught redhanded.

Years of sky warnings and delights.

Blood letting, pressure

thicker than water not thick enough to carry the weight of us.

Soaked. Flowing.

Lips with wine, desire, remembered rhythms, the first rivulet down a pale leg, a sigh of relief.

The stain life makes.

Blood thickens. Slows.

Dries. Rust. Clot.

Touches of red into the house in compensation. A vase, two cushions. Red frames for five black dancing herons and one black horse.

Moyra Donaldson

Opposite: Dan Shipsides, White Star Nation, Paint on Steel, 2012

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Ends FOB Shank, Khost, Afghanistan.

Sometimes I think something must have died under the walkway to our classroom tent, especially when the early spring rains roll through the valleys and soak us the smells bubble up—old mushrooms, wet dog, that dank something you get when you turn over a rock and the cold wet rolls off its mossy underbelly.

Death lingers here like some bad smell nobody wants to talk about, like all the latrine reek we more or less learn to put up with, like the smell of hot garbage stirred by the sun, old half-chewed scraps roiling in the landfills, what’s not burnt picked over by the shiny crows, the ones rippling blue-black with plague along their greasy wings and grayish feet.

Out back behind the huts you never know what you might find tossed out, a crazy tower of rusted-out bed frames slung up against an abandoned K-9 shed, an old paw print by the twisted gate that leads to nothing any more, caterpillar tracks from a passing tank cut into the dirt by an old burned-out Jeep, the composting heap of an abandoned pallet of mosquito repellant, poison and old cardboard soaking into the loosening earth.

Spring rain and mildew smell means it’s time to fight again.

And right on cue the explosions ripple through the east and soon I’m sure they’ll reach us here where our little tents flap and shudder in the squalls gusting through the Kush.

But would you look at that. The sky just cleared and for once it doesn’t smell that bad. The twisted scraps of chain-link fence glisten and drip, the old dirty water in the puddles one big slick of rainbow. The kitchen guys goof and wrestle as they slice.

One of the Filipina girls who cuts hair and does massage struts down the path between the laundry tents with her earbuds in, rocking out to her Engrish bubblegum pop. Baby you are sex in my eyes. She’s wafted on a cloud of Bounce and soap.

Benny and Reeves get the guys into teams to play hacky sack in the dark, their little heads and feet splashed with reflective paint and peeping out of the blackout like so many new stars, or lightning bugs doing a mating dance in the softer air of home summers. And, in the morning as I unlock the door, I can see something pushing up through the scattered rocks.

I know it’s probably a weed, but from here for now in this more forgiving light I swear it looks like it might be a flower

Joanna Grant

All these old odds and ends of men. What’s left behind.

No matter how hard you try you never get all of them.

This one time, Russell says, when I first got put on mortuary.

This one time I got the call. And I went out and took a look at what they’d thrown in the back of the truck. And I couldn’t tell if I was looking at his ass or his face. Part of his jaw had done fell off and a tooth rolled out when I pulled out his vest. That’s the truth.

Opposite: Dan Shipsides, Brown Star Nation, Paint on Steel, 2012

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Rotten apples born too late

at end of day the dead fruit falls blown by the wind

laid out on corrugated tin

covered against gunmetal rain gathering a fine dust

of winter flies turning

I can smell it still Brian Kirk

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Sean—chló Luíonn brat deannaigh Ar dromchla an clóscríobháin, Méarchlár meirgeach Sa sean—chló gaelach Le eochracha marbha Don séimhiú, don síniú fada Cnagadh ciúnaithe.

Rusted Relic Drifts of dust muffle the old typewriter’s surface Each dead key is encrusted with rust A forgotten Gaelic font Of blurred syllables And bygone symbols Muted music.

