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Contributors
Volume One
November-December 2024
Terry McDonagh – Guest Editorial
Anne M Carson
Bernadette Gallagher
Brian Kirk
Colette Nic Aodha
Doreen Duffy
Eamonn Lynskey
Edward Caruso
Eugen Bacon
Fred Everett Maus
Geraldine Mills
Ian Watson
Indran Amirthanayagam
John Grey
John Liddy
Julian Matthews
Kate Ennals
Lynne Thompson
Margaret Kiernan
Maria Miraglia
Michael Durack
Ndue Ukaj
Noel Monahan
Paris Rosemont
Richard Halperin
Roisin Browne
Sinead McClure
Terry McDonagh. Photo credit: Joanna Longster McDonagh
Terry McDonagh, Irish poet and dramatist has worked in Europe, Asia and Australia. He’s taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at Hamburg International School. Published eleven poetry collections, letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. In March 2022, he was poet in residence and Grand Marshal as part of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Brussels. His work has been translated into German and Indonesian. His poem, ‘UCG by Degrees’ is included in the Galway Poetry Trail on Galway University campus. In 2020, Two Notes for Home – a two-part radio documentary, compiled and presented by Werner Lewon, on The Life and Work of Terry McDonagh, The Modern Bard of Cill Aodáin. His latest poetry collection, ‘Two Notes for Home’ – published by Arlen House – September 2022. He returned to live in County Mayo in 2019. www.terry-mcdonagh.com
Terry McDonagh Words are Big… They Blow Me Out… They Make Poems.
This morning when reading a football page I came across a piece that suggested football was bigger than all of us – I suppose it’s true in some ways. I like football and, indeed, sport in general. I love my bike, too, because it sets words in motion, and, as I rattle along I notice things that shout stop or, simply, keep going. Talk to yourself. Make things up. Words, words! Words old and new, words by the tonne – W.B. Yeats.
And Mary Oliver:
As for life, I’m humbled, I’m without words sufficient to say how it’s been hard as flint, and soft as a spring pond, both of these and over and over…
Heaps of words thrown together do deals, entertain, make us laugh, imagine and cry – but the language of poetry provokes and keeps us wondering – a bit like crossing from one unknown bog-land or meadow to another on a warm day or even on a cold day. It can feel like a strange sight or sound calling from a place we don’t know. My wife, Joanna and I like reading – we watch football on TV and go to live games as well. We were at a club Gaelic football match, recently, between Ballintubber and Breaffy and the banter along the sideline was of a much superior quality than some of the antics on the pitch. It was all special. A bit of craic. It didn’t rain and we had an exciting game with heaps of big, rich language that felt like a huge poem wrapped up in a warm coat.
And speaking of rich language, I had the pleasure of being present at a reading by that wonderful Australian poet, Les Murray. I was living in Hamburg at the time and the Director of Literaturhaus Hamburg, Ursula Keller, invited me to attend – which I did – and not knowing much about Les Murray’s work, I was eager to be educated. Now I have a signed copy of his selected poems – a collection I will always treasure. His reading was hypnotic. It was everything I would wish for in a reading: his use of language; his rural background and mother’s death when he was a boy; his love of nature and the less fortunate – it was all there. And we had a special conversation and a few beers after the reading. I remember thinking to myself: this is a real poet, one I would like to be. His work was a kind of quirky diary – a journey in rich lyrical words that will remain with me and, I feel sure, with others that had the experience of being present at a reading of his. He has passed away but his is a great story – much bigger than football.
Homer and Beowulf tell the big stories that we study and label as epic poetry. They hang over us like a threat and source of inspiration – as, indeed, for an Irish writer, does W. B. Yeats in some ways. His work takes us through his ‘story’ from his early ideas and ideals, through to his middle years –Responsibilities – and in his later life, to more reflective work. His life and poetry can hardly be separated – a bit like a leaf on its journey from spring through to winter.
I recall doing a reading a number of years ago where I suggested that I could see my own work as a kind of diary or journey in verse and, to my surprise, some ‘established’ poets in the audience were not in agreement and shook their heads vehemently but, thankfully, there were others.
I’m not too sure where I’m going right now. I set out by suggesting that poetry was bigger than all of us – even bigger than football. I think of Seamus Heaney, the Australian poet, Homer Rieth with his wonderful ‘epics’ Wimmera and The Garden of Earth. Geraldine Mills, Sinead McClure and Moya Cannon are poets; Bob Dylan is a poet, John Cooper Clarke is a poet; my neighbour who tells jokes and stories in the pub, surrounded by a willing audience, is a poet and doesn’t know it. Real poetry is the story of life itself on earth and beyond – it’s the music, mosaic and sound that landscape, fashion and streets throw up. Bigger than football. The New York Times Book Review said, Mary Oliver’s poems are thoroughly convincing – as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring. She writes stories in verse of the coming-together of all living things.
We communicate in so many ways but for, us, writers, it’s the shape, sound, feel and rhythm of language that counts. Peter Porter said, Matthew Sweeney tells you relaxed stories in gentle persuasive verse. He, too, has passed on but his words should resonate through generations to come. Matthew, once, said something like: there are worse pastimes than writing and rain doesn’t matter.
I really enjoy writing poetry for and with young people where we can scribble and perform our work. We don’t discuss reviews, good or bad writing, red carpets, funding or any of that stuff, but we have lots of fun and smiling faces. I, sometimes, wish we could hold on to the innocence and devil-may-care that young writers possess. It’s infectious.
One day, after a session of planting, starving and eating words with children, I scribbled the following poem.
Making Poems
Eat the words beat the words cut the words well.
Stare at words glare at words make the words tell.
Carve the words starve the words watch the words jell.
Sow the words hoe the words give the words a bell.
Words are sloppy like jellyfish. They are busy like bees among berries like mice in a granary.
Words carry you up. They swing you about. They drop you down.
They slam crash bang wallop. They frolic. They can be soft as down quiet as clover quaint as clowns or sing like fleas in a mattress.
Words blow me out. They make poems.
at: www.amazon.com
Anne M Carson
Anne M Carson is an Australian poet, essayist and visual artist whose poetry has been published internationally, and widely in Australia, receiving numerous awards including Commended in the Ada’s (2024) and shortlisting in the SWW NSW 2024. The Detective’s Chair: prose poems about fictional detectives was published Liquid Amber Press (2023). Her PhD, awarded in 2023, was awarded an Outstanding Dissertation Prize from the Visual and Performing Arts SIG of the American Educational Researchers Association in 2024.
