I C A R U S MAGAZINE
VOL LXXV | ISSUE 1 | MMXXIV © Trinity Publications 2024
LOUISE NORRIS
F O R E W O R D
Cat and Louise are currently in a state of liminality. They aren’t sure when or how they ended up here, so they’ve been trying to figure it out through a process of elimination. Louise thinks it happened some time between hitting her head that one time and finding a dead wasp in her kale. Cat, for her part, reckons the transition occurred when she stopped falling into naps and started chasing her tail.
Despite Louise’s kale deficit and Cat’s cyclical chasing, we would say we are relatively well qualified to mind your work. Indeed, we have been carrying your words around in our pockets, along with our loose change, ever since reading them. Sometimes we buy ourselves coffee with the change. Other times, your words are enough to sustain us.
These pages solve problems in the pub, then stumble home. They turn fifteen more times than is probable. They bleed through pain; they let love go to the wind. They edge around believing, and not believing, too.
Yours, in words and art and joy,
Cat and Lou.
Molly Twomey
Ahmad Almallah
by Zara Kiely
Tip-toe Midas
Foot on the pulse; Kiss this new ground Soft with my soles.
I sip your sound, Beg your defiance But wilting rounds Christen compliance.
These trees agree. I nod, I know — You rent the breeze To come and go.
Stride
Offall by Caroline Cappelletti
What gets left over after first love dies a fitful death is usually something unsettling and undeliverable like,
Where did your family end up burying the dogs?
When we were together their eyes were newly milky and you were reading Ponge. I imagine they must be sleeping out back at the old house on that wide street named after locusts, Of all things.
Or,
Would you have loved me more had I tried those oysters? In Arcachon you were the only one who could speak for me to the serveurs and sommeliers and I was just pretty and American enough to get away with saying, I’ll pass! to you.
I imagine we might have ordered a dozen and that you would have inspected each, scrutinizing their black lacy trim, Of all things.
Or,
Why, in my dream last night, was I alone with you in Montparnasse showing off my just-shaven legs
of all things?
We were shower-slick and ghastly pearly against the death-darkened quarry stones upon which we were strewn.
Rostos by Margot Guilhot Delsoldato
When I met him
August was just beginning to end
There were flights to catch and homes to build Strangers to remember and friends to forget And a very orange kayak
He told me his name was in copyright infringement
Borrowed from a friend never to be returned
He wore faces on his skin like they were tailor-made for him
Su Li-zhen, Chow Mo-wan and Vincent Vega
He was a person full of people
I asked him his favourite thing about Hong Kong
And he said it was the trams and the buses and the MTR
He said he lived far away I didn’t tell him that I agreed
We were on a boat and water was taking up too much space
I talked about cinema instead and he listened quietly I said his life was a New Wave coming-of-age romance
And he laughed Romance was but another word for distance
His girlfriend was in America and he was in love
We invited him for dim sum on Monday and he said yes
He came wearing a bright blue shirt and cleaned our dishes
We drank oceans of tea and took silly pictures
And the aroma of abbreviated intimacy
Seeped into our clothes
Elvis (2) by Khushi Jain
On Sunday night Carmel calls to tell me about the jellyfish & the boys Paradigms, she says, they are the last true divinities the boys onstage and the jellyfish in-tank. Paradigms, she says, & I feel sick thinking about being on display. Paradigms She says, the movie’s final girls. Fact: I can’t write about the people I love so I turn them into mountains & silver lakes, white rabbits, swooping crows. Carmel says she likes bluish veins and long fingers, my bluish veins & long fingers. She is my greatest believer. Soon I’ll have the potential to be more than someone who sits in the pick-up passenger seat fumbling with the radio. Carmel calls me her prince of foxes & braids my hair tight-tight. I ask her how she got that ugly bruise on her cheek & she says sometimes there won’t be a story. Desire is conditional, I think. Mediocrity too. Because Carmel says she loves me in the Greek way & she doesn’t mean tragically. I could get lucky but first I need to ditch the strip malls & superstition.
Carmel Baby Blue Forever by Violette Smith
I tell her I imagine us as kids in the county swimming pool. She says I put too much faith in childhood — growing up together is just another kind of brutality. Besides, she can’t swim. I’m becoming my own tradition like Christmas lottery tickets & Easter rose petals. Carmel and I have never spent the summer together. We haven’t sat close, me, feigning sleep so my head can meet her shoulder. I would be absolved, our thighs stuck to leather seats, braving the late-June highway at dusk. An invented memory. Carmel says I never tell it like it is.
In my dreams, she walks over gardens & doesn’t feel guilty. Carmel says don’t get so political. This is just a new kind of idolatry. One day I’ll get what I deserve.
Parcae by Margot Guilhot Delsoldato
COTTON STRINGS by
Noa Askat
i washed my sheets with detergent smelling of vanilla, at last again the one i like the most. i carried out my soaking wet laundry and hung it on the string; yellow clip, then red, then blue waiting for the sun to dry it, for the droplets to water the grass underneath. i let the sunlight warm my face and melt away the smell of you, embedded in the cotton strings.
it’s june, and my grief still clings to me; like your perfume to the wind, like dampness to old pantry walls, the mold growing underneath.
/... / sometimes it’s alright to walk away from things that brought more pain than joy. so as we hug goodbye, i dig my face into your shoulder, to catch a scent of what used to smell like home but you changed the perfume that you wear; it only smells of chemicals and your kissed neck of someone else.
it’s august, and i forgive myself.