Smothered percussion.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

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Corrosio in the afterlife of a rainstorm

a heartbeat counts down silence

any shift in light or shade

indicates a cloud moving across

or away from the face of the sun

by distorted notions of scale

large elements are miniaturised

small detail tragically magnified

and in-between

symmetric coronas of dark black smoke

reach from the horizon to the heavens

disregardless

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in the afterlife of an afternoon

sunlight oscillates these oiled boards

submerged memories give way

to that dream where

there are iron bridges

collapsing and in-between

fornenst a sumptuous stand

of dark black oak there are

jazz musicians there are

hydroscopic attitudes

resisting the boundaries

of our known world

Barbara A. Morton

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Theo Sims, Thaw, 2012.

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In the Hills In the hills of Víznar, British Petroleum has set up shop where Lorca and thousands of others were shot.

In the hills of Níjar, the legs of the dead goat slung under the tree have landed in a trot. * A watermelon cracked open by an oily fist flashes its guts in a truck bed.

A pregnant woman buys 2 of them as elbows and knees poke her stomach from the inside. * A black-faced bird sits down at the table, gives out hell to me, says to throw away the funeral parlor advertisements attached to the flowers clutched by the dead. * A man holds out his lack-of-hand with its screw-in porcelain cup, asks for change.

The child across from me dressed like a puta tells me to fuck off with her kohled eyes. * Three boys in identical shirts dance in the square where the church wall still says José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

In death slang, they call the host, the body of Christ, a whore.

They promise to shit in the skulls of our dead ancestors.

Kimberly Campanello

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Seized iron brown fleck

on your tongue - stult articulation, bitter as old gunmetal arthritic clench, ill-disposed to sweeten joints - bending over backwards to lock down

the status quo wedged now in gallbladder tram tracks, crying out for Valencian orange oil did you only know how to ask for it instead, inedible tarnished pips stick in your stiffening gullet and eyes flick corneal rust dried blood flinching crust Becky Kilsby

Over: David Hepher, From Aylesbury (Homage To Robert Gober), 2008-10, Courtesy of FlowersGallery www.flowersgalleries.com

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Dingo What have the gulls left at this dark end of the day?

Your coat is rusted in patches now the waves thin whisper arrives at your feet.

You are lost in this story head thrown back howling that miserable hymn.

Eyes more stone than sight, ribs showing the sick weight of breath.

Graham Nunn

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Sarah Mixtapes, Untitled, 2012

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Vision of Rust Ferous filings heated in a closed damp crucible exposed to animal effluvia.

An airtight mass caulking the rims, pipe sockets packed with rings of spun yarn.

Borings, turnings, salt ammoniac, vertical brackets bolted to the baseplate, fixed to the bearing for overhead girders. Flanges concealed with ornamental foliage, metal leaves cast from the true fit of iron bedded on iron. Burrs, snugs, stubs.

Oxydised barrels of cider, vinegarised bungholes open to the air. Baths of water acidulated with sulphuric acid in leaden or wooden vessels, tubs settling on mud at ebb tide, bilge and keel, midship-sulphuretted hydrogen and alkaline sulphides.

The washspace plumbago of chaffed chains, pintles and eyes, an anchor galvanised, rivet heads highly wrought and refined, scoured with sand, deposited in lime.

Plunged into fused zinc, bent and warped out of shape. Nodules and carbuncles.

Plumpen oatseeds sown broadcast on sandy loam, mildew, blight, wire-worm.

Earthen substances sponged and brushed, smoothed through bran and sawdust.

Bricks, potters clay, the surface glaze of Babylonian iron-stained fictile wares.

Gerard Beirne

Opposite: Dan Harvey, (Ackroyd & Harvey), Magnet Mouth, Iron Filings and Slate, 2003

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The Gate They need a context, to eke out their distant echo, undisturbed by cities or freeways, some place desolate perhaps, where bones have settled well below earth, and bats hold on in the favoured dark, where a fox might bark; a place to find comfort among moth-coloured shapes in the unlit gloom, haunted by the passing of a stranger at a gate, its brittle metal rocking on loose hinges, raven-blue grooves indented and weathered; or a stray, looking for a shelter to coil into, away from the cooling air; nature’s dissolution shared with human debris, relic of a blue kettle tipped to one side and growing moss; above the cracked mantel, a thorned heart.

The gate stirs, lifts the torpid air to a condition of unreason, and at any moment they might step across, feel the weight of this rusted gate on a solid leaning arm.