Bâton de marche en France
It can’t be helped the hip is coming to the end of its life lasting far beyond its anticipated remit Saucershaped hips like mine often don’t last twenty years Mine has held onto its femur faithfully for nearer seven decades than six although
it has enlisted muscles and tendons in place of bone to stop my leg falling off This acetabulum has been a good hip always able in yoga to splay abnormally wide But this joint has done all the splaying it was given to do Now I limp around France first Paris then on a stick in Lyon It helps I’d be lying if I said it didn‘t hurt
that it isn’t hard but many live with worse My hip is on borrowed time I am grateful I am alive and have a hip still carrying my weight letting me pivot and turn sit and stand I tack the phrase ma hanch est mauvaise gratuitously to the end of an exercise
today in French class demonstrating with a certain panache that my mauvaise hip and I for now continue to vivre ensemble
Bernadette Gallagher
Bernadette Gallagher is the author of The Risen Tree (Revival Press, 2024), her debut poetry collection. She is a recipient of the Culture Matters Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2024. She has received awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council. Further details on bernadettegallagher.blogspot.ie
Low Tide
…our ancestors crossed the river on foot. Psalm 66:6
This place where the sea washes over sand, beats against the wall, raining down on the roadway. This place, where my great grandmother walked — Isabella, a goddess on dry land.
Whisper of a Worm
The fox routs out rabbit, worm, and grub only the scream of the rabbit touches our ears. Higher sounds skirt past us, intended for others.
The Pull of Home
I left it before it left me and still, something pulls at my sleeve, threads swirling around the Duach around my head as the boat rows gently under the bridge — out to sea.
Brian Kirk
Brian Kirk has published two collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023). His poem “Birthday” won Irish Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2018. His chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition, published by Southword Editions in 2019. His novel Riverrun was chosen as a winner of the IWC Novel Fair 2022. www.briankirkwriter.com
Nostos
Some are destined never to go home while some spend whole lives journeying; others can’t attain their fate because their’s is a nostos of the mind. Last night I dreamt I went to Station House again. The place was silent, the lawn trimmed, sills and eaves freshly painted, gunmetal grey. The dash was stippled, unscuffed by footballs, the drainpipes shining black. I walked the lane into the yard, opened the door and stepped inside. I passed through empty rooms, unable to move for anxious ghosts who gathered there whispering the story of our lives, the secret shame we thought we left behind, the foolish hopes that lived there for a while before they died, abandoned and forgotten. Look, we are here, they said, not to judge or blame but to take you back to who you are, the essence of the child who cried and cried but could not find the words to make themselves be understood.
Wrong Side of the Tracks
Early Monday morning, sun shining, station full of tired kids laughing, joking, but muted – a two-mile walk ahead of them followed by a hard slog in the fields and glasshouses. Too warm already for denim jackets, they stumble on platforms, ill-dressed for labour, hungry for pay day. Some won’t see Saturday, let go by the farmer because they are idle or careless, filling bags up with stones more than spuds. Others can’t stand the heat of the glasshouse, acrid smell of tomato plants in their hair, on their hands; in dreams they haul heavy buckets down endless rows. Saturday morning, and voices grow louder, the slagging takes off. The station master herds them to the road like sheep. At lunchtime they return, cash in their pockets, bellies full of crisps and sweets – they’re just kids after all. Respectable families travelling to town on the far side of the tracks pretend not to see one lad holding another’s hair, swinging a heavy boot up to his face. Somehow he wrestles free, crosses the tracks just as the train’s pulling in. The station master holds him by the ear until the guard waves his green flag; they crush at the windows, laughing, as they pull away, his nose bleeding, tears streaming down his face.
Dr Colette Nic Aodha’s academic monograph, David Jones, Disability, and Modernist Form is forthcoming in 2025 from Bloomsbury Academic Press. During the month of September, 2024, Colette’s art was exhibited as part of Tús exhibition celebrating 100 years of Galway libraries. Colette Nic Aodha is an award-winning poet and a visual artist who resides in Galway in the West of Ireland and has just completed a Ph.D., with the University of Galway, Discipline of English. Colette had her first solo exhibition, Imbolc, at Galway City Library, February 2023. She has exhibited her work with Quest, Artspace, UachtarArts, and Arts & Disability Ireland. She writes in both Irish and English, has fifteen volumes published which are mainly poetry collections but also include a volume of short stories, Ádh Mór, as well as an academic study of the blind poet Anthony Raftery, an 18th century bard whose songs and poems are still recited and sung today. She has one volume of English poetry, Sundial, which was published by Arlen House Press, She also has two dual language collections of poetry by the same publisher; Between Curses: Bainne Géar, and In Castlewood: An Ghaoth Aduaidh. Her work is on the syllabus in Primary, Secondary and Third Level colleges. Colette’s collected works (bilingual) entitled Bainne Géár: Sour Milk, is available in hardback and softback, published by Arlen House, 2016. Her most recent published collection of Irish language poetry and visual art, Réabhlóideach is published by Coiscéim, Dublin, 2020.
Solo
The lady in the tobacco kiosk in the local shopping centre has a beautiful daughter; slim and tall with straight black hair but unable to speak English, like her mother, I purchase two boxes of Cuban cigars and ponder over cigarettes for my son; the athlete. While I procrastinate the pool attendant transforms himself into a lizard and crawls under my sunbed, awaiting my return; a serpent of few words. Later, only the odd grunt my way, a puny chicken crisscrosses my path, I befriend a Finish girl who runs a boutique; she advises that it is more beautiful here.
I paint my toenails sunset orange and make the best of it, twilight has eluded me these past four days; eager for a red sky I forgo any fiesta, lagarto slithers from under my bed,
Cockerel chases chicken in the garden, sun slides behind cloud, thinking in English as the pool attendant gives a non denominational nod. I try and make sense of new Spanish; hand, the word for drink, the friendly waiter at the local cafe. I sip black coffee and write, just figured out who does the early shift and indulge in a cream slice; no substitute, waiter jokes as he leaves it on my table, another employee in evening dress
takes over the night shift, flowers blossom all year around, birds sing from dawn to twilight; dressing and eating the only exercise in the absence of hunting and gathering. I stroll the mild evening air to the shore; audience to a choir of waves crashing I examine lengthening shadows at Surfers Cove
Vertical Drop
Not wanting to fall at the last hurdle and be found storing coal in the bathroom or with cows lowing in the pasture of his bedchamber
he resolved to take her to dinner, his treat, make polite simile and metaphor, she thought his speech lilted classical and was impressed with the bachelor piece
despite previous undertakings never again to sit in his audience. Later they waltzed and did the foxtrot beneath Egyptian cotton and silken moon, he was all petals and silver gilding
but when the sun surfaced and without the consolation of night’s blanket it was the customary underground river to be negotiated, potholing in treacherous straits.
Leaving High Kings
On the crossing from the fortress of Laoghaire son of Niall Naoi nGiallach or Niall of the Nine Hostages, brother of Cairbrememories of struggling with alliteration, I searched for strains of ancient chivalry as I closed in on Cymru. A host of modern motorways instead of firey red dragons battling the knighta of Y Gododdin or Ambrosius Aurelianus, as visualized by the venerable Gildas. I scrutinize scenes from the bus window for any trace of Bedwyr from Pa Gur Yv Y Porthaur who returned Excalibur to its rightful lady. Night sky is diluted pots of Indian ink, and I dream of carpet the colour of sunflowers.