One Month in Garden-Land by
Violette Smith
The root of February is some sort of katabasis. This is our salvation, almond trees in bloom. Place of burning. You’re dying which means you know you’re alive for sure. That picture could’ve been taken anywhere, the mountains lush and sacred. Give me a name.
Back then we slept with our hands clasped like orphans, grieving inevitable separations. Danger everywhere. I turned fifteen again. I imagined him waiting at the diner. Parable of a fallen man, the ice melting in his glass. I imagined him dead. Simple joys
we wished ourselves halfway across the earth. It was always the year of the tiger it was always that day when she felt the first kick and then saw the blood, scarlet & offensive. The church loomed over us, we were far from our kingdom of sea-glass and driftwood. One hundred thirty saints but then we came to, standing over the gorge, and the river snaked on for miles.
Everyone was after us. We had that in common nothing was ever our fault! I turned fifteen again. There was golden-rod all over, parted thighs, bull-thistle, chicory, split lips, anthesis. They caught me in the meadow: “We’ve got a live one”. I turned fifteen again. It was the immanence of twisted girls — I ate peaches on the back porch, pretty sugar violent & the stomach was the tenderest part. I turned fifteen. There was my perennial lover. The
hastening light. The buck-head on Grandfather’s wall. That wasn’t the worst of it your scraped knees and tangled hair. Someone’s masterpiece. February, katabasis: Our army of black-eyed children rode in on white ponies. We looked like them once. We held the world in our fists too.
HE WILL BE ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE
by Luca McVey
an unbroken eulogy: he will give he will give he will give until palms are torn and clavicles are blasted from the body in gratitude, always.
this will all be real, genuine, a defined feeling made manifest in rapturous tableaux. with certainty he will enact reciprocity and kindle forest fires in those who shepherded him homewards between the shoulder blades of giants like glowing escas passing through dark oceanic slabs.
Son of Orti by Sophie Quinn
Gravedigger by Matilda Brewe
Trigger Warning: abortion
Felix didn’t come inside when he brought Mara home from her abortion, and when she sat in bed that night and thought about it, she wished for someone to sit with her, anyone who might laugh at that joke. She couldn’t say whether Felix would, couldn’t say much about him beyond that he had a car, which had been both the beginning and end of her problems, parked near the beach and outside the clinic. He had been understanding when she said she would need a ride, that it had to be this week, this time, that he could tell no one. Now, sitting alone in bed, Mara wished she could tell someone.
She woke up a few hours later when the mattress shifted and she felt Gerald climb into bed. She must’ve forgotten to shut the door, and he must’ve been pretty desperate himself, because he normally slept in Aunt Anja’s bed. She reached out to pet him slowly, afraid he might remember his usual attitude of indifference towards her. When she moved in two years ago, she had imagined that he would sit in her lap, purring, comforting her. Aunt Anja even laughed when Mara joked that the one upside to the crash was that her mom would never have allowed her to have a cat. But Gerald, older than Mara and the previous object of all of Aunt Anja’s affections had proven unmoved by her grief and tended to slink away from any room Mara occupied. She was surprised, then, to find that he allowed her hand to reach his vast, furry belly as he made himself comfortable over her polka-dot duvet. Her sense of pride at this new connection was quickly replaced with a pang of guilt: Aunt Anja would be so happy to hear that her two favourite babies were finally getting along, but Mara could never tell Anja about this moment, afraid that Anja might wonder what had Mara laid up in bed in the middle of the day. She lifted her head a small amount to look at Gerald’s sleeping form. Maybe this was a ruse, maybe he would report back to his master when she returned from the city, tell her how Mara had betrayed her trust. He didn’t look at her, didn’t move when she removed her hand from his fur and tucked it back under the covers.
Mara woke up a second time, hot with pain but chilled by sweat.
The sun had risen and she could feel that blood had soaked through the clinically large pad the nurse had given her. In her first months of living with Anja, Mara would wake up from nightmares she couldn’t remember, sheets and sweatpants drenched in urine. She felt she was too old for Anja to clean up after her, but Anja would just gather them up and push her into her freshly made bed. Anja was away though, and Mara was grateful for it. She pulled the covers back to survey the damage, but found that Gerald’s considerable weight stopped her from removing them fully. She pulled harder, hoping he would wake up and scurry off, as he normally did when she came near him. He didn’t move. She nudged him gently with the backside of her hand and he shifted slightly with her push. Mara leaned over her bedside table and flicked on the lamp. Gerald’s eyes were closed, his head rested in a small trickle of fishy vomit slowly soaking into the duvet. Forgetting the ache in her stomach and the blood creeping down her thighs, Mara swung out of bed, her hands going to Gerald’s small head. He wasn’t cold exactly, but his warmth was gone. His neck was stiff but his body and legs bent and curled when Mara picked him up. It was the first time she had ever held him.
Mara carried Gerald’s body into the kitchen, holding him low, near her stomach, both because of his unexpected heaviness and the pain that bloomed there. Without thinking, she walked towards the countertop where she tended to drop her books and papers at the end of each day, but she stopped before she could place the dead animal over the old newspaper and the leaflets the doctor had given her yesterday. She moved into the hall, growing more aware of the vomit on her hands and the blood on her pants. She used her elbow to push the closet door open and knelt to the floor. The shoebox still had tissue paper inside, and it crumbled at the bottom as she gently placed Gerald down, his body pushing the sides outward as it filled the space. Once he was out of her arms, she looked at him, his grey fur more rumpled than she had ever seen it in life. Mara placed Gerald’s box on the table with the lid beside it. Aunt Anja couldn’t see this.