Evening draws in, darkness creeping closer, until the gate is all there is, and even that a shaky prospect, disintegrating under seeping ink.

The night glides its wings, silent as an owl, only the wind to attend those ghosts, knowing there is something they need to say.

The air curls round mounds, trees, stones, like little leaves, to carry sorrows, secrets, lost dreams.

An unlocked gate shudders, creates a breach, invitation to leave.

Afric McGlinchey Page 34

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Fertilia Is Nothing Special Future towns of coal and silver Carbonia

Argenteria

the one he called after himself

this place

where anything might grow

Here Musso’s notions of order

drained egrets with mosquitoes

gave the town hall a watchtower

took people like cuttings to plant

in sticky malarial silt

A model village

girders

blocks

a sketch on squared paper

If hotel space is scant it makes

a reasonable place to sleep

Children and dogs play in its streets

the past is filtered out of them

as reeds around the town’s lagoon

suck filth and breathe it out again

sweetened to feed the fishing lines

suspended from the Roman bridge left disconnected half-submerged

available for photographs.

Gráinne Tobin

Over: David Hepher, From Aylesbury (Homage To Robert Gober), 2008-10, Courtesy of FlowersGallery www.flowersgalleries.com

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Seaside theatre, end of season After ‘Untitled (Living Sculpture)’ by Merisa Merz Wires hang from unmanned gantries, a phone rings, rings, gives up.

In an air heavy with grease-paint, sweat and dust, boards creak, contract into winter.

To the front of the dim stage the janitor comes, silver knees protesting against the years.

In a dressing room he found The Tin Man thrown over a stool, pearly face-paint abandoned near a fly-specked glass.

Somewhere over the rainbow comes out as a croak.

He clears his throat, begins again.

He cannot see the gods, where they used to sit, just the rows in the stalls they could not afford if they wanted a take-out after the show.

The tin janitor sings until the place echoes, until it’s time to lock the doors and post the key back through.

He sings constellations to their rest in a painted sky he cannot see, but knows is there.

All the while this emptiness in his chest, where his heart used to be.

Its absence, like rust, holding the shape of that which is lost.

Vanessa Gebbie

Opposie: Conor McFeely: Untitled 2012.

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ORES We bore holes in us, as if attrition comes naturally.

Water does what water does, slowly builds more layers while time comes on and throws us under inchthick crusts of residue. Slapped on fast, this way and that, varnish up our weakest points so we can’t see despite being flush against the panes – we stay sitting, smoking slowly, refining the crudeness of our gestures until we pump ourselves outside even then, nothing can remind you of the day when our selves glinted, shiny new: hips crackle and spit, and something silver corrugates lips with not quite words slagged out in heaps.

We grow inside houses, this much is clear, yet our hair stays flat, we count the days in single strands.

Reduced to a specimen, a set of samples: hours kept stock in breathing bowls, broken bones pile up with kisses, the taste of iron.

My memories clamber under skies, fuming full of smashed clay pots and the days when our mouths moved, and music came

Benjamin Norris

Opposite: Anne-Marie Glasheen, Bird, 2012

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Stone Lumped in my hand Growing hot suddenly As if a sun were inside A nuclear beginning Atomic explosion tucked in the fist Or a bird’s foetus curled In the stone’s solid centre Learning songs Of the stone’s beginning Its pink lizard head Tucked under a mountain I drop it to the ground It takes root Sprout iron shoots Rusty flakes of leaves Struggles out of its jacket Sprouts eyes a mouth Yawning amazed at the flimsy trees The wind wriggling under its tail Crawls over the battlefield Of petals leaves Grappling the earth With its delicate hands.

David Calcutt

Opposite: Aideen Barry, Rigor Mort Adagio, 2012

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Aubade Fly to Bee: Where you land is what you see. A warbler agreed, having seen rust

story trees, benches of iron, clocks of castles, the Rock* of a country, the brush of

a painter — who saw Bee story a flower. Fly, an eye.

Frog, a water-lily. Fish,

a boat. Mosquito, a bower.

