Icarus vol. 67 no. 3 (2017)

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ICARUS MAGAZINE

VOLUME LXVII, ISSUE III

Trinity College Dublin © Trinity Publications 2017

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EDITORIAL ‘You know there is no other poet on earth like me. I know there is no other poet on the earth like you. We need to be read. This is the theme of poetry, now.’

— Frank Stanford Some lovely and well-meaning people, many of whom are good friends of ours, have referred to this erstwhile-present volume of Icarus as ‘experimental’. There is, of course, some truth in this, if the precondition of experimentation is not knowing what one is doing. If I were to write out the entirety of Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle’ from memory, it would probably be an experiment, although I don’t suppose this sort of experiment would be particularly worth my time.

Reflecting on the year, we are happy to have published a number of writers ‘outside’ Trinity who, through their work as editors, organizers, and critics, have helped poetry to be read. Thanks as well to our contributors, whose work, as time forks off into innumerable and increasingly perilous futures, has served continually to remind us that the potentialities for human expression will persist in excess of that with which we are expected to be satisfied.

Thanks to Gill and best of luck to Sean and Sophie with the next volume.

Thanks to our friends, who made this the wonderful fiscal year that it was and who showed up to Cave Writings (almost) every time. We also owe a great deal to Maurice Scully, without whose help very little of this would have been possible. Thanks to Ed for his unwavering support. Thanks to Paul Muldoon for dinner, if he’s reading this, and to Furry Lewis. Hi, Nath.

— Leo Dunsker & Will Fleming Icarus 67.3 (Trinity 2017) is proud to present work from Randolph Healy, Kit Fryatt, Billy Mills, and Sarah Hayden, alongside work from within the College.

Icarus acknowledges Trinity Publications and the School of English, as well as Gemini International Ltd, for making this issue possible.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, Mandela House, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

Information concerning copyright and permissions can be found at www [dot] icarusmagazine [dot] com.

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CHIEF EDITORS

Leo Dunsker & Will Fleming EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER

Sean Pierson

Gillian Murtagh

CONTENTS Cover: The Belle and the Bones

by NATHANAËL ROMAN FEATURED: RANDOLPH HEALY

What Are You At? Omelette Dalek Not Included Morning Came Early Except When The Night Was Long

5 6 8 10

I,I

by GISÈLE SCALON

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In the time-lapse / footage

by COLETTE BRYCE

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Anadromous

by ALDEN MATHIEU

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It was still bright at 7

by ED SALLEY

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Ball Poem & Birthday Poem

by ED SALLEY & LEO DUNSKER

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Lil’ Totient’s Locus Solus

by SOPHIE FITZPATRICK

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Pros of the Transsiberian & little Flint of the Ronson FEATURED: KIT FRYATT

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xoxo

by MOLLY-MAY O’LEARY

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Something called Negative out of the Dead and the New

by SEAN PIERSON

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The Corpus Clock

by GERALD DAWE

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One thing of ‘last things’

by CIAR MCCORMICK

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why am i so sensitive

by ED SALLEY

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Molloy and the Knife-Rest

by BENJAMIN KEATINGE

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Landscape

by JAY MULHALL

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The Revolutionist

by CIARÁN O’ROURKE

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Entries of a non-lucid

by MICHELLE NICOLAOU

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from Uncertain Songs FEATURED: BILLY MILLS

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from <sitevisit> FEATURED: SARAH HAYDEN

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Contributors

68

Editors

71

Back Matter

72

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What Are You At? FEATURED: RANDOLPH HEALY Well, you tell me. I suppose that anything can be a poem, though not if it doesn’t want to. Or a poem should be at least as interesting as a good conversation. That said, I’ve been informed that what I write isn’t poetry. Which is fine. I’ve also read several statements which have been incorrectly attributed to me. For example, that I am part of a neo-avant-garde (No, but thanks anyway.), or that I don’t consider myself to be an Irish poet (Who wouldn’t want to be an Irish poet?), or that, poor, ticketless item in poetry’s lost-and-found, I fruitlessly seek recognition (Nonsense. My wife knows who I am, and so do I quite often). There is a unique line between any two points. Though this only works if the points have neither length nor breadth. And the line has no width.

Not so easy to draw. Some hypothesise that poetry should be simple. That’s the sort of thinking that could, paradoxically, lead to texts aimed at imagined beings who never read or to works of effortless brilliance. Others swear that poetry should be rebarbative, politicised, subversive. Here, the gamut runs from the dull but innovative to the exhilaratingly engaged. Anyway, thanks to the first hominid who proto-linguistically gargled to achieve ecstasy or to entertain and instruct his or her mates. In less than five billion years an expansive sun will lose some of its gravity and what’s left of the earth will be on the inside. Who could do with a lift?

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Omelette FEATURED: RANDOLPH HEALY

“Dead is dead” said Tom going for mirth, remorse, or toddler’s tondo.

O ear you so little choose what enters you.

A pole is a pole.

Wax is wax.

Ken is Dodd.

Phallic symbols used to be smaller and floppier then.

You could say a lot about Désiré’s sword and I got the en pointe but not the other connection.

But who’s to tell if you can’t return from afters?

Winklepickers were big then and ducks such magical animals, lords and ladies of water, earth and air.

But not so much the walking.

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Sean got really short when I said that I thought we were animals.

The first craw fell.

Forgive me.

The world being an egg, it was much harder to get in or out without causing damage.

Those at the edge had less hold and less to hold them those at the centre declined imitations.

Then after a change of tense equalityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s victory was complete and conversation redundant.

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Dalek Not Included FEATURED: RANDOLPH HEALY Why did I risk this milk ranker than if the herd had smoked forty a day while snacking on salmon?

Talk as in tawk the l bowing out the a changing shape for its new Platonic vessel or round two with a virus.

Twenty four hours on a train and they didn’t get my jokes the silence getting thicker and thicker.

It didn’t help when I leaned on my fork and bent it they having put out the silver.

Shouting in the kitchen.

I like that talk ends in a k.

Otherwise it would be talc.

Crossing the bridge I tensed seeing a man thump a woman.

“I think it’s wrong,” I offered.

“You’re a traveller,” he replied, “You know how it stands.”

I’d no idea why he was dragging in Ozymandias.

Yonks later I realised what he meant.

“Where’s the real stuff in life

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to cling to?” sings Tony not really interrogatively, prepositions concerning themselves with charm rather than logic.

I can still smell the sacks in the post-office bag room and those men three quarters dust moving as if stuck in Zeno’s paradox.

It’s amazing what can work.

The woman who invented magic knickers is now a billionaire.

When my sisters didn’t want to wash their hair they would douse it with talc then brush it out.

Teenage-I tried it once but got the dose wrong aging a decade per minute frantic brushing only increasing oil production.

People laughed in the street.

Happiness is closer than you think.

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Morning Came Early Except When The Night Was Long FEATURED: RANDOLPH HEALY

A tribe in the South have a dance that encodes a recipe for a particularly delicious soup.

It’s not something they do at weddings but it’s a good dance for a cold winter’s night.

Spiderman, in his best costume, went over to the Fantastic Four and asked if he could join.