Out in the garden, the sun was shining. Mara’s cursory Google search had revealed that foxes might dig up the body if she didn't cover it, bury deep enough that it could decompose peacefully. She imagined Aunt
Anja, fresh from Mass, drinking tea near the window, watching in horror as the foxes that so amused her tore into the fur she had lovingly caressed. No, that couldn’t happen. Mara breathed deeply and retrieved the garden shovel, determined to spare Anja the pain of seeing her Gerald’s end. As her knees sunk into the earth, she tuned into the pain in her hips, like they were hot and angry, boiling her lower body. Soon a burn in her shoulders joined them as she lifted clumps of wet dirt into a neat pile.
The sides of the hole were caving in slightly, crumbling warm soil into the darker, colder earth. Mara stood up, felt dizzy, remembered the anxiety of yesterday morning and the cereal in the sink. She felt the viscous drip of more blood between her legs, lubricating the place where her thighs rubbed together. The dirt on her hands left a brown mark on the handle of the sliding glass door as she walked into the kitchen. On the table, Gerald’s fur ruffled slightly under the ceiling fan. Mara took a last grim look at the body, wondered who the patron saint of pets was, made up her mind to look it up before she told her aunt the news. With both hands, she lifted the top of the box over Gerald, pushed it down. But Gerald’s years of living with Anja’s love made the thin cardboard curve on the sides. Mara pushed the box in on itself, thinking about how Gerald used to disappear under the couch when she sat down. With the lid finally on, she worried about the precarious fit and thought again about the foxes. She needed to find some strong tape. Rifling through the drawers, Mara thought about Gerald and how she might explain this to Aunt Anja. It began to seem like a good thing; it was lucky that Mara had begged off going with Anja to visit Nan in the city, it was fortunate that she had needed to be home this weekend. As she opened more drawers and went deeper in search of the tape, Mara cast her thoughts further back, to that spontaneous night near the beach and that panicky morning in the pharmacy. She was thinking that maybe it was all meant to be, forgetting the guilt and the pain in her stomach for the first time in weeks, when she didn’t hear a car pull into the driveway. Mara bent to look in the bottom drawer, thinking about how she would have a cup of tea ready for Anja when she gave her the news, how she could finally say that she’d taken care of something for her. Mara’s hand closed around a roll of grey duct tape as Aunt Anja’s hand closed around the front door knob. Mara
heard Anja walk in before she could turn around.
The glass of the oven door was flecked with crumbs, but in the corner of her eye, Mara could see her image reflected, small and without detail. She very well could have been just cooking lunch. She turned quickly though, and all at once, saw herself clearly through Anja’s eyes: her grey trackies, splotches of dark brown at the knees and deep crimson at the crotch. Her hair was coming loose from the same plaits she had been wearing when Aunt Anja left her two days ago, her fingernails and abused cuticles caked with dirt. On the table, where Aunt Anja used to look over Mara’s best physics tests and most impressive drawings, a leaflet explaining the symptoms of post-abortion infection and a bottle of prescription strength paracetamol. The Footlocker box. The still mountain of grey fur. In the moments where Anja looked confused, before she reached the table, before she saw the box and the bottle and the blood, Mara was struck by just how hungry she felt. Aunt Anja’s sudden appearance sent Mara careening back into her body, yanking her away from her thoughts of fate and duty, and suddenly Mara was an empty, aching stomach. She felt the crusted buildup of thick fluid in her underwear. She felt the heaviness of grease in her hair and the sting of dirt under her ragged nails. And she was hungry, shaky and weak, the sort of hunger that loosens your grip and lowers your eyelids. She dropped the tape and it rolled until it hit the leg of the table. Mara couldn’t think of anything to say. Then the box, and the bottle, and Gerald himself hit the floor as Anja’s hip knocked into the table in her rush to catch Mara.
The sheets were clean in a fresh, scratchy way. There was no polka-dot cover on her duvet. Aunt Anja sat on the edge of the bed. She cradled the bottle of paracetamol in her lap.
“What happened?”
Mara’s back was cold, wet hair soaking through her cotton top. She didn’t know which question Anja was asking, so she decided to answer the easiest one.
"He just crawled into the bed last night. When I woke up, he was dead, there was sick all over, I think he had some sort of episode Aunt Anja."
Anja’s lips puckered and she glanced briefly at the ceiling.
“Mara.”
“I’m sorry, I knew you wouldn’t want me to but I had to. I knew you’d be mad. You’re mad. I’m sorry. I had to. I’m sorry. Please, I didn’t want you to have to find out. I didn’t want you to have to know.”
Anja’s weight left the bed. She put the paracetamol on the table, somewhat more forcefully than she needed to. She left the room. Alone, Mara didn’t move. She didn’t lean back onto her pillows, she remained tense, hunched forward, hugging her knees. She didn’t stare into space, she looked around her room. The posters on the walls were the same ones she’d had when she lived with her mom. She didn’t remember going to get them, didn’t remember anything from those first horrible weeks. The first day that she woke up and noticed where she was, it wasn’t the guest room at her aunt’s anymore, it had been transformed into her room. Her posters, her drawings, her polka-dot duvet. Mara’s hair had stopped dripping by now. Her shoulders felt stiff as she uncurled her arms from her legs. She heard the sliding glass door open and close. Anja was in the garden.