When the wind whirled dust, a cricket landed on

the hub of a wheel attached to a plane taxiing on the tarmac of time and rust.

*Uluru Joyce Parkes

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Peninsula A tongue of brown tin curls on the far shed, ready to be ripped by the next high wind.

On the pier rust rimes cars and winches.

Scrap metal, grassed over by the ditch, slowly turns to burnt-brown grit.

Rust fills every gap in the fields, gnaws iron bedsteads, crumpled oil drums, a wheelbarrow rammed between stones.

Paint cans, old tins of nails leave rings of rust on window ledge and doorstep.

Digging old ground, the spade jars, scrapes out chains; half hinges; broken shears; one side of a rusty tongs- left lying begrudged: never fully let go.

The salt wind brings me in.

I look in the mirror, examine jaundiced eyes; psoriasis.

I retch, taste the bitter tang, spit blood like coffee grounds.

Annette Skade

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Harvest Start with this, bend. Work from the grained spine & back. The ridges of ribs take longer.

Look up. She watches your fingers run along the belt of fibre. Silently, she kneels and picks asparagus tips. They click like cicadas, like a clock.

Start with this, squat. It is clear, today. Outside, you choose bare feet. The wood shavings rain onto your cracked heels. Cedars are dribbled with rust. That bird feeder you hung, dripped.

The curve of arm sloughs off squash-coloured patterns.

Start with this, crouch. Feel the feathered tips; let them brush the back of your hand. Run your hands along their length, drink in their tallness.

Take the small garden knife and snap off stems. Hear each one tick.

Start with this, stoop. Spring will bring rust – overwintered spores shine lime-green braille.

She treats the ferns, wipes clean each stalk.

Creases up over them, folds belly into belly.

Marks rust with red tags. Harvests. Thinks of how we mark, tag, note.

Start with this, bow.

Elizabeth Welsh

Opposite, Denzil Browne, Photographic Darkroom Print, 20 x 16”, 2011 Page 47

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Contributors Kristin Abraham is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus (Subito Press, 2008), and Orange Reminds You of Listening(Elixir Press, 2006); her poem “Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus” was selected for Best New Poets 2005. Additional poetry, lyric essays, and critical essays have appeared in such places as American Letters & Commentary, Rattle, Court Green, LIT, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Journal. She currently teaches English at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, WY, and is Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Spittoon.

Aideen Barry has performed and exhibited her practice extensively both in Ireland and internationally, with recent shows at, Galeria Isabel Hurley, Spain ( 2012) Catherine Clark Gallery, US ( 2011) Millenium Court Arts Centre, UK (2011), the Butler Gallery (2010), the Mermaid Arts Centre (2009) and Headlands Centre for the Arts ( 2011). Significant international projects and group exhibitions include: LISTE, Basel, (2010), Futures, RHA (2009), Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon (2009), The Wexner Center, Ohio (2009), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008) and Artscene, Shanghai (2005).

Her work as an artist takes the form of many media: film, video, performance, sound art, drawing, sculpture and lens based works. Barry lives and works in the west of Ireland.

Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer now living in Canada where he teaches at the University of New Brunswick and is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead, Canada’s oldest literary magazine. His most recent collection of poetry Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual was published by Oberon Press, Fall 2011. He has published two novels including The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars) shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004. His short story Sightings of Bono was adapted into a short film featuring Bono (U2).

This poem is from a new manuscript, The Death Poems.

Other poems from this manuscript have been published or accepted for publication in a large number of international magazines including Magma, Cyphers, Causeway/Cabhsair, The Moth, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Saltzburg Review, The Malahat Review, Ecotone.

Denzil Browne photographically speaking, likes to live in the past as much as possible. Words like megapixel and jpeg make his head spin and he has to retire to a darkened room.

He is currently involved in reviving the utterly obsolete but very beautiful technique of cyanotype printing and exhibited the results in Artlink’s Gallery at fort Dunree in May 2012. In 2010 his solo exhibition ‘Abandoned Donegal’ was launched at Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny and published by Abridged; in 2011 it was exhibited at X-PO, Kilnaboy, Co Clare.