“There’d still be as much alliteration,” he explained.

“We’re good with four,” they said.

He lost a lot of weight after that.

In the end, his dead uncle appeared and pleaded, “Look, Pete, do it because it’s the right thing to do.

Forget about that floozy and the bad reviews.

And for Christ’s sake stop whining.”

How we loved our old volcano.

Even after it became extinct we still went to visit it.

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Harrowing, of course. But respect.

Then a risible tide shaved all goats.

And we didn’t even have a snorkel.

In the world’s most inflated democracy, the Placeholder’s new scrotum experienced mechanical failure. Cameras were deep-fried and the building wrapped in alufoil. Officials applied an emergency amalgam of parental ashes and a relic of the probable cross while facing east. Nevertheless, his unknowable onions continued to fill all available space. A new commander could not be appointed until the old one had passed through a cetacean digestive system. “All in a flayed dork,” he quipped, ambergris glistening in the artificial moonlight.

We placed magnets in the pattern of the Cayman islands so that only attractive females would enter. However, they smelled slightly of seaweed or rubber and their species could not be guaranteed.

Members of the International Space Mushroom evacuated when its stalk was hit by junk bonds moving at a rate of over fifty thousand dollars a second.

Replacement spores had to be germinated on the pseudopodia of a foster caterpillar.

At the end of the day, it was simple as adding the square of the sum of the components of the unit circle to the square of their difference to get the sum of squares of the sine and cosine of theta plus twice their product plus the sum of their squares minus twice their product.

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I,I

by GISÈLE SCANLON (After Hayden Carruth) Now, I come down to exactness. Before too long I am going to have to observe.

And I want to say the starting point, the place where I begin, is where my blood is, or is it my mind and where it begins?

Next my grandfather and his only son and My mother, an attempt to understand now what I struggled with as a young girl. For I know I watched myself – the self, watching another self because I was the eldest – a girl.

And I want to mention the neighbours, or maybe that is a meaning I don’t want, these others watching the watcher, where are they? The self that watches in glass the face of the self on the hill, then another self, my own face looking back at me at night.

Father brought me to the nearby town, my first time, to watch the watchers watching.

I was dispatched into a back room to meet the watchers who gave me food, and I was alone, no other woman would venture in there. It was me and the watchers. Was it my first time seeing?

Perhaps. My comfortable body let my mind go freely to its gathering of soup and sandwiches.

The room had a huge mirrored wall, so that I

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saw a watcher watching me, considering me, another beyond another, and I tried then to gaze farther than them into the distance To see the me in succession, to consider Me in the shadows of the watchers. I stood rigid And peered at myself. The soup man waggled paper change and piled my arms with Styrofoam cups of brown oxtail and I stepped down from the counter and ran from the hall of mirrors to find my father.

Five miles to home, to my own room with no mirror.

I had myself now, diminutive in the shadows.

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In the time-lapse / footage

by COLETTE BRYCE In the time-lapse footage of the decomposition of a pear, a light lace crust appears and devours the fruit which collapses in on itself like a beast brought down by a pack.

Always, fungi is feasting, working its quick saprotrophic magic on all matter, even this seasonal litter I’ve just finished clearing from your grave, your shelf of the earth, yes you, who don’t even realise you’re dead.

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Anadromous

by ALDEN MATHIEU these days are small, filled with Stygian sunsets and drowsy late-night mornings followed by toast and beans and silence, three times to Dublin, striding east and west and coffee in the arcade, and tea in the house, and baklava smearing honeysweet lips houses standing foursquare all upright in a row, for miles, for years & my nights are wilder now, quieter but incandescent, the billion stars, a million breaths, a thousand roads I might have taken, a single word here, whitewashed, humming with small songs, articulate hands with insect-leg bows broad-leafed pages and plants my hands ache with speech, my mouth aches with thought, my waking and sleeping and waking again so small, my needs so small, like an infant reborn into old age, books and bread and beer, hungry for thoughts and sex and argument, hungry to be drunk and alive, hungry to stay awhile and grow like a tree, instead of rough-handled potted, my viridescent leaves all straining and falling away soon these pale days will ripen, white blossoms budding into fruit, like strawberries bleeding into sweetness, but until then

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I have my own sour fruits to savor my small wounds to nurse, half-remembered lyrics and broken cups, an artefact of a man both myself and dead, building an idea so noble even children know it false, giving myself away like the receding tide: these lost years I gave up, my heart locked in a chest, my head aflame, the woman I killed, the corpse I ate, the tears, bruises brilliant like blackcurrants the river running through it, the water under the words, red-bellied past which I chased through alleys as it hid, around corners, piscine; I laid down in channels, in beds, in streams: it was me I am alive I speak I grow here in the west isle where I with two suitcases set up shop and sold insanity, my own hysteria sweet as corn the gold blazon of sun rimed in a silver corona of mist, erasing the links, the road, the valley until my days are short as mayflies, tracing the lines of your back, soft, invisible

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It was still bright at 7

by ED SALLEY I like being a human being with a deal I am not about the automobile a question of experience one time I had to moleskine in public did I ever tell you that? sometimes itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really nice to have a beer in public What think ye of Christ the ghost of W. C. Williams

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Birthday Poem

by ED SALLEY & LEO DUNSKER

Bent like pieces of steel My lucid wet dream a drink w/ Isaac Hayes I am tearing myself apart onscreen.

Hi Nath, had to drop off the vitamins Everyone is suffering crime.

I can stay in your basement, just don’t tell me it’s raining. They laughed when I demanded a 9,000 year lease, not in this economy.

Learning the lessons of “The Poems” my dream I fucked a 6’4” woman in her early forties who worked in a retirement home on her lunch break.

That one will stay with me; it sounded like he was lying down.

The only horse I have in this race is the dead one I’ve been beating for years Kill me like teen lit

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Ball Poem

by ED SALLEY & LEO DUNSKER

Try not to account for the continuity errors, Sorry Nath, 6:15 AM I know I haven’t been “in touch” lately. I can hear the choices in my head: consider this intimate gesture a clear standout the act of transcription like soundtracking dreams – how to cut out the middleman. How Beefheart fucked like a political statement. Me and Bobby are going to party forever, if it isn’t broke don’t fix it. We could chill to some hardcore like a cold hand in the ear. We could pass Bill Gates, etc. etc.

Nothing chosen can be unbearable, nothing unbearable can be chosen.

Tomorrow I wake and write again and would bury you out back given half a chance.

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Lil’ Totient’s Locus Solus

by SOPHIE FITZPATRICK 14.

I said you were spiced nicely.

Wall in my body somewhere Continuous self that paused the burnt bush 13.

Need to buy this cloak and look less childlike Mulberry silk Worms with teeth in them and on the beach they have anaesthetic in their saliva so you never feel them eating your flesh a flashback I’m sorry I didn’t tell you If they had been real then you would have been screwed fleshwise but was terrified I hope you wear it well 12.

What does present itself ?

Voices blurring each other that’s just what i needed.

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11. “cavailles was a resistance fighter for reasons of logic.”

Not to be looked up Moooorph.