Doreen Duffy
Doreen Duffy MA with 1st class honours in Creative Writing, Creative Writer and Tutor, studied at Dublin City University, National University of Ireland Maynooth, University College Dublin and Oxford University Online. Pushcart Nominated. Publications include Poetry Ireland Review 129 by Eavan Boland, Washing Windows Volumes Too & Three & Four, Arlen House, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, (Germany), The Storms Journals 1 & 3, The Galway Review, Flash Fiction (USA), Glisk & Glimmer by Sídhe Press, Black Bough Poetry Christmas/Winter 2022 & 2023, The Incubator Journal, The Woman’s Way and The Irish Times and she was delighted to have work published in several issues of Live Encounters (Indonesia), She won The Jonathan Swift Award and was presented with The Deirdre Purcell Cup at the Maria Edgeworth Literary Festival. Doreen was a featured poet on iambapoet wave 12, 2022. Shortlisted in the Francis MacManus Competition, her story ‘Tattoo’ was broadcast on RTE Radio One https://doreenduffy.blogspot.com/
Bad Seed
“Michael, Michael.”
Mom pulled her knees up under her. She had been lying stretched out on the grass, her breath going in and out and she never stays still. Not since Dad died. She never sat with me anymore to watch TV like she used to before my sister Carol Anne came along. She was always picking up, tidying things away, right up to the time I had to go to bed. She was always cleaning, into every tiny corner leaving no place for anyone to just keep stuff.
No, stuff wasn’t allowed in our house anymore.
“What do you want to keep that for Michael?”
She always used my full name when she was giving out to me.
“Why on earth would you want a jar of spiders under your bed?”
“You’re supposed to know better.”
Why, why am I supposed to know better?
“Broken glass is dangerous Michael, for God’s sake, if you’ve broken a glass just own up and put it in the bin, you don’t keep it in the end of your wardrobe. Why does everything have to be so sneaky with you now?”
The day she said that her hand flew to cover her mouth, but she didn’t take it back.
If Dad were still here things would be better. I didn’t like to think of him because when I did the picture that came into my mind wasn’t the Dad who used to bring me fishing, it was him lying in the wooden coffin. That day, I had tried so hard to keep my eyes on the shiny gold handle, but Mom leaned in to kiss him her sleeve caught it and the bang as it fell in the room made me jump, then I saw Dad’s face, stiff, yellowy, like his angry face frozen. My Aunt came over, put her arm around Mom, leaned in, I could barely hear, but I heard my name, I knew it was something those nosey neighbours had told her and then I heard her say something about the ladder being pushed. Mom shook her head quickly, her eyes squeezed shut. I moved a bit closer; she looked down at me, but she didn’t put her arm around me or anything.
“Michael,” Mom’s voice was getting louder.
Ignoring her, I chased a hard, black beetle through the grass keeping one eye on Carol Anne, stubbing my finger hard into the earth just behind it. There were loads of different beetles; fierce predators it said when I googled them, liked to eat other bugs; nice juicy slugs top of the list. I cupped my hand over the beetle and looked over at Carol Anne. It was a big one alright, shiny purple around the edges, its body the colour of a black eye. I could see long legs and big jaws, I put my head to the ground and squeezed one eye shut. I had an eagle eye view over its entire world, it couldn’t escape. I wished I’d brought one of my pieces of glass with me, I could have trapped the bug and watched him burn. Instead, I had to keep my eye on it all the time and I did, right up until she had to open her fat mouth and start singing.
“Jinny Joe, Jinny Joe…” bring me back an eggio
My bug escaped. Even Mom looked annoyed with Carol Anne.
Now we’d have to go home.
I got up and kicked the earth hard where I hoped the beetle had run to hide. I walked over to Carol Anne. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mom packing up our stuff, brushing down her dress.
“Let’s see,” I reached down to take the Jinny Joe from her.
She held it up, a big stupid smile on her face.
“You can tell the time by how many goes it takes to set them free.”
There was still a white puff of fluff left attached to its centre. Close up, the centre looked like one of the spiders in my jar, hanging on for all its worth, while I pulled each leg off. I took a deep breath and blew the seeds as hard as I could, little bits of spit flew out on the air, one landed on Carol Anne’s face.
“It’s time,” I said slowly through gritted teeth, squashing the stem till thick goo oozed out.
“I wish you were dead,” I whispered, dropping the stem into her lap.
Eamonn Lynskey
Eamonn Lynskey is a poet and essayist whose work has been published extensively in leading magazines and journals and on-line. His latest collection, Material Support, was published by salmonpoetry in 2023. www.eamonnlynskey.com
Poem 1
black fields green mouths and nothing but farewells maybe farewells forever pushing through the wretched refuse crouching with the huddled masses suffering windsweep stormspray stench and not a word until the letter giving thanks to God or not a word until the letter
: i regret i have to tell you …
* * * evening lamplight chairs pushed back we kneel to say the rosary remembering each last leavetaking
Poem 2
no man an island more an archipelago of disparate lands some known others unexplored awaiting a Magellan sound their promontories or that Ehinger who sailed the Orinoco track the winding course of mitochondrial flow back to its source divine the mix of straits and inlets
we inherit : fjords deep and unexpected navigated daily
Poem 3
eyes stonecold this girl who wears the peplos flowing to her sandals beckons : stay a moment stranger merge your meagre lot of ten and three score years with mine of centuries – although they too a thread thin spun a filament will not escape the shears
: deny the hour its hurry eternity its scorn together we can stitch a common shred of time along the endlessly unfolding hem of Zeus
Edward Caruso
Edward Caruso has been published by A Voz Limpia, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, ‘La Bottega della Poesia’ (La Repubblica, Italy), Burrow, Communion, Kalliope X, Mediterranean Poetry, Meniscus, Melbourne Poets Union, n-Scribe, Right Now, P76, StylusLit, TEXT, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His second collection of poems, Blue Milonga, was published by Hybrid Publishers in 2019. In August of that year, he featured on 3CR’s Spoken Word program. In 2024 he co-judged the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.
Crossings, i gessi della Croara
1
Exhaustion will you spare me? Silence at almost 5 am.
Visitations from dreams, I’m averse to the cat at my door, scratching to enter.
Dawn across clicking gates, if I’m awake, gold coins found on a park bench, a distant train’s passing, glimpses that perforate morning.
Raindrops. Elongated cypresses beneath fading starlight. I’m in transit.
continued overleaf...
2
Web cam images of this train travelling at 300 km per hour. Ploughed fields, remote country houses, horizons the fading line of haze.
MBAs in the next seat ply through screens:
• tables of ranked personnel;
• performance indicators.
Rows of vines sped past, train wheel rhythms my hi-hats, my drums.
Farmers, their absence the slumber I bring as I leave the city behind.
3
On arrival, pearl skies. Creepers dangling off frayed bark, branches the clasped hands of twigs and gales, bird droppings and drunken fruits the quicksand of intensifying sunlight.
To enter this place of worship, ghost walks and dew, valleys in shadow.
Take this soil of mid-morning sap and haunted oaks, my bare feet among pine cones and moss.
To this refuge I return, each arrival as if the first.
Steep climbs past common hornbeams.
Scorched fields of glare.