David Calcutt is a playwright and poet, and has also written three novels for young people, published by Oxford University Press. He has many radio plays to his credit, and is currently working on a project in Herefordshire creating poetry with people with dementia. His most recent work is The Ward, a play based on writings by Anton Chekhov, for Midland Actors Theatre. David lives in the West Midlands.

Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana, where she grew up working in her family’s pizza restaurant.

She now lives in Dublin. Her chapbook Spinning Cities was published by Wurm Press (2011). She was the featured poet in the Summer 2010 issue of The Stinging Fly, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several publications including Tears in the Fence, Burning Bush II, and nthposition. She is an editor of Rowboat, a new international magazine dedicated to poetry in translation.

Gerald Dawe’s Selected Poems was published earlier this year by The Gallery Press. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin.

Maurice Devitt, a student at Mater Dei in Dublin, reading for an MA in Poetry Studies. Recently long-listed for the Doire Press Chapbook Competition, during 2011 he was short-listed for both the Fish Poetry prize and the Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition, and was also runner-up in the Phizzfest poetry competition. Over the past twelve months he has had poems accepted by Abridged, Orbis, Moloch, Paraxis, Weary Blues, #firstcut, Stony Thursday, Ofi Press, Bluepepper and Smiths Knoll and is now working towards a first collection.

Moyra Donaldson is a poet and creative writing facilitator, living and working in Co Down. Her fourth collection of poetry, Miracle Fruit was published in November 2010 by Lagan Press, Belfast . Her Selected Poems is forthcoming in September 2012 from Liberties Press, Dublin.

Vanessa Gebbie is a Welsh writer and freelance writing teacher. She is author of two fiction collections and contributing editor of Short Circuit (Salt), a text book on the art of the short story. Her debut novel The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury) was selected as a Financial Times 2011 book of the year. Her poetry has been published both online and in print. www.vanessagebbie.com Anne-Marie Glasheen is a photographic artist, prizewinning poet and literary translator. She is a regular exhibitor and her images, poetry and ‘shorts’ have been published in the UK and abroad. Her first collection of poetry Lines in the Sand was published in 2008 by Bradshaw Books, Cork, Ireland. She lives in London.

Opposite: Blaine O’Donnell, All Things Are Pigment, watercolour, pencil and varnish on Somerset paper, 84x63.5cm, 2010.

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Joanna Grant’s work has previously appeared in Guernica, Verse Monthly, The Southern Women’s Review, The Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and was nominated for inclusion in the volume Best New Poets 2010. She currently serves as a Collegiate Associate Professor and Wandering Scholar for the University of Maryland University College, teaching soldiers English, speech, and humanities courses at various sites in Afghanistan. Thanks to Prairie Schooner for permission to use the poem.

Dan Harvey of artist partnership Ackroyd & Harvey makes time-based interventions that intersect disciplines of sculpture, photography, ecology, architecture and biology. Their work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries, museums and diverse public and found spaces. In 2011, they won the Mapping the Park public art commission in the Olympic Park, ten sculptures acting as a lasting legacy for London 2012. www.ackroydandharvey.com David Hepher, born in Surrey, studied at Camberwell School of Art and then the Slade School of Art. He had solo exhibitions at Whitechapel, Serpentine and Hayward Gallery in consecutive years during the 1970’s and is featured in national collections including Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts Council England and the Contemporary Arts Society. David Hepher’s work is to be included in Out of Britain, National Museum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and was recently shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, East London as part of a series of British Council Collection exhibitions to celebrate their 75th Anniversary. He will also be in Tulca 2012 Festival in Galway, Ireland. He is represented by the Flowers Gallery: http://www.flowersgallery.com Joanna Karolini, born 1978 Wroclaw, Poland. Based in Belfast for the last decade, Karolini’s ambition as an artist is broadly ‘anthropological’: to understand the environment in which she works and to use that knowledge to make a positive contribution. In the public domain Karolini’s projects have taken place in public baths, or former, and involved ideas of cleaning and purification. Her work concerns the ‘invisible’ and almost unacknowledged manual labour of cleaning in relation to organised leisure as cultural phenomenon.