Look Dupe when i get upset i hug who i am with so that they cannot use my face then i use their shoulder as a sort of prop to stabilise my cheek muscles that go all droopy at those times and the stitching on their clothes usually works a treat a quote?

10. i made a menu it’s really me how bothered people stand i stood like that too the difference is in thought how do you think you stand i find myself standing more and more and look at the chair i thought i was (sitting?) on i keep standing on chairs self correction egg-skin-legged pressure and dampness pulling and tightness of the jaw in bed

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warm need to stretch smooth plastic and a running tongue too far two far reaching hands longer than a piece of string chuckling and doing the dishes five pieces of paper folded the same by different hands all copying each other but it worked out just fine so shoes on newspaper 9. â&#x20AC;&#x153;im not hiding anything im just asking you personal questions.â&#x20AC;? this is not my hybrid place-escape google search result; get a job there Pinpoint what is gold encrusted.

I want real diamonds that smell like real pussy. i am a lonely lady not to be looked at 8.02 winter break begins feminist flow: spoken word tie me to an anchor No. Your criticisms are bad. period cramps. i feel a piece of shit lurking in my spine.

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growing?

a good spurt.

what if i am never forgotten ?

my sweet centenary.

we all imagine minds and wait out?

fringing of face surprised.

when i die there are no sinners left 7. walk walk pressure ugh valves steep blood flow gross concussion tell on me again and i sewer your brains revolution.

6. wants to die in the wild because his hands are too soft. He wants to feel Mother Earth with his hard hands. we have female orgasm so that we can explode. guitar is your first language; a hero w ten thousand faeces.

Ruckus. My phone says youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve fucked up your life enough.

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5.50. you have to admire someone practice makes perfect i have a problem that needs to be solved right away. we should hang out some time lots lots lots there is no fine literature without all my friends 4.

I am so glad I tell the truth Stare in filthy mirrors say what looks good I will be honoured (practice makes perfect) It’s a date.

First idealised house Then idealised passion Fishing and thinking Thinking and fishing This time you won’t look bored. pain in my ear today’s quote; get out of bed

(oscar wilde)

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you have to admire someone I have stopped looking for or caring about any real enemies I want to pinpoint what is gold encrusted.

Do not look that up.

3.30. someone said hi and i went home crying ran myself over my best single life Fine tuned This is where boiled water began 2.

Sinusoidial day Monday Could not make out distinct words people were saying today.

Every year one million art students do their final year project on tea.

Vibrations work and the earth shakes. Exceptional! This is where boiled water began.

1. if they need you they keep you. i keep you tucked tight ticketed forever my memory. go away. (i can remember forever.

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i am a lonely lady) let’s not take responsibility for this. now I’m reading like I’m running let’s get married now you cry until I go to sleep 0. i spent the night when you was sleeping thinking about attending your funeral and the friends i would make there. (lots lots lots) (get out of bed?)

I’m so glad to mean what I say.

I’m so glad I’m honest.

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Pros of the Transsiberian & little Flint of the Ronson FEATURED: KIT FRYATT Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, Blaise Cendrars’ hallucinatory account of a railway journey from Moscow to Harbin, set against the violent backdrop of the Russo-Japanese war, was written in 1913 in collaboration with the artist Sonia Delauney and produced as a limited-edition artists’ book. Since then it has been translated into English many times. With this version, I’ve tried to do something slightly different: to represent Cendrars’ tale from the point of view of his ‘companion’, Jeanne (or Jehanne, as the name is spelled in the first edition). Jeanne is a part of Cendrars’ own consciousness, so much of the translation is quite literal. But in places the points change, the narratives diverge and then re-encounter one another.

K.F., Dublin 2017

*** for the unsung Back then I was in my teens (nor am I out of them) barely 500 years dead and I wouldn’t remember my childhood if you paid me, and though (pace little Flint) I don’t think you can be 16.000 leagues from anywhere on the face of the earth I was a tidy steppe from my birthplace I was in Moscow, city of one thousand and three campaniles and 7 railway stations and I hadn’t got enough already of the 1003 campaniles and seven railway stations because my flaming adolescence was such a drag that my heart was burning, turn and turnabout, like the Temple of Artemis with a herostratic love, or like Red Square in Moscow when the sun goes down.

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My eyes were lighting out down those old roads and I was such a crappy muse I didn’t even know how to get myself there.

The Kremlin was like a huge cake with royal icing crusted with gold hundreds and thousands, with the blanched almonds of cathedrals and the honey gold of bells.

An old nun was telling me tales of Baba Yaga, I was dry and decrypting Linear A when the Pentecostal pigeons flocked over the square and my hands flew up alongside, with the bruising whizz of an albatross and these are my last memories of the last day of the very last journey and of the sea.

Nonetheless, I was such a shitty muse I didn’t even know how to get myself there.

I was hollow and all the days and all the fellows in the cafés and glass upon glass I wanted to take them and break them and the shopfronts and the streets and all the houses and the lives and the wheels of the hackneys raising tornadoes over the potholes I wanted to shovel them into a blacksmith’s forge I wanted to grind their bones and rip out their tongues liquidate their sublime bodies, strange & naked under maddening clothes…

I have seen the coming of the terrible red Christ of the Russian Revolution and the sun was a hideous lesion spitting and splitting like firesteel.

Back then I was in my teens (nor am I out of them) and I still didn’t remember nothing about my birthplace already I was in Moscow, wanting to be a fire-eater and I couldn’t get enough of the towers and the stations, rubbing against a flinty substance that formed a constellation of sparks in my eyes sufficient to light an acetylene lamp in the wildest wind.

In Siberia the artillery hammered – it was war.

Hunger cold disease cholera

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And the turbid water of Heilong Jiang was bearing its freight of human carrion In the stations I saw the last trains leave, no-one could leave because there were no more tickets for sale and the soldiers who were leaving would rather have stayed.

An old nun sang to me: I smell the blood of Russia, the Russian smell.

And I, the worst muse, who didn’t want to go anywhere specially, could’ve gone anywhere.

And of course the entrepreneurs still had plenty of cash to make their fortunes with.

Their train left every Friday morning.

There was talk of a lot of deaths.

Someone brought a hundred cases of alarm-clocks and Black Forest cuckoo clocks someone else, hatboxes and stovepipes and corkscrews of Sheffield steel someone else, coffins from Malmö full of jam and sardines Then there were a lot of women touting their thigh-gaps which (said Flint) would also service or serve as, I didn’t quite catch it, coffins but they all had license to trade there was talk of a lot of deaths out there they rode concession rate and even had current accounts.

Now, one morning it was little Flint’s turn It was in December I left too, keeping company with a traveller in jewellery on his way to Harbin We had two coupes in the express and 34 caskets of jewellery from Pforzheim German carbuncles, made in Germany He’d got Flint all togged out in new clobber but getting on the train he lost a button I remember I remember but I think sometimes Flint forgets that we were just a pair of catamites to a travelling tatmonger and if anything it was me who got him the gig.