Night lines
1
Via Mascarella, 21.00
Crowds, motor cycles and cars block the road. A silver-haired figure wanders into a group, stumbles out, but is dragged back in.
Voices and orange light, bedsheets dangling from a window ledge, onlookers dancing to a tune at street level.
Drums; guttural accents, jazz and punk rhythms; Africans and Sicilians, dreadlocks, studs and nose rings – two dealers chat up a bottle blonde who’s tripping.
In front of San Petronio a choral mass, onlookers outnumbered by clergy backed by the choir’s unearthly chant.
A 19 bus arrives, from its rear seat the centre a passing blur of illuminated stone pillars. More drums, but the sudden halt of the vehicle and the whichever way its passengers fall reminds me of a lottery – numbers coming up.
2
Via Emilia, 23.00
Headlights and fireflies, an African sex worker hums a lullaby, dances ostrich style by potato and maize fields.
Street lights curve into each other, this a night of one German beer too many. At times I hear my own breath; at others the cars going by.
Even when meeting somebody new, making that drive for the coast and sleeping together onshore, this is a city of endless wandering and star-less skies.
Via Emilia,* to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, foggy sunrises, imagined rain. Street beneath my feet.
* The via Emilia, completed in 187 BCE, runs from Rimini to Piacenza, Italy, passing through Bologna. It is still in use today as a major road, and was named after the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.
A handful of beans
In a crowded fruiterer’s she asks for cooked carrots, a handful of beans (clutching and dropping several) and for riper than ripe prunes.
After she leaves, a customer recounts that the shopper had lost her husband and had since lost her mind.
When she returns, repeating her request for beans, constant explanations of looking for them in her bag see her depart.
On the street, the bean lady asks where the baker, who’s been closed for years, can be found.
At Infanzia Park, while leaning over a wooden table and listening for busses, she asks me the time, hoping to leave for a destination she can’t recollect.
The strength of an afternoon breeze stops her in mid-thought. Busses come and go, leaving her behind.
The newsagent phones the bean lady’s daughter, who arrives, double parking on a narrow street, enticing her mother home, a third floor apartment whose building has no lift.
I expect to see the bean lady at Belpoggio Park, but the road is too steep.
Public spaces she occupied and those the bean lady never would, as if she were still among us.
Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards, including the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, as well as the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
The Politics of Things
He stole into nightmares, found a looking glass, peered into a person’s mind and marked the spot—cementing the mood of a dream into actuality. He made you think about real things, like how the girl at the café said your hair looked like creased weevils.
Like how rain sought you on the day of a final interview, drenched your borrowed suit with unasked questions, then the phone rang and rang, went to voicemail, you sent a text but no ellipse showed a response was coming.
Like how guilt skipped the gym, ate its way into a whole mud cake, three tubs of ice cream, even Ozempic couldn’t fix and someone put a mug on your desk—it said, stop singing. please. never. sing.
Like how the month had barely begun in the coldest winter and bills were a menace, you had nowhere to go but a choice between electricity or bread, bus fare or toilet paper.
Like zealots at the supreme court, fanatics inside parliament, loons outside campus.
continued overleaf...
Like staring into clouds and fretting over what’s ahead, what was here, or behind. Emergency room visits, power outages, heatwaves, hurricanes. The sequence. Never. Stopped.
The next morning, a perfectly sane girl, not you, toasted week-old bread, pushed out a flat-tyred bicycle all the way across the horizon, up, up a cliff, to join a queue of suicides.
dreams culminated in bodies soured from living tear stains flesh tatters bone fragments crawled in port lights blinking closer than you wish
Fred Everett Maus. “With Porfirio Diaz. La Pocha Nostra Alumni Summit, 2024. Posed by Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Photo by Aquarius Funkk.”
Fred Everett Maus is a musician, writer, and teacher. They teach music classes on a range of topics, for example a recent course on “Music in Relation to Sexuality and Disability” and a recurring contemplative course “Deep Listening.” They are a trained teacher of mindfulness meditation and Deep Listening, and a student of music therapy and object relations psychoanalysis. They have published prose memoir, poetry, and fiction, for instance in Citron Review, Palette Poetry, Roanoke Review, Vox Populi, and Live Encounters. They live in a house in the woods north of Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Roma Norte, Mexico City. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, which they co-edited with the late Sheila Whiteley, was published in 2022. The Handbook received the 2023 Philip Brett Award for “exceptional musicological work in the field of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender/transsexual studies.”
A Message to You
I address this poem to someone I can’t write about yet, though you shared my life, because we never finished our talking—although we stopped and it seems we won’t start now— but until we clarify some things (I doubt we will), our story is not mine to tell.
I might say I don’t think of you, but I started writing my dreams, and you are here every night. Last night we scurried along the dark street through bushes, into porches, ducking as we passed windows, holding hands, trying not to giggle. Someone, something wanted to find us. We were like children playing. The danger was real.
We were there and also I saw us across the street—the sea-deep sky, weak yellow streetlights, tender shadows.
Toward Winter
A tree quivered. A dog slept under it. Branches swept across the sky. So many leaves, some on the trees, others all around on the ground.
Too late to be shy. Things were progressing. No ice, but it was cold. Quick birds dipped through space between the roof and the trees.
When was something supposed to happenor was this the moment, as good as any other.
A baby separates from its mother, through milky tantrums and flights of power and rage, or works at separateness, playing softly in a special world, not real, not unreal.
Leaves played like that, too, gentle massage of the air between earth and sky. No one could contradict them. They were happier than they knew.
Light slanted in late afternoon across blades of grass, long and floppy like rumpled hair. Underneath, moles and voles, grubs and worms, another world, indifferent to the emotion of oblique light. Earlier, the edges of blossoms curled. They’re gone now, like hummingbirds,
better not to mourn them but look to what is here now, soggy patches of yesterday’s snow disappearing in the ground, making a mess of the animals’ tunnels, keeping everything alive.
Hey, Body
Startle me one more time. Let me see something that left my mind.
There was that time the darkness brushed against me. It made music.
Hey, Body, cool it. It’s not like you protect me.
I’m sorry, I think I went too far. I’ll be here.
Hey, Body, are you trying to lower my guard?
Are you trying to think for yourself?
Do you think we need a break? Heh, just kidding.
Hey, Body, it’s great the way you fall asleep.
I stroke your cheek and you comfort me.
You know that you have always won. If I want to forget you, I have to become you.
Geraldine Mills is a poet and fiction writer. She has published five collections of poetry, three of short stories and two children’s novels. She is an experienced facilitator and is a member of Poetry Ireland’s Writers in Schools’ Scheme. Her most recent publication is When the Light: New and Selected Poems (Arlen House, 2023).
Poltergeist
Being children, what we did was sleep through the noise of the baskets being dragged from under the still warm kitchen range as we did for the clatter against the walls of chairs upended, flung, socks and underwear scattered across the red and black lino, our mother sitting up in bed, shaking.
Next morning at the breakfast table her hand shook as she cupped it around a Gold Flake, tea untouched. Then she ordered us to marry each sock to its mate refold our knickers, vests, slips, return the tidied baskets to their own place chairs restored, a catkin of ash trembling onto her toast.