Recent projects include Convergence: ‘Kafka’s Love Letters to Felicie’. Belfast, GT Gallery Limerick, LCGA. (2011), Clean Towels of Ill Nightmares, Russian/Turkish Baths, New York, Performance/Photo/Video/Sound (2010, solo), To All the Local Nymphs, Rimske Toplice (Roman Spa), Slovenia (2007, site-specific work).

Becky Kilsby’s poetry explores emotions, places and situations rooted in her own experience. British by birth and education, she has lived amongst a stimulating mix of cultures in the Middle East for over twenty years. She bounces between free verse and traditional forms such as the villanelle and sonnet.

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer and playwright from Dublin. He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com. His poetry and stories have been published in Boyne Berries, Revival,

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The Stony Thursday Book, Sunday Tribune, Southword, Crannog, Wordlegs, Cancan Poezine, Bare Hands, The First Cut and various anthologies.

Rachel Mc Donnell is a multi-disciplinary artist who recently graduated from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2011 with a B.A (hons) Degree in Fine Art. Whilst completing her Degree in 2009 she co-founded Basement Project Space an artist-led inititive based in Cork City.

She currently lives and works between Mayo and Limerick City, Ireland. Web :www.rachelmcdonnell.wordpress.com email: rachelmcdon@gmail.com Conor McFeely is an artist living and working in Derry.

He works with video, sound, sculpture and installation. His works have been characterised by an idiosyncratic use of materials and media. The contexts for these works have been varied and include references to cult literature, cinema, art history and social and political contexts amongst others.

Afric McGlinchey’s just published début collection is The Lucky Star of Hidden Things, (Salmon). She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been commended in several poetry prizes, including the Magma poetry award (2012) and the Dromineer poetry award (2011). She won the Hennessy Emerging Poetry Award in 2011. Afric lives in West Cork.

Sarah Mixtapes is an occasional zine producer turned occasional blogger, currently based between Dublin and County Meath. She works mainly in small notebooks, with glue and found paper objects, and rarely shows these to the world. She shares the photos she takes on aharesrush. blogspot.com Barbara A. Morton writes essays, stories and poetry. She is the recipient of a Tyrone Guthrie Writers Award and in 2011 was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. Her writing is published in national and international journals and anthologies.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa grew up in County Clare. Her poetry has been published in many journals, both in Ireland and internationally. Doireann was among the prize-winners in the emerging writer category at the Oireachtas literary awards 2010, and was shortlisted in Comórtas Uí Néill, both in 2011 and 2012. The Arts Council has awarded her a literature bursary.

She was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. Her debut collection, Résheoid and her second collection Dúlasair are both published by Coiscéim.

Fiona Ní Mhaoilir is a visual artist based in Belfast since 1997. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in both public and private collections.

Walking:thinking,thinking about thinking, and not thinking - the site of a happy hippocampus. -extract from Ní Mhaoilir’s visual diary 2012.

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Benjamin Norris is a writer and lecturer currently residing in Budapest, where he teaches Indian Cultural Studies at a leading architecture university. His poetry and prose attempts to combine the mythic with the mundane, and to expose them to be two sides of the same coin. He has been published in several magazines, collections and on many online poetry journals. He is currently working on a novel and a screenplay.

Graham Nunn blogs at Another Lost Shark: www. anotherlostshark.com and has published five collections of poetry, his most recent, Ocean Hearted, published by Another Lost Shark Publications. In 2011, Nunn was the recipient of The Johnno Award for outstanding contribution to Queensland Writers and Writing.

Blaine O’Donnell (Northern Ireland, 1986) is a visual artist.

He graduated BA (Honours) in Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2009. Recent group exhibitions include Spectrum of Activity, Black Mariah, Cork (2011) curated by Padraic E. Moore. Recent solo exhibitions include Table-Fables, Void Community Space, Derry (2011) and ZENITH, Ulster Hall, Belfast (2011/12). He currently occupies studio space at Void, Derry, Northern Ireland. www.blaineodonnell.com Joyce Parkes has previously published her work in Literary Magazines, Journals and Anthologies in Australia, Finland, the UK, Canada, the US, Germany, and New Zealand. She is in dialogue with inclusion, rejection, irony and empathy.