We slept on the caskets and I was on top of the world, playing with the Ronson Pist-o-Liter the old fruit had given me (Flint had a nickel-plated Browning) We were happy and carefree We made believe we were bandits We had stolen the treasure of Golkonda and by the grace of God and the Transsiberian railway, were going to hide it on the other side of the world

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Flint defended the loot while I was the robbers coming down from the Urals to attack the mountebanks in Jules Verne I was the Honghuzi, the Chinese Boxers and furious Mongolian horsemen and the Forty Thieves and the henchmen of the terrible Old Man of the Mountain and, most modern of all Raffles and Bunny and all those international men of mystery.

And yet, and yet Flint was sad, crying like a baby The rhythms of the train The American headshrinkers, they have this thing they call railroad neurasthenia: the doors banging, voices and axle-grinding on the frozen track the golden filament of futurity his Browning and the piano and the oaths of the oafs playing cards next door the underwhelming presence of Little Flint the man in the tinted spectacles who nervously prowled the corridor and looked in at him missing a trick ladies zhooshing about the steam whistle and the perpetual din of the wheels tumbling along a wild and groovy sky windows iced up à rebours!

Behind, the Siberian plains, the low sky and the massive umbrage of silence, up and down.

Little Flint in his plaid parti-coloured like his life which has kept him no warmer than that Caledonian rug (I’ll shelter thee, I’ll shelter thee) the whole of Europe seen through the windcheater that is an express going full steam ahead is no richer than my life my poor life this rug raveling out on these caskets full of gold we roll along with them as we dream as we smoke and the only glimmer in the universe is a poor thought…

I just about laugh myself to mortal tears if I think, oh Lord of Love, of my mate he’s just a kid, who I found

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pale, virginal and spotty, out back of the knocking-shop where I, assistant deputy bottlewasher-in- chief was stacking crates and he came cooling his cold feet.

I had a couple of chits in my arse pocket, messages to buy and deliver and I said come along for the ride.

He’s only a ginger kid, never laughs, is sad, smiles, cries way too much.

There’s something in his eyes, though, the poignant heraldic spike of the fleur de lys call it the yellow flag of his disposition, or of France.

He’s rude and noisy and full of complaint he’d tempt the tried patience of a goddamn saint any road along we wore out a lot of shoeleather that evening and somehow wound up in the Metropol courtesy of our patron, the seller of kickshaws, I fucked Flint up the arse he gave me head and the merchant turned on us a glittering currant-black eye.

It was Flint he really wanted he bought him a new suit and a revolver and all I got was a novelty lighter but I said we came as a pair because we did (spectacularly) because what harm can come to two of you? because despite it all, he’s my darling all other guys seem to come wrapped in leopardskin and barbells my poor imp is so lonely, so naked that when I grip his hips and give it to him his midriff melts it’s like he has no body at all, he can’t afford one.

He’s just a spark in charcloth, the fleur de lys, with its poignant heraldic spike cold and lonely, the bloom already going off I could laugh myself to tears thinking of his heart.

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Anyway, I just wanted to set that straight because when Flint tells it it gets maudlin.

And this night is just like a thousand others, a train weaving through it big star falling and a pair of lost boys, even if one of them is a girl, love to make love.

The sky is like the tattered canvas of a twopenny ha’penny big top in a fishing village in Flanders the sun is a smoky lamp and up on the flying trapeze, in the shape of a moon, is a woman.

The hautboy, sackbut, the reedy flute and broken tabor and here is my cradle my cradle it was always by the pianola, when my mother, like Clive Durham, fed Tchaikovsky into it I spent my childhood in the Temple of Artemis and the School of Life, behind the trains pulling out of the station now I pull the trains behind me Basel-Timbuktu I’ve had a flutter at Ascot and Longchamps Paris-New York Now the trains run in harness with my life Madrid-Stockholm and I’ve lost all those Super Yankees There’s nothing for it but Patagonia, Patagonia can ease my vast melancholy, Patagonia and a South Sea voyage I am on my way I am always on my way I’m on my way with little Flint of the Ronson.

The train takes one gigantic bound and lands on its treads.

The train lands on its treads.

The train always lands on its treads.

‘I say, Flint,’ I say (it’s our little joke) ‘are we there yet?’

‘You’re a long way from Montmartre,’ he says, ‘you’ve been trundling along for seven days, ‘far from the Butte, that brought you up by hand, from the bosom of Sacre Coeur ‘that you nuzzled ‘Paris has gone up in a huge conflagration ‘there are just flinders falling back ‘the rain falling ‘the turf bulging ‘Siberia turning, turning, ‘heavy snowdrifts piling, ‘the chimes of madness trembling like one last desire in the grey-blue air

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‘the train pounding in the heart of the leaden horizon ‘and your misery chuckles…’

‘I say, Flint,’ I say (it’s our little joke) ‘are we there yet?’

‘Worries, ‘forget your worries ‘all the peeling, carious stations along the way, ‘the telegraph wires they dangle from, ‘the poles that gesture as if to strangle them ‘the world stretches out, elongates like a concertina ‘like the lonesome whistle of a blues harp ‘tormented by a sadistic hand, ‘through rents in the sky, fierce engines ‘flee ‘the whirling wheels the mouths the voices ‘hellhounds on our trail ‘the demons are let slip ‘any old iron ‘everything’s a false accord ‘the yaketty-yak of the wheels ‘shocks ‘rebounds ‘we’re a tempest in a deaf skull…’

‘I say, Flint,’ I say (it’s our little joke) ‘are we there yet?’

‘Yeah right, you’re wearing me down and out, you know full well we’re far out and in deep ‘sweltering madness brangling in the engine ‘plague and cholera rise like burning brands around us ‘we’re heading into war like it’s a tunnel, uh-huh, going through the tunnel of war ‘Famine, that bitch, snatches at routed clouds ‘and shits rotting corpses on the battlefield ‘do as she does, get to it…’

(I love him when he talks smack like that, he thinks it’s smart, OK?) ‘I say, Flint,’ I say (it’s our little joke) ‘are we there yet?’

‘Yes we are we fucking are ‘all the scapegoats have crashed out in the desert ‘can you hear the bells on this scabby lot, more cowbell ‘Tomsk, Chelyabinsk, Kainsk, river Obi, Taïchet, Verkné-Oudinsk, a lych-barrow, Samara, the dreaming cloudcapped spires of K’un Lun… ‘Death in Manchuria ‘is our destination and last resort

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‘this is a bad trip ‘yesterday morning ‘Lucky’s hair turned white, (most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible) ‘and Kolya Nicolaï Ivanovitch has been biting his nails to the quick for a fortnight ‘do as Death and Famine do, get to it ‘if it costs a tanner, on the Transiberian it costs a tenner ‘set the seats on fire and hide your blush under a bushel ‘Old Nick’s on the old joanna, ‘his gnarly fingering gets the old dears going ‘Nature ‘hey Fanny ‘get to it till we get to Harbin…’

‘I say, Flint,’ I say (it’s our little joke) ‘are we there yet?’