It was only a few steps from Mara’s room to the kitchen. She just meant to grab a box of crackers, something to tide her over. When she bolted in, she noticed the smell first. A sweet smell, the Tesco tomato soup that Anja hated for its sugar content, the only thing that Mara didn’t remember throwing up in the days after her mother’s death. The sizzle of butter in a pan and Mara didn’t have to look to know that Anja had smeared pesto inside the toastie, just the way she liked it. She didn’t take the crackers. She turned to the kitchen table. Gerald’s box had been replaced from the floor, the top placed over him. Mara picked up the tape from the floor. The sound of the tape ripping mixed with the sound of the sliding glass door opening. Mara kept her head down while Anja stirred the soup.
Neither woman acknowledged the other. Mara secured the corners of Gerald’s makeshift coffin first, then, for good measure, wrapped a long band of grey tape around the middle. She walked outside, holding the box. She placed it, gently, into the hole beside Anja’s flowerbeds. She took up the shovel again, used the flat spade to push the pile of disturbed dirt over the box. It took far less time to fill the hole than it had taken to dig it. When she was done, she patted the mound with her hands and thought about how much Gerald would have hated to be touched like that.
Inside, she sat down at the table. Anja poured the bubbling soup into a mug, sliced the sandwich into two triangles. She placed the food in front of Mara.
“Wash your hands, Mara.”
Mara stood up, walked to the sink. When she was done, there was still some residual dirt under her nails. Anja’s eyes followed her hands as she reached for a toastie. She didn’t say anything.
“Thank you Aunt Anja.”
Before Anja could respond, the washing machine chimed. Anja stood up. She stooped, and pulled out the polka-dot duvet cover, clean and wet. She stretched it over the drying rack.
“Thank you Aunt Anja.”
This time Anja looked at Mara. Her face relaxed. She reached out a hand and patted Mara’s head.
“This will dry by tonight. I’ll put it on before you go to bed.”
Poll na bPéist by Evelyn Doyle
Dislocated
by
Liam Kelly
Will my eyesight suit our long-forgotten foray so It can wrest logic from a flagrant wile, so It can flail about fickle burning paper-trails, And say nothing is the matter?
How will the tyranny of dislocation solve itself? How many mottos must I say until the one is spoken? How is the circus alive in words beyond word?
If I go and retreat into the pile, it is duty But promise can teeter on toe-caps touching under desks. But men have gone into the dirt expecting as much, And say nothing is the matter.
What do I call this divine whim we suffer for? What comes after undeliberated outburst? What stops the sentence structure of penalty astride?
Consult the prancing exchange of constant Back and forth unbothered by tinfoil tablets etched like Backwash into a plastic bottle of full-fat milk And say nothing is the matter.
Can you be two things at once as the cross decreed? Can you bleed as her wine spills on white linen? Can you answer the question I will not ask?
No avid want on the miracle of restraint, for We spoke vows in baby tongues to our calamity! We'll avoid our open scab in silence, And say nothing is the matter.
Why queue behind this calibre at her beck and call? Why dare, why stay, why care at all?
Bóithrín by Evelyn Doyle
First Time in a Ciorcal Comhrá by Chris Fitzpatrick
“Hi, is mise Chris” “Tá fáilte romhat Chris” Focail lodge in my larynx — a lump of gristle.
I cough (more a bark) — not a budge.
I suppress panic, contemplate solo-Heimlichs: box in the midriff jack-knife over the back of a chair.
Fearing commotion more than death, I hesitate — a mute Hamlet among Gaeilgeoirí.
The room swirls.
A Christian Brother kicks me in the shins for saying “airball an spidóga”
A bean an tí ties my leg to a bunkbed bedpost for complaining about her Gaeltacht special (tinned meatballs) — for three dinners in a row.
A Professor in a Batman cape insists I speak Irish like the toothless Connemara fisherman on the tape.
“Go raibh maith agat” I spit it all out; sit down — this is what I’ve been dreaming of.
Doe by Luca McVey
he appears in a history book before he is born, death certificate as christening gown illuminated for future readers to swallow with ease.
where will they place his flame-soaked limbs?
maybe a place where a hasty god sucks fleshy time from the bone, where oil slicks breed and exchange pleasantries on coffee cup rims, where identity is disseminated through waterlogged barricades.
his house slumbers on — a pantomime horse stands guard atop a scarred sofa, a grenade in its bulletproof hoof.
it will stay with the boy.
together they feast on the blanched branch.
John
Tico Ranch Dog by Alex Andrés
Two Pauls in 1986 by
Ella Flynn
I know what nurse means now I met the lambs and the calves on the collarbone of Sleigh Head I heard about the woman who is nice to your mother, And I think I can work here now.
So there is work to do and I have a single candle on my eye’s mind It flickers and shakes but doesn’t go away from me Red, the same one on my grandmother's door.
He doesn’t look at me, Performs for the wall of wine Has a laptop bag with a cap in it, I can see the green of skins flat in a breast pocket,
All the smoking I’ve done a man as old as 46 and you’d think I much older now
You’re a good one you wouldn’t be doing the smoking Looking for my fags for my pack of Dutch gold,
I’ll get to heaven somehow.
Large tooth-gap smile, the display of Merlot, and a shuffle out the door.
The eyes on the singular flame.
We’re both a pair of believers aren’t we Johnny? We both believe don’t we?
That we take the high mighty stairs
With gum on the soles of our shoes.
The
Unnamed by Lucien Clough
The white hands, the spilling light, the face that peered out from the thumping mauve of crowd occasionally ruptured by great swashes of bright oranges and blues, little diffracting yellows that perforated the humid street like stars.