Jaundiced
His heart is in the wrong place just above the liver where it pumps in bile not blood. Every little hurt he rubs the gall of memory into until he grows fat on it. He sits there in the corner like an old grandmother waiting for someone, anyone to come and feed him little spoonfuls of umbrage tiny sips of pique that he can spit out dribble down his chin the white of his eyes turning yellow.
Stone formation in a cave in north Laos. The cave was bombed by the US during the Vietnam War. Photograph by Mark Ulyseas.
Ian Watson is originally from Belfast but lives in Bremen, Germany. He is the author of two poetry collections in English, the latest being Granny’s Interpreter (Salmon Poetry 2016); a further collection with Salmon, Somewhere, Far Away, a Radio, is forthcoming. His recent German-language non-fiction includes Spielfelder: eine Fußballmigration, on football and identity, and Bremen erlesen, a literary and cultural guide to his second-home city in Germany (both with Edition Falkenberg). He also publishes translations of poetry from and into German and English. He has worked regularly for radio and also made the film Cool to be Celtic for German and French television (arte 1999). He is a steering committee member of the Literaturhaus Bremen.
Energy on the Wing
1
Blackbird in the pear tree’s having a panic attack; three pigeons huddle next to the shed.
The ruffled corbies up high on the roofs of the main road on the dyke are hunched.
Not a hum or a whizz, the bees are abed, but the birds are burning joules; they feel the storm.
2
Like hundreds of boys and girls on bikes, the geese chatter and honk above the roofs.
They will cover thousands of miles to Morocco their talk is travel announcements, I am told –instructions for the change of pilot and cabin crew.
How many calories vanish in panic or flight? And there is nothing in the ocean they can eat.
Night Candle?
for Miriam Otto
Nachtkerze –
the German has a Victorian ring to it, Dickensian, this balm on my skin. The English, when I found it, was an alien concept like cucumber sandwiches, coffee, wine, grass snakes and village greens were to me as an Ulster child, known only from books from England.
Miriam fills me in on the scurrilous details.
‘There’s a lot you could do with this: it opens only at night; it will heal you, it will get below your skin. And they say there are poisonous varieties.’
The lady is a closet vamp. This prim river beauty, this shrinking violet, this modest wallflower, so prim and anonymous by day, so self-effacing, wastes her charms on the darkling beetle and the moth oblivious to her bright to deep pink lipstick. In the morning she creeps back into her vampire coffin.
Chamerion latifolium Evening Primrose
Train #37, Québec–Ottawa
Each approaching crossing is foretold by three long phantom cries; a careless motorist would be instant toast. The rash of red lights flashes past on the lurching walk to the loo.
Each rumbling crisscross bridge reveals a rush of foamy rapids wadeable to waist or maybe only knee.
Each leaping current wider than the Rhine is just a minor pipeline under the tracks. Feeders feeding bigger feeders through the pines tumble down to Trois Rivières.
I blink and see a stooped fur trader stumble, slipping with his wild-eyed cayuse, a hundred years ago on rocks he has to footfeelfind in shallows far too white for trout or pike on his laborious western trek.
Indran Amirthanayagam
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, editor, publisher, translator, youtube host and diplomat. For thirty years he worked for his adoptive country, the United States, on diplomatic assignments in Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America. Amirthanayagam produced a unique record in 2020 publishing three poetry collections written in three different languages. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty five poetry books In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com); writes https://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com; writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento; has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony. He is the IFLAC Word Poeta Mundial 2022. Amirthanayagam hosts The Poetry Channel https://youtube.com/user/indranam. New books include Seer, The Runner’s Almanac, and Powèt nan po la (Poet of the Port ) Indran publishes poetry books at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com). Amirthanayagam’s first collection in Portuguese Música subterranea just appeared from Editora Kotter in Brazil.
The Voice (Return)
This return will take place without further delay or dilly dallying. It will happen in full and half light and quarter darkness. It will be full, half and quarter courtpressed. There is no other way out. You will return now or later or eventually or before you get interrupted by the whirling knife or lacerating tongue, the insecure need to seize and slice the neck and press down until the chords pop.
Outside
I have the impression that the poet in the Spanish-speaking world still works in business, in public administration, in entertainment and not only as a bookseller, librarian or teacher of literary creation. This reassures me a lot. I can go to Mexico or Costa Rica, or Chile to meet poets on the streets, in bars, in offices. Sadly the American situation is different. Here poets teach in master’s programs in fine arts or in departments of literary creation. And they help one another with mutual invitations to their classrooms inside ivory towers. But those city poets, who live outside of the university, do not reach the student’s ear. They are voices in the darkness and in the wastelands. They are also excluded from prizes judged by the professors.
From the Periphery
The center did not hold. Wings buckled and from the dust bowl of beams broken into concrete strips and slivers a horrible terror is waking up after more than twenty centuries and tens of eons asleep… You see and hear nods to Yeats. Now, let me go with young Tom down the sawdust-strewn street. And to C.P in those days
of 19…take his hand and scurry into the alley and through the backdoor
of the coffee shop. I have an appointment to keep: with my daughter and son,
woman and god: my reader as well, if you can bear the beams of autobiography
to traipse ‘round the tent like a lamb in love–forever in your debt, Mr. William Blake.
John Grey
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, “Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
Herewith, The Life
Telephone rings. Someone wants your money. Or another close friend has died. You follow the hearse with watery eyes.
Each night, you try to dream the dead back to life, but their futile existent is perhaps no different from your own, where sex is confused with garbage disposal, passion with washing dishes, lovers with plumbers.
Another day, another look in the mirror. Your gangrenous confession you try to recycle, but it catches you out like a drunk at a cocktail party. like the grime on your hands from the life you’ve lived, how it differs so much from the one you would have chosen.
You throw out waste, scrub the toilet, mouth the familiar to everyone you meet. trudge through life working just hard enough to maintain a kind of grace.
You have your expertise. And a degree in dirt under your nails.
Poetry Reading At The Local Library
In case you don’t like poetry, there’s lemonade in a jug on a table at the back of the room –help yourself. And cookies of course. Madge baked them herself. And hot coffee. Sorry, Hank forgot to pick up donuts on his way but there is a plate of cheese and crackers and tiny slices of some kind of meat. That’s courtesy of Amy.
In fact, this is the biggest spread I’ve seen since last summer, at Kavanaugh field, when the mothers laid out a veritable banquet on benches for those who don’t care much for Little League baseball.
We have some amazing civic-minded folks in our little town. Some wonderful cooks, I might add.
In every one of the well-kept homes, as dinner time rolls around, a veritable feast for the eyes and taste buds is prepared and served.
That’s for people who don’t like each other.
October Evening, Harmony Lake
October evening, full moon slowly ascending that invisible arc over the lake, On the porch, I’m accompanied by nothing but the gentle slap of water.
I’m alone and drawing closer to true nature, a breath for every gust of wind, a heart-beat measured in ripple, thoughts trimmed back to simple sensation.