‘No, give me rest, leave me alone…

‘Your hipbones jut ‘your stomach’s upset and you’re gone with the gonny ‘that’s what Paris dropped into your lap ‘you got a bit of soul, because you’re unhappy ‘I’m sorry, sorry for you, come here to me, let me clasp you to my heart ‘the wheels are windmills in the land of makebelieve ‘and the windmills are a beggar’s whirling crutches ‘we’re legless in space ‘we trundle on our four stumps ‘our wings have been clipped ‘the wings of our cardinal sins ‘and all trains are the devil’s playthings ‘coop, coop ‘the modern world ‘speed gets you nowhere ‘the modern world ‘distances are all too distant ‘at the end of the road it’s terrible to be a man with a woman.’

(Lucky he’s not, then, isn’t it?)

‘I say, Flint,’ I say for the last time (it’s our little joke) ‘are we far from Montmartre?’

‘I’m sorry, sorry for you, come here close to me I’m going to tell you a story ‘Come into my bed, ‘let me clasp you to my heart ‘I’m going to tell you a story ‘Oh come, come!’

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‘In Fiji spring springs eternally, ‘languour, ‘lovers swoon in the tall grass and burning pox lurks among the banana trees ‘come to the lost isles of the Pacific ‘they have names like Phoenix, the Marquesas ‘Borneo and Java ‘and Celebes, shaped like an elephant.’

‘We can’t go to Japan ‘Come to Mexico ‘on the high plateaux tulips bloom ‘the creeping lianas are the sun’s elaborate coiffure ‘it’s like a painter’s palette and brushes ‘colours as noisy as a gong ‘Rousseau was here,’ (he wasn’t) ‘and it marked him for life ‘it is a land of birds ‘the bird of paradise, the lyre bird ‘the toucan, the mocking bird ‘and the hummingbird nesting in the heart of a black lily ‘we’ll make love in the magnificent ruins of an Aztec temple ‘you’ll be my idol ‘a gaudy, infantile idol, a bit ugly and bizarrely strange ‘Come!’

‘If you like we’ll get in an aeroplane and fly over the land of a thousand lakes ‘nights there are long beyond measure ‘our prehistoric ancestors will be scared of the engine noise ‘and I’ll build a hangar for my plane with mammoth fossils ‘the pristine fire will rekindle our poor love ‘a samovar ‘and we’ll make fine suburban love at the Pole, ‘Oh come!’

‘Jeanne Jeannette Ninette ninny baby-blanky booby ‘me oh my mama namby-pamby my Newfoundland ‘dodo jumbo ‘dooby-doo poop ‘little cabbage-face ‘cocoon ‘cutie kiddo ‘naughty peachy ‘sweet treat ‘choo-choo ‘kitey-kite’

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(He’s an embarrassment. I pretend to be asleep.)

I pretend to be asleep (and dream) all this time, I’ve had to accept so much without question all those faces glimpsed in stations all the clocks Paris time, Berlin time, Saint Petersburg time, railway time and at Ufa the gunner’s face running blood and the ridiculously bright clockface at Grodno and the perpetual motion of the train every morning you put your watch forward the train advances and the sun retreats nothing to be done, I hear the bells the great tocsin of Notre Dame the shrill bell at the Louvre that rang on St Bartholomew’s Day the rusty bell of Bruges, Life-in-Death the electric alarums of the the New York Public Library the campaniles of Venice and the bells of Moscow, the clock at Red Gate that I clockwatched when I was in the office And my memories the train rumbles over points the train trundles on and the gramophone stutters over a Zingari march and the world, like the clock in the Jewish Quarter of Prague, runs crazily backwards…

Fling love-me-nots to the wind here, the storm unloosed trains roar like cyclones down tortuous tracks devilish toys there are trains that never meet some just get lost along the way the stationmasters play chess backgammon billiards carom shots putting English on the ball the railroad is a new branch of geometry Syracuse Archimedes and the soldier who gutted him and the galleys and the destroyers and the amazing machines he invented and all that carnage ancient history

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modern history the whirlwhinds the shipwrecks like the Titanic that I read about in the paper so many associations of ideas that I can’t make anything of because I’m a really shitty muse because I forgot to take out travel insurance I don’t even know how to get myself there and I’m scared.

I’m scared I don’t even know how to get myself there I should do a series of deranged paintings, like Flint’s mate Chagall But I didn’t take notes as we went along “Excuse my ignorance excuse me for not knowing how to play up and play the poetry game” as Flint’s pal Guillaume Apollinaire says you can learn you need to know about war from Kropotin’s Memoirs or in the bloodthirsty Japanese illustrated papers but why should I footnote it all?

I give myself up to the acrobatics of memory…

Around Irkutsk things got slow started to drag we were the first to negotiate Lake Baikal and the train was decked with flags and lanterns and we’d departed the station to the strains of God Save the Tsar or Glinka’s ‘Glory’, I didn’t know which and Flint said both were melancholic though I couldn’t see it myself. If I were a painter I’d slap on loads of red and yellow because I think we were all a bit mental and a vast giddiness put blood into the passengers’ pinched cheeks.

As we got nearer to Mongolia that burned like a housefire the train’s allure had gone into definite rallentando and I sensed in the constant grinding of the wheels the bloody uncontrolled sobbing of an eternal liturgy.

I saw.

I saw the dark trains the silent trains the ghost trains coming back from the Far East and my eyes are the lights they had on behind at Talga 100.000 casualties agonised and none to help I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk and near Khilok our paths crossed a line of mad soldiers and in the quarantine wards I saw oozing sores and gashy wounds and exposed organs

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and the amputated limbs did a jig or took flight in the savage air every face was a furnace, and every heart imbecile fingers thrumming on the windows and fear lances every face, like a boil.

In all the stations all the carriages had been set on fire I saw convoys of 60 engines racing at top speed, the horizon in heat pursuing, and flocks of crows flying after disappearing in the direction of Port Arthur At Chita we had a few days respite a break of five days, ‘something on the line’ we stayed with Mr. Iankelevitch who wanted Flint to marry his only daughter then the train set off again now he’d taken over at the piano and he had toothache and I daresay he can look back on the father’s shop and the eyes of the girl who spent every night in his bed and the afternoons in mine.

Mussorgsky Hugo Wolf lieder and the Gobi sands And at Khailar there was a caravan of white camels I think I was seeing pink elephants for about 500 km but Flint was at the piano and he saw them too you’ve got to close your eyes on a trip and sleep I was desperate for a kip I recognised all the places with my eyes closed, by their smell and learned to tell the trains by their rhythm European trains keep common measure, and Asian ones quintuple or septuple time some, pianissimo, are lullabies and there are some whose monotonous wheels remind me of the heavy prose of Marie Corelli I decoded all the muddled messages of the wheels and rearranged the fragments into a terrible beauty which I own which pushes me on.

Qiqihar and Harbin I’m not going further It’s the end of the line.

I got off at Harbin as the Red Cross offices were put to the torch.

O Paris

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Great glowing hearth with streets crossing like charred sticks and old houses huddled over them for warmth like a bunch of old grannies and here are posters, red and green—all the colours, like my little yellow life yellow, the lofty colour of French novels abroad.

Flint says, he likes rubbing up against great cities on the bus and on foot he’s a pervert for cities we take the Saint Germaine-Monmartre line to lay siege to the old butte the motor-cars bawl like golden bulls the cows of twilight graze on the Sacre Coeur O Paris Central disembarkation station for desires, junction of disquiet only the druggists who sell paint still have a little light above their doors and Flint is absorbed in the International Pullman and Great European Express Company brochure rapt, he says ‘It’s the loveliest church in the world!’