It is impossible to say what I was doing at such an hour. I, who am rarely up past dusk, creeping the streets at those despicable early hours. Looking for something, the likes of which forever eluded me. Looking for him, perhaps. The existence of anyone else but myself.
I have an excellent memory but in recollection of that whirring night I cannot fully reproduce his face. I remember it was pale, dusted lightly with facial hair; I remember that his skin was splotchy and almost not form-fitting, as if poorly adhered onto the flesh. I remember his crooked yellowing teeth, but not the shade of yellow nor the angles of the pincers—these features I only remember as phrases, mental notes, but not as images in themselves.
It is impossible to retroactively predict why I chose him. The night had already drawn itself out; the crowd had thinned and swelled several times over, was at that point filled almost exclusively with students from the neighbouring universities, their clothes much too tight, their grins much too wide. Despicable, embarrassing youth; I resented them then just as I resent them now.
I existed in the warm stupor of drink, my skin likely hot to the touch and my eyes aglow with temptations undisclosed. Temptations, to say nothing of my very many temptations. I observe, often, in the windows of storefronts or in the long mirrors of department store changing rooms, my beauty and mystery and think of it as nothing short of a divine art. But do not speak to me of vanity, for I’ll have nothing of it. What a sin to even utter that word. No. Objective disclosure of the human truth. I am gazed at, often, as much by myself as by others.
The human gaze. Potentially the most life affirming thing.
The morning before, even, taking the tram into the city centre, I granted three women lives through the milky orbs.
I observed a young woman whose half-eaten croissant dropped
dancing pastry flakes on her bundled grey coat. She wore a disengaged halfsmile. I called her Emily and swore that some other time we could’ve been the closest of sisters or the most vengeful of enemies.
I observed a woman sitting with her forehead resting against the cool window. I imagined the perspiration of sweat that sat under her many layers. I could almost taste it. I called her Margaret.
I finally observed a woman who looked to be permanently cast in a state of stony wit. Her eyes forever unfocused, the creases of her skin traced like obscure outsider art. For her I had no name, for her presence was hard and untouchable.
I thought about them as I commanded the day, as I donned my elastic dress and ventured outwards, for a reason that, like so many other motifs that I confront, I could neither pinpoint nor deny. A sap to skin.
Later, in that fitted dress, seeping through my sweat. Slicked with it, as I saw his white buoy. Sweat, fundamental proof of living. The only thing I seek.
I pushed my way through the insolents to arrive to him, found myself in front of him—I wet and wild, he dry and tame—without a word in my mouth. What even to say? No words for my state of being. I wanted to ask what he was, this unknown creature of the club, but could not conjure the correct words or phrasing.
He noticed my gaze and asked me what my name was. “Why?” I finally sputtered. He sighed and asked me immediately if I was one of those types, the type to treat all pleasantries and details as frivolous obscurities—he wasted no time making clear, in heavy handed terms, that he had no bandwidth for such persons. I said that I might or might not be such a thing, but enquired either way what it was to him. He ignored me, asking again what my name was. I told him Penelope, then corrected to Clarissa, then redirected to Joanna. He sighed, then attempted to introduce himself to me but I disallowed it. Your name is Ernesto, I told him with honest conviction. He told me I was wrong, very wrong, laughably wrong. I told him I didn’t care, for I had already decided. “O.K. Penelope, or Clarissa, or Joanna—You don’t strike me as someone for whom I can do much. What is it that you want?” I smiled at his dismissal of me, and told him that it was almost entirely the opposite, that I was a part of all facets of the world and that nothing escaped my grasp, that therefore he could do any range of
things for me. He chuckled lightly, shaking his head once more. “What am I meant to do with that?” I said nothing to him and ordered myself a drink. We stood in silence for some time, him scanning the crowd of youthing children as I laced my thin fingers across my flushed face. “What do you do?” he finally asked. I did not know how to answer, paused, eventually told him that I taught ballet at an institution in the city centre. “Are you lying to me?” he asked. I shrugged as if even I did not know. He seemed unconvinced. “I work in marketing,” he said finally, “for a very prominent tech firm in—” I told him that I already knew this. He looked at me with an expression of befuddlement, souring almost immediately into pitiful dismay, frustration. I had no answer for his changing face. My drink arrived with a paper straw that immediately decayed in my mouth as I sipped it. Far too sweet for my taste. I asked him if he wanted it. He accepted meekly, sucking it up like a little boy sips a juice carton. The revolting victories. “Where are your friends?” I asked him. “Or did you come here alone.” “Alone,” he said. “Clear my head, you know.” “Quite the place,” I said. No response. I wondered what he was really doing here, what his true purpose for showing up to this disgusting club could possibly be. I wondered how old he was, if he was here for the university girls, to swallow them whole. This disgusted me yet also felt somehow untrue. I debated asking him. I did not.
“Are you hungry?” he attempted. “Almost never,” I said to him. “I dislike food. I dislike texture.” He told me that that was the most ridiculous thing that he’d ever heard. I elaborated that I dined almost exclusively on crackers and prawns. He laughed but I could tell I was losing what little of his interest I had previously held. Perhaps I was too old for him, lion of youth yet still too sullied by age. I grew quietly angry, not for his obvious tendency towards the youngest and most corruptible of women but for his lack of interest in my admittedly abnormal tendencies. Why would he not take me seriously? Him, with his ugly striped sweater and insipid khakis, outwardly mocking the very things upon which I defined myself. I would not relent and told him of my many other specificities. I told him that I went to sleep before the sun and woke up in the dead hours of the night, and that I never dreamt; I told him that my house was bare and white save for a thin layer of mysterious sand; I told him that every dusky morning I roamed the nooks and crannies of this incoherent city in simple silent garb; I told him that I preferred my eggs raw —a lie, I’d never eat the
genesis—and that I could not whistle.