The air is clear, weather unbothereda spawning ground of peace. Short of a lover, what more is there?
I smile just this good side of smug. I sigh in case that smile needs reassurance.
John Liddy
John Liddy was born in Ireland. Between Boundaries (Nora McNamara/Limerick Leader (1974) and Slipstreaming in the West of Ireland, co-authored with Jim Burke, (Revival Press, (2024) he has published thirteen Poetry books, a collection of stories for children Cuentos Cortos en Ingles: Los Sonidos de los Vocales (Bruno, 2011), edited with Dominic Taylor 1916-2016 An Anthology of Reactions and Let Us Rise 1919-2019 An Anthology Commemorating The Limerick Soviet 1919. Liddy has also translated poems to and from English, Irish, Spanish and edited a special edition of Vietnamese poets for The Café Review Two in One, a collection of short stories, co-authored with his brother Liam, was recently published. He is currently working on a collection of poems True to Form, and editing a special issue of Irish language poets to appear with poets from Macao, China for The Hong Kong Review, of which he is a board member.
The Weaver Of Reeds And Rushes
I would look in after school or market morning, each time a glimpse of the weaver behind a reed basket, willow cot, mat or mesh bag in the making, lost amongst the briar and sally rods of his trade.
He seemed to work stretched out on the floor, threading a creel with hands moving hypnotically, recognizable objects emerging, a touch of hammer on rattan or bamboo, bullrush tied methodically.
By first of Spring, I had my Brigit’s Cross made; lush-green and sturdy, a gift for father and mother, who placed it on the kitchen door where it stayed to outlast them and Jack Delaney its maker
From Limerick, whose handiwork was woven into local lives, beyond river and ocean.
Youth And Age
The Madrid concert queue of mostly young women lengthened by the minute as I pedalled on my way to buy daily bread and morning paper; oblivion not for them, which, of course, I didn’t say.
Some stood in line chaperoned by parents who came and went until the queue began to move, while others sat on cardboard, wrapped in blankets, sipped juices or sang themselves into the groove.
It was 9am and the diehards had been waiting all night for an idol who would sing to each of them in ten more hours. I recalled the flutter of their beat, immunity to imminent demise, the day’s gruesome
Headline for a massacre at a music festival near Gaza, where vengeful bombs exploded as I cycled by, a pair of eyes glancing at an old guy in the plaza, concerned for a world not of their hue and cry.
Open Wounds
We have always been slow to make the leap between the links, to abandon the caveteachings, to embrace what doesn’t enslave, shake off the smell of the putrid scrapheap
To wake ourselves free from primitive sleep and live to outgrow the open casket by a mother who defied the silent threat to show us the hate that runs skin deep.
Is change possible within a lifespan? Each of us doing our part to reject corrosive influence with its sly plan to cause devastating aftereffect.
To earn the right to self-respect is to recognise in others what we ourselves have come to accept.
The Pantoum
Trapped in river water, their futile search For the mermaid’s song a vain attempt To find the mouth of the estuary, Fulfil their preordained goal.
A vain attempt to find the mermaid’s song Like words on a page in search of light To fulfil their preordained goal, Condemned to exist below the river bed
In search of light for them to grow. Then something stirs in their innards, Releasing them from condemnation, Converting them into musical notes
That stir the innards to move like a swarm, Free of river water, to end the search Like word-music on the homecoming tide, To frolic with mermaids in the Sargasso Sea.
Julian Matthews is a mixed-race poet from Malaysia. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Dream Catcher magazine/Stairwell Books, UK, in 2022. He is published in The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Live Encounters and New Verse News, among other journals and anthologies. Connect via http://linktr.ee/julianmatthews
Tyranny of a Good Memory
I turned the last page of Gaia’s biography and wept
Of course, I hadn’t even written it
I imagined it was there
And I wrote it
And you read it too
Because you were in it
And we hurt inside
And we hurt each other
And we hurt the world over And we wept together from all this earthly hurt
Even our fondest memories are wrapped in this very hurt
And all we want to do is forget
To unwrap, discard, flush out this hurt
The hurt that haunts us still
Until we write it all down
Frame it in a way that lessens the hurt
Or wade through it like hot tar
Thick and sticky and bitter as war
Until it rips at our skin, our ribs, our hearts
Until we all feel this hurt
Again and again and again
The hurt we are all trying to forget
The hurt we will never forget
The hurt we can never forget
Unreliable Narrator
The truth is wobbly.
Like trifle, panna cotta or mousse.
You mean like the jelly grandma makes?
Yes, like the jelly grandma makes.
Are you saying grandma is a liar?
No grandma never lies.
In fact, that’s her most endearing trait. That – and her ability to make the best trifle.
And chocolate cakes and pineapple tarts and curry puffs!
Yes, all those too.
So what do you mean when you say the truth is wobbly, grandpa?
Just like a dessert, truth at first can taste good but later you find out it’s not so good.
Like when you have too much sweet stuff and wanna puke?
Sort of.
More like when you have a cake or cookie that you think should be sweet but turns out it’s rather tasteless, even bitter.
Like sour candy or pop rocks?
Yes, the truth can be too much sometimes and explode in your mouth, I suppose. So you hold back, bend it a little so as not to hurt others.
Like when grandma thought you were me once, and you just played along because she had Alzee-mers.
Yes, sometimes, all people need is a little ear candy, not the bitterness of sour candy. There’s candy for ears?
Yes, but not the edible kind.
I miss grandma.
I miss grandma, too.
All this talk of food is making me hungry, grandpa. Can we go get ice-cream?
Yes. Let’s.
Kate Ennals
Kate Ennals has published poems and short stories in a range of literary and on-line journals (Crannog, Skylight 47, Honest Ulsterman, Live Encounters, Boyne Berries, Stony Thursday, Crossways, The Ogham Stone, Poetry Ireland Review, plus many more). She has published three collections of poetry. At The Edge (Lapwing) was published in 2015. Threads (Lapwing), was published in April 2018. Elsewhere (Vole Imprint), in November 21. Her fourth, Practically A Wake, will be published shortly (Salmon Poetry). Her blog can be found at kateennals.com
Insouciance
for my granddaughter, Aine
In the highchair, you kick grin, rule the kitchen consume my heart dig your fingers into my solar plexus, stick out your tongue, smile spread me across your face and lick your lips.
Playing on the rug with abandon and dexterity you scatter my arms and legs across the mat, then snatch me up squeeze me back in my box, limb by limb.
Laughing, you take your leave, wave, blow a kiss your eyes sparkling.
It’s the Mother of the Bride
It’s the Mother of the Bride, I hear a whispered aside. I smile, but don’t flash my teeth, my left molar is gone. Instead, I tip my hat. I bought it in a Columbian market thirty three years ago. Roisin was two. Joseph was one.
I smile, but don’t flash my teeth, my left molar is gone. Hello, I greet and welcome the guests, such a glorious day! Thirty three years ago Roisin was two. Joseph was one. I kiss bountiful cheeks, full of youth and blossom.