Dan Shipsides is an artist based in Orchid Studios in Belfast and is also a lecturer and researcher at the School of Art & Design at the University of Ulster. Since 2004 he also has a collaborative practice with Neal Beggs as Shipsides & Beggs Projects. In 2004 he was awarded the ACNI Major Artist Award, in 2000 won the Nissan Art award IMMA (Bamboo Support) Dublin and 1998 won the Perspective award, OBG, Belfast (The Stone Bridge). Recent solo and group exhibitions include; The Third Space Gallery, Belfast (Bivacco|Star), Aliceday, Brussels (Vigil|Star), South London Gallery (Games & Theory), Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (Radical Architecture), Wings Project Art Space, Switzerland (Performance), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (Elastic Frontiers), Konsthall C / Lava Kulturhuset, Stockholm (Under plattan, ängen!), Platform Garanti, Istanbul (Hit & Run), Riga Sculpture Quadrennial, Latvia (European Space), Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (Beta), Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (Pioneers), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (Sporting Life). Smart, Amsterdam (Endure), Gimpel Fils, London (Nature/Culture), Melbourne International Biennial, (Signs of Life).

Theo Sims, (b. Brighton, England), recently ended his tenure as Director of the Context Gallery, Derry, (200820011) to focus on his own art. Sims Studied Fine Art at The Winchester School Of Art (Foundation Studies) and Brighton Polytechnic (BFA) before receiving an MFA from the University of Ulster, in Belfast in 1994. He moved to Canada in 1998. He was Co-managing Editor of BlackFlash magazine from 2001-2004 and Programming Coordinator of Winnipeg’s Aceartinc. From 2004-2008. Theo Sims has exhibited extensively across Canada and Europe in the past two decades. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Macleans, Canadian Art, C magazine, Border Crossings, Circa and BlackFlash.

Annette Skade grew up in Manchester and has lived in West Cork for 22 years. Her poems have recently been published in the Shop Poetry Magazine. In 2010 she was awarded first place in the Poets meet Painters Competition and her work appears in that anthology.

Grainne Tobin lives in Newcastle, Co Down. Poetry collections are Banjaxed (2001) and The Nervous Flyer’s Companion (2010). Member of the Word of Mouth Poetry Collective.

Shelley Tracey is a South African poet and educator who has been living in Northern Ireland for twenty years. Her poems and short stories have been published in a range of local, national and international publications. As coordinator of a professional qualifications programme for adult literacy tutors at Queen’s University Belfast from 20022012, she is an advocate for reading and writing poetry to enhance confidence in literacy learning.

Elizabeth Welsh is a freelance editor, originally from New Zealand and now living in South London. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in numerous online and print journals. She is currently writing a chapter for a collection of Katherine Mansfield essays and is a doctoral candidate.

Gerald Yelle teaches high school English. He has poems in recent editions of Citizens for Decent Literature, Prick of the Spindle and The Straddler. He is a member of the Florence (MA) Poets Society. Blog and links can be found at geraldyelle.blogspot.com.

Abridged Personnel Project Coordinator/Editor: Gregory McCartney: Planning, plotting and mooching majestically.

Editorial Assistant: Susanna Galbraith: A levels complete and ready for literary paddling to become a consistent wade; ripples to waves. The horrors of funding applications and photocopiers await.

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Residencies & Projects Programmed at The Intersection of Rural Archives, Agrarian Industries & Contemporary Art

David Farquhar, Garden Boat, 2012

For more info see www.artlink.ie or contact info@artlink.ie

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What Became of the People We Used to Be? Tulca 2012 November Galway, Ireland Curated by Gregory McCartney Abridged www.tulca.ie www.abridgedonline.com

Image Nadege Meriau, Solanium Tuberousm VI, 2011

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inside front cover Void Advert