I have friends that I can lean on like banisters but they don’t think of me when I’m not there all the people I’ve ever known range themselves on the horizon with gestures I can’t make out and blurred faces, semaphoring something under the rain Claire, Rob, Felicity, Nicola, Priya, Jonathan, and one or two more the lover I still hope to meet when finally I come into possession of my true body oh, how that lonesome whistle blows so many places racked with birthpangs but China maybe isn’t one of them right now I wish I’d never gone anywhere Tonight a fatal passion torments me and despite myself I think of little Flint of the Ronson over many lonely nights I wrote this poem in his honour Flint the little bit of rent I’m sad so sad I’ll go to that plastic Paddy joint to remember my lost youth again get a few pints in and go home alone like every other old roué Paris City of the Only Tower, the Gallows High, and the Wheel

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xoxo

by MOLLY-MAY Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;LEARY

genkent tongue

cleaner scraper

taste enhancer

fresher breath

blue colour sterilized water solutions stainless steal tongue scrapers (a smaller scraper is suitable for older children and smaller tongues while a wider-angled scraper is ideal for adults)

cleaning the tongue does improve the taste within your mouth.

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Something called Negative out of the Dead and the New

by SEAN PIERSON

the house i own empty of kentucky coffeetree saplings attracts no black witch moths awake the mouth is less of a maw i was born a bull in the shade in heavy armour i am now on sabbatical canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trust the whistle miracles inhabit all these cars we drive a passage from river to end i am pummeled no bats or benches this river i drink an errand on time slugs waiting for me chased by unopened red wolves not looking to burn anything this fire is not a proof nothing at these parties reveals the virtue of the madrigal taught to hound under the shape of the bird that devours the ants living larger than tancredâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skull no dust on the mantle 41

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reading judicious books off a list judicial readings of lists justice for what canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t burn scratches on the desk become repairs searching for a tense to use or talk to in money never eaten a single moth please kill for me the king his men i think i am we can eat our picnic photos here we celebrate in the water so there is no night no day and the whole of creation is there in the swallowed eye the out-popped home the unconcealed cold as moon these vaunted shattered waters i am only here to be suspended an ascetic deferral the legalist in the boughs everyone looks for a gaze to tell the truth-song into

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The Corpus Clock

by GERALD DAWE

Someone’s rehearsing Chopin in Free School Lane; a cyclist swings by lit up like a miner; the rooms lean to roadside – museum, chapel, the darkening hall of nooks and crannies, all await the next revelation, like the Corpus Clock snaffling each golden moment, the tourists take their selfies and move in file to Christ’s Pieces.

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One thing of ‘last things’

by CIAR MCCORMICK

we prefer to understand the subject like lava on the moon When I open your skull, and lick your brain I won’t taste what you taste.

The body not as, I incredibly lonely Becoming in dissolution It’s hard to say I fought against it Looking out for minimal cuts You gotta have taste Get away from me with your mythologies Fake life and death There are no good ideas, and yet Very bold declarative statement, citation needed.

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why am i so sensitive

by IMAAN BARI

i sit outside dizzy and head spinning smoking still makes me feel light headed why do i wake up at 5am self sabotaging and disorienting wilfully reading wearing all black i want to scare people away angry and emotionally fragile on the verge of tears and wanting to yell contain yourself why is it so difficult to focus i should be more disciplined i am so unstable get a hold of yourself you idiot maintain that cool exterior exercise your fingers and type words all of them and then finish it efficiently there will be satisfaction donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you see you are despicable energy everywhere it shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be restlessness and exhaustion simultaneously

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i see you and i smile i pretend not to see you what do you think you are infuriating i am unstable i am so demanding i require so much time i am selfish and demanding leave me alone i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want u near me no i am upset come back let me be a nuisance i know i can get away with it

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Molloy and the Knife-Rest

by BEN KEATINGE Many are the objects of our discontent: Footstool, fish-knife, fountain pen And all that has to be explained to us In cribbing parlance and crabbed restraint, Old books and lampshades in each room, Sofas and preferments, the codes and uses Knowing the ways of the inanimate Which strike us edgeways, like a pointed doom.

Landscape

by JAY MULHALL Starkness of figures stains this landscape. Who runs knows sights of brusque rain, of fields, of cities kept in snow and strange men doing things with fire. The provinces are recognised again, their claims seen to. Light lances the blubbery dark, morning oozes over towns that stink a high domestic stink. Protesting moans have flourished; new worships burgeon, claim the land.

Prophetic, not oracular. The dragon has a human hand.

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The Revolutionist

by CIARÁN O’ROURKE (Variations on Poems by Roque Dalton, 1935-75) And so I say the earth is beautiful and belongs like poetry or bread to all of us, who despite love’s poisoned battleground are believers still in the pungent roots that smell like tears, in the streaming grain of tomorrow’s skies, in the billowing verb of the blood we share, we who have faced the hungry future singing: the earth belongs to all of us, like poetry, like bread. ~ 48

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My sweat has the soil and the dew and the labour and dust and the stink of everything I own in it; it has the vapid grey heat of midnight grief, thick on the tongue; it has the taste of a village dead by drought in a month of promised rains; it has the mist a man turns into slowly when his body rots in the muck; it has the sweet breeze of my country, riffling the log-books of silence and catastrophe; and I’m like some weightless animal that stalks abandoned streets and towns, with the sound of massing voices ringing round me as I roam.

I’ll die of this sweat the world invents to keep those voices down. ~ Something’s changed: the dead are speaking up.

They ask us questions that we can’t forget, as if we filled their mouths with marble once,

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but now the marble’s singing wind; or as if the beat of dancing rifle butts was never all there was, and now the dead are clamouring – no longer happy to remain the silent and growing majority. ~ Call me a Communist and you’ll know my nature: the urge and ache (perennial) of permanent revolution that permeates my mind. It’s great!

And never dies, this pain a-flutter in the gut and brain, history’s living scar.

If you ask me: capitalism sits like a belching toad on the drowning leaf we call the world.

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If you ask me: the world we have’s an engine, dumping bodies in the dark.

If you ask me: paradise on earth’s no dream, but lurks in every pulse of breath our arms and lips were born to learn.

Call it Communism – a natural pain-killer, the size of the sky. ~ Who built the fleet of blazing cities, who left, who stayed, who brought the perfect walls of parliaments to life by hand and sinew-song, who bartered their bodies continually in Happyland and Cave of Dreams, who begged for more, who ran away, who crossed the fence en masse, subtle as a fox, whose faces scorched the wind, who burned, who crumpled in the dirt when bullets groaned,

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who grew grey-lipped and bevel-brained in cells for thieves and murderers, in butcher-chambers glistening every night through all the marching nations of the land, who walked the seething hills for work, who conquered daylight’s spinning map by dreaming every breath, who staggered pissed or half-malarial down death’s unbroken alley, the fuckwits, dropouts, retchers of the bitter earth, whose mouths were beautiful but always empty, whose laughter split the skies, and will, the saddest people in the world – I mean you, my friends, my fellow citizens, children of the sun.