He did not flinch. He did not even blink. I became somehow more enraptured with his utterly nondescript physicality.
I told him finally of my three women, of Emily and Margaret and the unnamed. I told him of their completely arbitrary presences and of my complete fascination with them. I asked him if it had even occurred to him to observe people who did not know they were being observed. He told me that that was a very cinematic way of seeing the world. I laughed and said it was infinitely more private, infinitely more personal than such a public spectacle as film. This was not entertainment, I assured him. He scoffed. He dismissed me as bizarre, perhaps the most bizarre woman he had ever met. I had still not ruptured his surface of null.
I asked him to take me to his home. I had no desire to sleep with him, in fact I had no plan of even touching him. I simply could not fathom this figure, could not fathom that he existed beyond this sweaty club, standing tall and alone in a sea of innocence. I needed proof.
He declined immediately. I was unharmed by rejection but grew increasingly depraved, for my stomach was teeming with the vile liquid of longing. Longing for what I could not confidently say. Perhaps the affirmation of my own mere existence. Something as fundamental as the atom.
I thought of my three women, their quiet looks, their privacies and my violation of it. I had gazed at them thinking that they could not be further from me. I know now that I am just as they are, that the four of us are as indistinguishable as ants crawling along the underside of a rotting log. I realise that I am a woman outside of the rim of consciousness, a thing that I cannot rectify with the inner image, a thing I’d have to name in order to even begin to know.
I left Ernesto without another word, left him for the scattered and sickening night, the humid late summer air that I belonged to adhering to my skin, forever and without the least of consequence.
Wipe your face of the navy wave on your cheek
And rise up off your knees. Face the swart stairs And descend them awkwardly, to seek The crowd now dividing, broken into pairs.
Watch the crowd grow each time you see the door Open to a back hooking a jacket up, and turn And fish a can from the bin so they can spew more Of that piss into it, again and again. Do not learn.
Quicken your breathing until you cry, and waste The first half of the night in a daze. Don’t be led To water, wince and force drink out, ignore the taste.
Face west and see the sun ascend. The cat creeps Out and doesn’t pay it any mind. Find a reason to Come back in, find some sorries as the feeling sleeps. Don’t let your night be ruined. Try something new.
Brush off your makeup in the mirror and stare At the sink as you leave. Weave a quick trail back To a sudden hand and a rhythmic kiss out there Beyond a dizzy shake of the head and stubborn black.
Greet him as he comes over to you in a stink. Drink your glass until it’s full and be kind. Gain your sense on the walk back home, think Of the road ahead, the path behind.
Cadaver by Gavin Jennings
Let's split up then come back together by Margot
Guilhot Delsoldato
Molly Twomey
Does he know that nightly I drag the curtains of my tonsils back
for the faint clap of the cistern, the petals of blood on the tiles?
How badly I need to be thigh-gapped, bone-gowned, seen?
My tutor looks up from his pinging phone, his open tabs, says you cannot write
about an eating disorder if all the protagonist does is shiver under her duvet,
memorise labels on every tin. I bite my lip into a scar as he advises
my character throws herself off a pier, swallows an ice-cream cone
of pills. He says that no audience wants to hear of her malnourished dreams
and blacked-out mornings. He tells me to expose how I hurt everyone
with the breakaway glass of my teeth, waist and bones, to describe those I love
scrabbling for the right words, unable to reach the torn script in my skull.
Playwriting by Molly Twomey
After 'Eochaill'
Aldi Car Park, Youghal by Molly Twomey
My only other choice, a bin liner taped to a cracked skylight, a torn mattress in Cappoquin —
I meet a landlord in his Hyundai. Outside, the Atlantic swallows the Blackwater.
He scratches the dice of his knuckle, calls me prettier than expected.
I consider faking a boyfriend to barbwire my breasts, lips, waist.
I wonder if he has a wife. Imagine her yanking the windpipe from a turkey’s neck, clawing for lungs through its pelvis.
I tear a loose thread from my hem. I’ll cut you a key, he says. I dream my own cooker, a chest of drawers, a king-sized bed.
I think of the long afternoons not knowing where I’ll sleep, willing a gale to pull me from the harbour—
his hand on my knee, sealed as a caul on a newborn skull.
I should be flattered to screw the flat-screen of my body to his wall.
Feeding Myself to the Shredder by Molly Twomey
after 'Girl' by Leslie MacWeeney
I admire those who don’t wear their illness, don’t allow it to hold them back, my boss says, as he skims a counselling leaflet and snaps shortcake over his tea. I reply, being held back can be protective, a child’s feet urged from the lip of a river, a lock on a cabinet of pills. He traps a crumb in the crook of his elbow, asks what’s there to be protected from?
I used to imagine feeding myself to the shredder, hole punching the throb in my skull. Yesterday he handed me a scissors, hot and sharp on my skin, but old rituals don’t make sense in a blazer and brogues, in a body clean as a water cooler that people say anything around and pour small cups of me out.
My boss drags on his jacket, shrugs at the glossy mountain and quotes. I miss my gown of scabs, wrist tag of bone.
Beth Kephart
She lies in Her Bed, in Her Room, Listening by
Beth Kephart
The glug in the gutter. The calico across the narrow of the street, new to its own mew. October 21. 1969. Yesterday sound was the yellow fur of the sun behind the room where she lies. It was the sound of the basketball in the park past the alley, slapped against the ground so many times by an invisible hand that she would have done anything to crush it into silence, but what could she do? Who would carry her the distance, lift her head, find her words, and besides, it is raining now. The pleasing pattering of liquid weather.