Hello, I greet the guests, such a glorious day! they bring exuberant blue dances, white flowers, green veils. I kiss bountiful cheeks full of youth and blossom, ignore the Atlantic crashing in my bosom.
They bring exuberant blue dances, white flowers, green veils vows, friendship, laughter, and craic. I ignore the Atlantic crashing in my bosom, rising and falling like champagne bubbles.
Vows, friendship, laughter, and craic
A cacophony of years breaks over my shores rising and falling like champagne bubbles. I gasp at the sharp, the light, the heart.
A cacophony of years breaks over my shores. I weep tears at my joy, my love, my girl gasp at the sharp, the light, the heart I’m the Mother of the Bride, I shout with pride.
On The Eastern Coast of the Mediterranean
The wild poppies and Spanish Marigolds are gone as are the strawberries, citrus fruits, and dates The qidra, kafta bi bandora, rummaniyya is no more.
Under the canvas and Cross and the eyes of the world grey sunlight hums instead beside plastic and rubber shimmering stainless steel and titanium alloys
Clods of earth are up-rooted and human limbs found torn at the breakfast table stamped with the name of God.
Lynne Thompson
Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, Start With A Small Guitar, Fretwork, and most recently Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024). A recipient of the George Drury Smith Award for Achievement in Poetry and 2024 representative of Los Angeles at the Marathon Poétique in Paris as part of the Olympic Games, Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and Gulf Coast, among others.
Still Life Without Sirens
Kingdom of Lahaina August, 2023
Then, again, a siren is a mythical monster—half woman, half bird— a proxy for the dangers of desire and risk. You think you want to live by the sea under an old banyan tree with no natural defenses for fighting flames, or with those with no time to recall where that banyan came from?
Do you want to return to your seaside home charred beyond knowing?
Where we come from, our ancestors recall with no small bit of remorse what they once declined to teach us— do not wait for the horn, for the euphonium.
You may like to snorkel and surf, wear headphones master-blasting M. Gaye’s who really cares? while the smoldering & ashes and departed reign above the foam.
But remember the sirens’ lure to Odysseus who, to save his men from crash & perish, inveigled them to silence their ears even as the sirens called; as O. gave way to madness.
Rare, Glistening
Everything lives in memory—boxes of trickor-treat paper cuts, daguerreotypes, door keys fit for no doors, tear-soddened letters too lovely to be tossed. It cannot be put into words and yet memory searches itself, recalls taffeta as a sound like no other when you’re fifteen, untouched, the new taste of champagne from Bar-sur-Seine on your lips.
Nothing like those firsts gives even one clue about a California autumn afternoon, rain washing away everything that was there just hours before, leaving—as though centuries were minutes—an elm, most of its growth given up to the season, the remainder glistening, greygreen emeralds in pale sunlight unwilling to set, the idea of them more beautiful than any language.
In this version, a fish
grows inside me because fish have grown inside me since I was a girl. Because I was a girl who could not name species, no one believed me when I said scales and my stomach hurts. The family said Pepto-Bismol. They said Cod Liver Oil and I spit all of it into the fireplace thinking spit burns. Spit does not burn. Amazing, yes?—what burns, what does not burn.
Shortly after I learned about the paradoxes of fire, I began to grasp the splendid nomenclature of fish: Pacific lamprey, green sturgeon, threadfin shad. When I shared my oceanic beliefs, our head-of-household raised both her eyebrows while opening a can of Chicken of the Sea, proudly wearing her apron and fossilized lack of imagination…
…but I had already swallowed the bones of a flannelmouth sucker set atop the parsley on my plate because children in China go to bed hungry although it wasn’t such a stretch to imagine that at least one of those bones expelled itself from my body and found a way to re-spawn in the Columbia River so I could get this interview and glossy cover on Scientific American . So I can tell everyone what I know: this is an understanding of the sea….
Margaret Kiernan
Margaret Kiernan is an Irish author and a Best of The Net Nominee for Creative Non-Fiction Award, 2021 and, 2022 and poetry and essay, 2023. She writes poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, and flash. She has had poetry and prose published in hard back, in e-book, on-line, and in literary journals and magazines, in Ireland, UK, America, India, and Australia. She also has multiple short stories and poems in anthology collections and cultural publications. She has Professional Membership at the Irish Writers Centre. Dublin. Ireland. She participated in a published collection in which professional writers and recognised curators participated, Published on December 6th, 2022. Ref: K. Higgins Chapbook Gift Presentation. The Arts Council of Ireland and Westmeath County Council Arts Office awarded her a Professional Development Bursary, 2021. Mayo County Council and The Arts Council of Ireland granted a Heinrich Boll Residency and Bursary, 2023. She launched her Live eBook, a fiction, in June 2024, titled, The Bay of Nectar” published by liveencounterspublishing.net- Issuu. https://issuu.com/liveencounters/docs/the-bay-of-nectar-bymargaret-kiernan-issuu Alba Publishing, UK, published her first poetry collection in July 2024, titled, A Mirage of Lost Things.
Sissy at Number 8
The three -story building over basement houses a mix of people. Some of them could have walked straight out of a comic strip, loud in garish colours, a mix of ages, young and old.
Sissy Norton lives on the top floor. She is the house owner, but even she has forgotten that. After all she is aged ninety- four.
Then, there is her son-in-law. Everyone calls him Coogan, but his mother had named him James at birth. His wife Bibi is long dead. Sissy has mostly forgotten that too.
Coogan is Nicola’s stepfather. He doesn’t allow anyone to remind him of this. A loner, he rarely joins in any family events. Leaving the house each day, he lives his life in spaces elsewhere.
Coogan is not dour, but he refuses to cheer-up, his energy is heavy. He makes the house happier after he leaves.
The parents of the brood of kids, are Jack and Nicola. They have seven children of varying ages from sixteen to six. Arthur, Rollo, Anna, Elizabeth, and the twins Cass and Jenny and finally William.
Down in the basement beneath the three stories is a paying resident, Mike Lee. Mostly unsure of when he is in the building, they just forget about him. He is missing for days, but he always pays his rent. Occasionally he is available to do chores and help Nicola when she lets him know in advance.
All floors shake with life, weighted down with running feet, Benji the cocker spaniel, Trixie the terrier dog, cats racing and screeching, doors slamming and the constant ringing of the house phone. No one seems to answer it.
Sissy bangs the floor, with a long rolled up umbrella with a metal hawk head, she calls for her needs during the afternoon. Someone eventually will answer her.
Coogan, when he is at home, will rouse from slumber and swear blue murder at her, roaring back at the banging with his own query,
“Is that woman still alive. Will someone take her next door to the graveyard?
Rollo, the fifteen-year-old, often climbs out the upstairs window onto the flat roof at the back of the house. He lies spreadeagled beneath the sky. The enormous garden bamboo plants reach high and swirl about him. He loves it out there. On hot days he can smell the tar pitch from the roof felt.
His dreaming carries him away to wherever he wants to go. On dark nights he goes out and watches the moon and stars. He owns a telescope and considers himself an astronomer of sorts. He is familiar with the position of planets and stars and can name them. He likes to hear the owls from the nearby shed . Sometimes bats fly about, and they swoop by his head.