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Entries of a non-lucid

by MICHELLE NICOLAOU

I : An economy of love fuck the fingers for choosing; fiddling in wallet pulling out a flaky note looking like a trampled flower. fuck the numbers and their weight in my pocket and in my head.

Fuck.

I want it back, every cent.

II: The hide of Douglas Step onto carpeted floor, let the sole reverberate through the fibers.

Let me lean over the concrete banister and steal looks at your privacy; the words and illustrations, but mostly the words.

The other two sit in front of a screen projecting pappouâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s job.

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stacked by a tepid sea.

Pappou, his carved hands and jugular sound; Το λιμανι το παλιο, το λιμανι το τζενουρκο.

The minaret opposite the cross, that crossroad I’ve grown out of.

Let me see the Croquis, the psychedelic tiles of melting colour and line.

I decorate my house in my head.

I lay down many tiles and they make me dizzy.

I read descriptions: Those tiles were also ties, somehow sometime in New York for fancy men.

Fancy men tend to be a problem, sometimes.

I read more: a marine orgasm.

Look again: organism but I’m already imagining the depth and how I’d float, the explosion of liquid fast and then slow to diffuse in water orbiting little things, everywhere.

The lightness of the bodies, the added dimension, the flow, and the drowning.

III: The prick I cremated my relationship into a cactus.

Contained in brittle soil it will last long.

It endures, this cactus.

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IV: Floweret/Nymphet The bud has since unraveled into a gentle existence.

The taking up of space, the breathing; its own photosynthesis.

The thin and bare branches, from which the pink drips, choke the dark bark.

The sonorous falling of dew, petal to petal leaf to leaf stem to soil ticks the time away.

I lay like a flower on my bed; blossoming against the sheets growing and growing into larger, more voluptuous shapes I writhe as the outside rain spills into the room and soaks the walls.

Even now that my stem has weakened, staying still, I can grow again.

V: Wear and tear I want to wear everything.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m told I dress like a high end escort but that my boots make me look like a lesbian.

I puzzle myself thinking of lesbian shoes.

They must be nice if 55

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I like to wear them.

Perhaps, the only item I wear out of utilitarian force.

Bodycon, he says, that’s what you wear.

Immediately my entire wardrobe tightens, shrinking smaller until it vanishes leaving nothing to contain me.

That girl on the Paris metro with her clear face and dark hood, I turned around and told you how much I wanted to be her.

You said someday nonsensically, unwilling to face my skin tight binding to the Darwinian ghost of my upbringing. Οσχιές, my grandmother used to call them and ugly things they were.

I tried to avoid becoming the living dead.

I had to heal my mother’s wounds through me.

I hold the pain of my women in my womb, and I will not give birth.

I will not conceive another bloody sun.

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VI: When your flat mate feels uncomfortable around you because you’ve lost something The pitch goes high, doesn’t undulate; tuning to discomfort decibels.

I sit, barefaced in just a robe, brush violating the page.

She sees how much I uncover for her in that small kitchen but pretends to look outside shuddering when she catches a reflection of my eye in the glass.

She beats the eggs, the faint tremble of her hands click and clack with the cutlery.

The hiss of the oil.

Sitting, I burn listening to the biscuit’s fibre crack against her tooth.

Finally, a gulp.

My ochre paint water stands tall in a glass she feels uncomfortable with me using.

I imagine spreading it on the wall behind her like a chrism of rotten egg.

I stay still.

I wet and wash and stroke and Create still shots of this loss.

She looks at my grief 57

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as it becomes tangible and rises to wash her plate.

VII: The jolt of the mornings still belongs to you Latching onto things of beauty and risk The distanced belonging The near detachment His riddled fingers call me in his intoxication I dream of speaking to him I miss the call.

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from Uncertain Songs FEATURED: BILLY MILLS These texts are from a work in progress called, unsurprisingly enough, Uncertain Songs. In writing them, I have two things partly in mind. One is Thomas Wyatt’s Certain Psalms of David, written when that kind of certainty was more readily available. It is my view that uncertainty is a preferable condition. The other is the following quotation from the Postface to Charles Ives’ 114 Songs of 1922: Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the latter ones, cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are; that is, “in the leaf ” and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable. *** the car in the street is a car the street is a street the impression of motion is created by motion all things being equal as they never are *** 59

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what might be what is words corrupted everything shifts that is everything light as air is air an imperfection *** making a sound making a mark on a sheet the sheet in a book a book of sounds listen: nothing happens & it is good the line bends here here breaks & it is good what does it mean not much but everything onwards on words *** can you see how it is the green & grey a colony living on air on water

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on light itself radiant still behind us the lichen is a system of cooperation the world is many & simple in its complexity & delicate oh so delicate which is its strength & we are not the thing itself not what we think ourselves *** these are the facts & these are the facts & the facts are that we do not hold the ice cracks & the water which the future holds over & the earth is indifferent in the end there is no end only the facts we do not hold *** there are these things & we live in them in this time we cannot see it will not see it the water rises a slow weight

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shifts the power of it a robin in the mud leaving no tracks *** wind again night again an absence of stillness over the deep nothing moving these walls groan no make a sound like the sound of groaning no more things can be added no more away a point of stasis achieved despite itself *** ice makes patterns on the car meaning a robin sings this early spring sun cold sings territory what might endure the ice holds the morning sings the bird

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*** there are whispers of beauty in the air which freezes over (sing it) somewhere a child starves a mother holds & we are lost in this death & this air cannot sustain

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from <sitevisit> FEATURED: SARAH HAYDEN

This is an extract from <sitevisit>. Other poems from this long sequence have appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review (US), on datableed (online), and in a special issue of the Irish University Review, edited by David Lloyd. In 2016, an extract appeared in Czech translation by David Koranda in Protimluv Revue (Prague).

I am currently collaborating with the artist, Angela Fulcher—<http://www. angela-fulcher.com/>—to realise <sitevisit> as an artists’ book.

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& if unrealized it would have you buried alongside: packed in tight, high on wax fumes, into the tomb to drown again there squirming as you choke upon a thousand libations.

Skinlike stuff more membrane than matter, like lucky pierre between the fingers.

Made breakable so as to be indestructible <a blister rose immediate upon his thumb and so as to cool the heat he stuck it fast right into his mouth> it would teach you to recognize your own printsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;your disarticulated walnutwhipsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in a lineup it would have you leave with lipstick tattling it would have you believe it knows nothing of doubt.

It seeks to hold you forever___ demanding, meanwhile, safe interment up to and beyond your own being. It has a rider for judicious transfer

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the room is light the soft stuff attends three mille-feuille cylinders are ready to be rolled out

he leans over a maquette, then, remembering the clipped might of his estimable self, straightens clasps hands duckwise and rolls his weight forward goes on waiting

___a man waits___ the room is light his shirt is cool but the day, nonetheless, is warm and so he wilts about the edges

smithson one and smithsons two spliced into the body of a blueshirted pencilfetishist

<slit my tongue let me love your loggia>

no expanse is spared

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the room is light he turns and the one he was wanting is there he is tall and his eyes are grey they want what is in each other they would turn each other inside out. and will. they are ready they are warm, though they are cool the man with the brownbrown eyes rolls his sleeves too a finer cotton (only just) scrunches at the elbow crease, lays the table other echoes are heard they sit. they begin.____.