Her mattress has been rutted by the long lengths of her illness. She feels, beneath her, the places her bones and flesh have been, the four depressions of the breakfast tray that her husband brought during the many months when she could still eat, or really just sip, a little. Beef broth. Orangeflavored Jell-O. Chocolate milk. Applesauce that her daughter made with the ripe Macintoshes and the hard sticks of cinnamon. Here we are, her husband would say, settling the pretty painted tray down among the white sheets, applying just enough pressure that the round feet of the wooden legs would become indelible in the deflated mattress.
Had he sat with her on the edge of the bed, the pretty painted would have gone sideways—lost its footing, tipped, released the bowl, the glass, the dish, the slosh onto the sheets he’d stopped washing, for she no longer had the strength to help him strip them from beneath her. To move to this side. To move to that side. To not get lost inside the puzzle of staying put but moving.
True, he might have brought the cushioned rocking chair with the string doily from the other room and sat right there, the two of them, together. He might have talked or hummed or listened, like she listened, to the weather. But that would have surprised them both, and they were long past surprises—the news of her illness being tired and ancient, his desire to keep living not—what is the word?—poignant. His desire to keep living was—here is the word—paramount.
A terrific paramounting wish. She makes new words now. Sluices others.
Besides: whatever it was he’d cooked up for himself—pineapple ham, rosemary chicken, his famous meatballs and spaghetti—awaited (he was hungry) down the hallway, past the paintings, down the stairwell, in the dining room, the one room with the tall, wide window that looked out upon the alley, past the alley into the park. She’s stopped picturing him alone at the big old table that never fit in that room to begin with. She’s stopped thinking of the furniture that once held in a tight squeeze all the world that was theirs—their children, their grandchildren, their Thanksgiving, and their Easter. She’d been a woman who had laughed behind her hand. He’d been a man who’d saved enough, and proudly, for the pure gold tooth that replaced the broken molar. He’d smiled so that everyone could see it.
A cloth napkin tucked in at his pressed collar. His sleeves pulled up by the wide rubber bands at his elbows. An immaculate man. From the beginning of them. How little she ever learned about who he was before her.
She, too, had kept her secrets.
Not this thought. Not now. There is no time for wishing. There hardly ever was. She’d lived the alternate story, and this is the end of it.
The rain falls. It is her sound.
Her sigh barely lifts the bones of her chest.
*
Two days ago, the girl came to see her.
Grandmom, she’d called, all the way up the steps, past the paintings, at the door.
Grandmom?
Her name like a question. The girl’s love more promiscuous than her fear, though the fear will in time carry its own magnitudes, will fold and bend and corrugate the girl as she grows (one cheek more hollow than the other, sag in her flesh) into the one who will someday trust this story.
The girl knocking. The girl knocking at her bedroom door, which her husband had closed as if she were no longer fit for company, and she was not. When the girl knocked, her legs were naked and white in the white of the sheets, and she could not lift herself to cover herself. The girl was only nine, and this would be the last time on this earth they would be seeing each other, and she did not wish to be seen like this—
but then—
The girl had bursted in—burst?—with her chopped bangs and her freckled face. The girl had seen her—naked as she was, uncovered.
Betty, she had tried to say.
Boop.
Her name for the girl who slammed the door shut and banged again from the other side, harder, frightened. Grandmom. She can’t remember how the girl had gotten it done, but she did. The girl had walked back in to dignify her grandmother—covered her legs with the whites of the sheets, though turquoise would have been nice, or peach—peach sheets—for everything was fading, everything, in the end, is white.
Remembering the girl who had, just a few days ago, come. Remembering how the girl, more courageous now, had reached for her hand. The girl whose name is slipping—
Boop— and then, in the very moment of the girl standing there, a blink of sun had
clinked the silver handle of the brush that had been left on the dresser, her hair in its bristles. The sun had clinked, and the girl had turned to see, and she knew in that instant that the girl would always be like this, confusing her own senses, startled by them. She knew that she loved the girl even more for the verse she’d be, open and broken and wanting.
It tires her, remembering like this.
It tires, and appeases.
Now it is the sound of the song she hears, all of them singing her song. The Kit-Cat Band. Paul Whiteman. Louis Armstrong. Bing Crosby. Judy Garland. Frank Sinatra. Hoagy Carmichael. Joni James. Connie Francis. Everyone singing her song, the breath of it being hers, there on the Victrola, the song playing until the needle reached the dead wax on the run out and time hitched and notched and someone stood and with elegant care returned the song to its start:
There’s nothing left for me
Of days that used to be
Catalog number 358—the name and the sound and the shape of the song. Its place in history.
Just the rain keeping time in a world going white, going whiter, and now something altogether shifts, and time jumps its track, and it is years ago, when she herself is young, a girl and not a wife, a teen and not a sigher with a song.
A mind dying backwards.
Ahmad Almallah
Excerpted from:
'My Tongue Is Tied Up Today' by Ahmad Almallah
&
So my tongue is tied up today, maybe I am certain it will be, something between jaws.
Maybe it could be just that slab of meat on its own without any language: and then I’ll swallow my pride without the bitter taste of meaning and then my mother, my mother land and Tongue will call onto me my name.