<lapis/lazuli music spins out of holes in the walls a jouleparty is held and everyone comes home a winner>

so badly meant so very wanted all the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blue magic shook up in a testtube spilled out in the throes of a diagrammatic dream trundleround breakground // emission complete

& cookie cutters already have been set aside for today, something entirely else is intended

CONTRIBUTORS FEATURED: RANDOLPH HEALY Randolph Healy was born in 1956. He has lived in Ireland since 1958. Having left school at the age of fourteen, he later studied mathematical sciences in Trinity College Dublin, going on to teach maths and physics for over thirty years.

Healy’s publications include 25 Poems, Rana Rana, Arbor Vitae, Ludo, Envelopes, Scales, Daylight Saving Sex, Green 532, Rattling the Bars, and Hex. He runs Wild Honey Press from a bedroom on the Dublin-Wicklow border.

FEATURED: KIT FRYATT Kit Fryatt is a lecturer in English at Dublin City University, whose (now not so) recent poetry publications include The Co.Durham Miner’s Granddaughter’s Farewell to the Harlan County Miner’s Grandson (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013).

FEATURED: BILLY MILLS Billy Mills was born in Dublin in 1954. He has lived and worked in Spain and the UK, and is now living in Limerick. He’s the co-editor (with Catherine Walsh) of hardPressed poetry and the Journal. His books include Lares/Manes: Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2009), Imaginary Gardens (hardPressed poetry, 2012), Loop Walks (with David Bremner) (hardPressed poetry, 2013), from Pensato (Smithereens Press e-book, 2013), and The City Itself (Hesterglock Press, 2017).

FEATURED: SARAH HAYDEN Sarah Hayden’s chapbooks are Exteroceptive (Wild Honey) and System Without Issue (Oystercatcher) and Turnpikes (Sad Press). Other poems have appeared in various magazines including, most recently, Tripwire, Golden Handcuffs Review, and a special issue of the Irish University Review on Irish experimental poetry. She lectures at the University of Southampton, where she teaches and writes on modernist and experimental literature and visual culture. Her first monograph, Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood will appear from University of New Mexico Press in Spring 2018.

IMAAN BARI In most arguments, Imaan plays thoughtful party. Empathy and feeling are no game to her. Not anymore.

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CONTRIBUTORS COLETTE BRYCE Colette Bryce, a poet from Derry, is the current TCD/Arts Council Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre. Her Selected Poems, drawing on four previous collections of poetry, is just out from Picador.

GERALD DAWE Gerald Dawe has published eight poetry collections with The Gallery Press including Selected Poems (2012) and Mickey Finnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Air (2014). He was Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College Cambridge (2016-17) and editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets.

SOPHIE FITZPATRICK Sophie is a third year student reading mathematics and philosophy. She is looking into feminist statistics. If you have any leads, you can find her at @ikvetch_.

BENJAMIN KEATINGE Benjamin Keatinge is a graduate of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He has co-edited France and Ireland in the Public Imagination with Mary Pierse (Peter Lang, 2014) and Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey with Aengus Woods (Irish Academic Press, 2010) and he has published several articles and reviews on Samuel Beckett on whom he wrote his Ph.D thesis at TCD. His poetry has previously appeared in Icarus, College Green, and Kore Broadsheets.

ALDEN MATHIEU Alden Mathieu is a first year mathematics student and the online editor of TN2 Magazine.

CIAR MCCORMICK Ciar is a student of philosophy in his final undergraduate year at Trinity College Dublin. He plans to continue his studies.

JAY MULHALL Jay Mulhall is a provincial youth who has found himself in third-year English.

This is his first published metrical grumble.

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CONTRIBUTORS MICHELLE NICOLAOU Michelle Nicolaou is a first-year student in English at Trinity College Dublin.

She was born and raised in Cyprus. She is an undisciplined poet whose random and sporadic word arrangements pop up in the occasional publication.

MOLLY-MAY O’LEARY Molly-May O’Leary is a fourth year Philosophy student at TCD. CIARÁN O’ROURKE Ciarán is a solitary, bumbling creature; he writes whenever he can, which is rarely. He is also a Ph.D student in the School of English.

NATHANAËL ROMAN Close accounts of Nathanaël Roman tell us that he first made a name for himself buying and selling miscellaneous wares at questionable mark-ups online.

Music and illustration were a natural next step.

ED SALLEY Ed Salley is a final year student of English. One third of Twitter handle @jakelatent on Twitter dot com.

GISÈLE SCANLON Gisèle Scanlon is an Irish writer and visual artist originally from Listowel, Co. Kerry. Her writing includes essays, poetry and several titles published by Harper Collins (UK and Ireland) and William Morrow (United States). Her mixedmedia books—which she illustrates and writes—are categorised as cultural dictionaries, featuring essays, art and photography, and have won her an Irish Book Award and two British Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Forthcoming publications include a short study of the relationship between Speranza, Isola, and Oscar Wilde in the journal The Wildean. She lives and works in Dublin where she is currently studying for the M.Phil. in Creative Writing at the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College Dublin.

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EDITORS Editor: LEO DUNSKER Leo Dunsker is a fourth-year student in the School of English at Trinity. He is also a Chair of the DU Metaphysical Society and the rector of Cave Writings. He was born and raised in upstate New York. Next year he will begin his Ph.D in English at UC Berkeley.

Editor: WILL FLEMING Will Fleming is a fourth-year student of English and philosophy. His poetry has appeared in Icarus, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and The Quill. He is from Wicklow. Next year he will be pursuing an M.A. in English at UCL. Public Relations Officer: GILLIAN MURTAGH Gillian Murtagh is a fourth-year student of English. She is also editor of Radius in The University Times. She is from Dublin.

Editorial Assitant: SEAN PIERSON Sean Pierson is a first-year student of English and philosophy. He once worked as a marketing intern at a medical device company and his work has appeared in Icarus, The Battering Ram, and the short-lived Pocketknife. He is from Massachusetts.

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Find us online at: www [dot] icarusmagazine [dot] com We are currently in the process of expanding our archival consciousness. If you are a former editor yourself (or believe that you might have some useful information or interesting stories), please reach out to Leo at: icarusmagarchive [at] gmail [dot] com ***

To those inclined to criticise us on the basis of the dearth of ‘inside contributions’, we tell them that we have found solace in the fact that this criticism has been one made of this magazine going back to the 50s.

One editor from the 70s — known at that time as Gerry McDonnell — wonders whether this is ‘an indication of how far removed education is from creativity’. An important question, but we’ll remain agnostic.

In another editorial from the 70s, Maurice Scully quotes from his interview with Anthony Cronin that the work of the editor ‘is only worthwhile if the editor imagines to come up with a few geniuses’. Once again, we will remain agnostic.

Finally, in lieu of a retraction, we give you Ted Berrigan: People of the future while you are reading these poems, remember you didn’t write them.

I did.

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