To this day, we face the world as one—the equation is simple math: you and I: irregular irreplicable, but mostly irreplaceable. There is no music to accompany our exists—we’ll proceed never the less: the streets are one road: the road is wide and open: it’s dark and clear—we know, we’ ve weaved together a way: begin a beginning, though beginnings are not for us, we look at each other: we re-imagine and say: what’s being together mean anyway?
Together, we might be triangles: pointy sharp corners going in and out of bodies, drawing color spilling blood. Boring or born again? Did we cross the in-between yet? Did we put a number on that one, already?! Any way, any where, we’ll have our steps: to run into each other to cross one other, to walk in the direction and against: currents, trends, times—
Does this poem need the aid of a simile?
Let’s try: like the veins of a tree, we mark the years without the finality of the blade. On the surface, we look
Love&Poem by Ahmad Almallah
apart but our roots must be touching. Is there more room to say: I love you, I miss you; I can’t get you! Will I Ever?
Maybe… the answer is no. At least it is, today.
When the world ends —as in the now—we’ll have to turn books to their source, and use them as burning wood.
For now: I look at my stack—of scrap books? Mostly wood on wood doesn’t burn on its own. What will I part with first to keep warm, or cook my self something?
Because you can’t eat a book, not for sustenance anyway! Or could I make a structure out of all my books—what would wood
look like in that form? Would the words stick out facing the sky, or would they be dripping in, on my head, on my everything. I don’t know
how to save myself, any how? most of the time?
I don’t know mainly how to save myself from my words: I would want them all, alive and well, or at once, all at once, burning.
Wook by Ahmad Almallah
CONTRIBUTORS
ALEX ANDRÉS is twenty years old. She lives and travels. She likes photography, music, writing, animals, etc etc — lots of things.
CAROLINE CAPPELLETTI knew this would happen. She’s got three tarot decks and plays them like a slot machine.
CHRIS FITZPATRICK is an extra-mural student. It has taken him half a century to rediscover his love for the Irish language — thanks to attending Trinity's Ciorcal Cómhrá over the last 2 years. His first collection of poetry, Poetic Licence in a Time of Corona (21st Century Renaissance), was published in May 2022.
ELLA FLYNN is able to play outside until it gets dark. She has to wear her jacket though.
EVELYN DOYLE is waiting for the kettle to boil. Do you take sugar?
GAVIN JENNINGS is sunning too close to the fly.
KHUSHI JAIN was asked to write a bio but she didn't want to.
LIAM KELLY is a writer.
LUCA MCVEY may or may not be able to ride a bike.
LUCIEN CLOUGH cannot fathom himself.
MARGOT GUILHOT DELSOLDATO is a writer and filmmaker from Parma, Italy. She likes people’s faces, walnut baklavas, and nightstands. You can find her on Letterboxd, or in the Boland library eating jelly snakes.
MATILDA BREWE is sounding it out.
NOA ASKAT moved to dublin but misses her brother.
SOPHIE QUINN is still compensating for the aura she lost by wandering around Fallon & Byrne taking photos of sardines. She exists on a diet of milk and oranges, though is grateful to have recently discovered the existence of other fruits. She completes side quests in the woods (teaches kids to zip-line) to fund a film photography addiction. Instagram: @s.omeonewhotakesphotos.
VIOLETTE SMITH loves jellyfish and mountains and being on the way.
ZARA KIELY is a final year student in English Literature & Sociology. She is suffering from perception anxiety due to writing about herself in the third person. She would love to "go with the flow", but what time is the flow at, and what are we wearing?
F E A T U R E D W R I T E R S
AHMAD ALMALLAH is a writer of fiction although he never managed to finish a novel, not even a short story. But, to his credit, he has announced many possible titles for his novel, such as "novel novel," "the facts about fiction," "novel or fiction--similar but different?". In the meantime and while working on his magnum opus novel, he turns to writing poetry and has somehow managed to write three collections of poems, which shall go unnamed.
BETH KEPHART makes things. Sometimes she makes monotypes and tears them into pieces, only to glue the jagged parts together to build a brand new thing. Sometimes she searches the remnants of her past—her memories, her artifacts — and writes either truth or fiction. Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News, from which this piece is excerpted, is both truth and fiction. Find Beth making art and story at her Substack, The Hush and the Howl.
MOLLY TWOMEY'S debut poetry collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. Since then, she has been staring out windows, feeling intense dread. She’s grateful to have experienced a house fire in 2023, from which her family emerged uninjured, as it has given her something to attempt to write about. Fingers crossed she'll have a new book next year!
E D I T O R S
CAT GROGAN is hungry for something — not for food, but for something else. She drinks too much coffee. She thinks too much, too. She has come around in recent times to really, really liking life.
LOUISE NORRIS is chewing less ice than usual and is in a perpetual state of counting down the days until her next Wowburger. Help, she can’t stop. The days just keep coming. Somebody stop them for her. Or, please, for the love of God, just buy her a Wowburger.
F E A T U R E D A R T I S T
EVE SMITH is a painter and writer. She has been doing anything for internet validation since 2013.
She created this issue's cover, the editor's portraits, and the illustrations interspersed throughout.
A C K
N O W L E D G E M E N T S
We would like to thank our contributors for their ineffably beautiful work! Our phenomenal featured writers! Trinity Publications! Eve Smith, who has more talent in her pinky finger than any one person should have in their whole body! Eloise, for her perpetual pearls of wisdom! Our parents (sure we’ll throw them in, why not)! And, last but not least, you, dear reader! Most certainly you.
Now go, tell little-big truths, run amuck, let your cards fall away from your chest!
Zooks!