This is the pattern and rhythm of days at number eight. The sun always seems to shine there. On wet days, the children play dressing-up. Under the back stairs there is a large trunk, a relic of travels abroad. It is full of clothes, bits of brightly coloured material of odd shapes and sizes, old tuxedos, brightly coloured shawls, hats from Brazil, Nicola and Jack still wear those occasionally. The kids dress up and earnestly perform dramas and make-belief sketches.
Outsiders rarely call to visit the house. Nicola once declared, “There just isn’t enough room for any more people in this house. No room for any more bodies.”
Jack Monroe adores Nicola. He agrees with her that they are enough. But he said that way back in the beginning, when they met in Recife, in Brazil. They both were working on UNICEF projects there. Child mortality amongst the Alto women was the primary focus. The research was harrowing for both of them. It was very intense work with hours spent data logging.
They took a class in basket weaving, figured it would be a distraction, enable both to relax for a couple of hours. Nicola developed a talent for the craft. She took her baskets and sold them at the monthly markets. On Monday morning it was back to the real job. Some weekends they had taken a bus to get away. They travelled further up into the mountains, camped under the skies, ate little and were enough, just the two of them together. Little did they know back then that one day they would have seven children of their own, and live in Bray, near the city of Dublin. In a house big enough for them all, and Great-aunt Sissy.
On their front lawn stands an ancient sycamore tree. It leans toward the yew tree at the broken fence, which is next door to the ancient cemetery. To the side of number eight, there is a clearing. It is where the family’s dead dogs, cats and birds lie buried. Bits of wood with those named pets marks the burial spot.
William tries to poke a hole to see his recently demised pet budgie. Nicola tells him it has flown up to bird heaven. William continues to poke there.
Over the boundary wall, wild roses, and briars tumble over headstones. White butterflies hop from bush to bush. The old church sits in ruins, resting into the red clay. A Holly tree grows through the ruins. On winter days, when the wind howls around, it blows through the broken walls. The Holly tree is always laden with bright red berries.
Sissy says one day she will lie out there quietly, in the ground. The children do not believe her. Sissy is never quiet. One of the twins suggests she accept a place in the pet’s corner. Everyone laughed at that. They knew Sissy had never like dogs. Or the budgie.
The dogs gave wide berth to Sissy and her long reach, with the brass topped head of that umbrella, she could give a lethal swipe. The cats were much sneakier. They crawled behind her, or over her, they watched for a day when she was behaving softer, before sneakily pushing onto her lap.
Jack worked in the city, as the CEO of a large charity group. Nicola stayed behind and took care of the family and home. She also worked at her basket making business. She had found an overseas purchaser; she no longer had to find buyers and could avoid having to go to markets.
She also got other people to make baskets for her in their homes. A cottage industry of sorts. Nicola purchased all the materials and delivered the stuff in her van to the workers. Later in the month, she returned and collected the finished products from them, paid them in hard cash. It was at these times that she asked Mike Lee to help. It was a job he seemed to like doing. At least, he never said otherwise. She paid him a small sum, said it would give him something to do. He agreed. However, Nicola rarely noticed that he scowled when she said it.
When she gets back to number eight, Mike takes his leave, goes down into his basement apartment. She gets the goods ready for shipping overseas to her client.
The bigger children help during their holidays, after school or at weekends. Arthur and Rollo do the lifting. Anna and Elizabeth help with the packing and invoicing. The twins, Cass and Jenny keep William amused.
One day in late August, when the apples were ripening on the back lawn, an incident occurred that Nicola found disturbing. Jack arrived home from work early, he was irritable, mostly about that revenue was querying his taxes. His substantial salary was known to them, but they suggested he had made an insufficient declaration of his income.
It had come about when his employer, a large global charity, was under investigation. The media were hounding the story, getting coverage in the global news press. Now the revenue commissioners were double-checking everyone on the payroll, and Jack was under the limelight. It troubled Jack that his life was being scrutinised. Nicola and Jack debated about this new turn of events.
What could have drawn tax revenue to them, Nicola wondered. She was in a mood to reflect and began to jump from one notion to the next. She dwelt on the last time Mike Lee had helped her out. When she had handed him money, he looked at it and stared her down.
She had asked if everything was all right. He closed his fist on the money and strode away without answering. At the time, she put it behind her, figuring he was in a bad mood. Now, she was trying to recall if he had ever queried her paying the basket weavers in cash.
She seemed to remember it coming up in conversation one time. They were in rural Wicklow, and she hadn’t enough cash in hand. She made a detour to the nearest town to withdraw money from an ATM . Mike had laughed at her, suggested the weavers would hold-on to the baskets. He had said in a mocking voice, “Why not use a chequebook, Nicola”?
She replied that it was the weavers pocket money, not wages at all. They did not want to bother with the business of keeping accounts and submitting returns to revenue. It was a hobby for them. Living on the margins sort of thing.
He had replied, “Tell, me about it. If I could borrow your van, I could make a bit of money myself too. Wheels would improve my work prospects; I could shift stuff.”
Nicola had given him reasons why she wouldn’t loan the vehicle to him or to anyone else. She refused to loan him or anyone her van. He seemed to take the refusal in his stride. That was months ago.
Now, she wondered, did he tell anyone about her business arrangement with the weavers. Who could be malicious towards her after all? Did they have unseen enemies? Could Mike Lee, who rented his apartment form them, be capable of a grudge. Would he have informed the tax office about her arrangements? How could he know that she was undeclared in the first instance? She then recalled the chequebook comment. It was possible that gave Mike the clue. His grudge may have been her refusal to loan the van to him. Nicola was making herself dizzy with the speculation.
Their household had become unsettled. Jack was stressed out. They were sleeping badly; the anxiety of investigation and the possible repayment of money arose. Jack had the worry about his job and the outcomes for his employer.
Nicola was upset. Her thoughts went round and round. Circling the questions, she didn’t have any answers to.
She joined Rollo out on the roof one night. He made room for her on his Lilo mattress. They lay side-by-side. The sky shone with clear stars. It was peaceful out there.
The breeze from the sea wafted over her, carrying the smells of the ocean, as the bamboo canes swayed about them. Reminded herself that out in the shipping lanes beyond Wicklow Head, large ships sailed by. Submarines too. From places far away in the world. She remembered her days and nights in Brazil. It now seemed a lifetime ago. In so many ways it was.
Life had seemed simpler then, well for her and Jack at least. Nicola began to think running a business from home wasn’t all roses. Being a stay-at-home mom was what they had chosen, it was best for the family both had agreed, years ago.
There was Sissy too. What would happen to her if Nicola went to work each morning in a regular way? Coogan wasn’t one to be depended on to mind Sissy. He slept and kept to himself when he was home. Sissy liked her early morning tea and toast to arrive upstairs to her. It was how she started her day.
The children took it in turns to carry the tray up. Nicola was considering the shape of her day if she went out to work. The kids at school would be fine but what about after school and holidays? There was so much to consider, she weighed the pros with the cons.
Crunch time came for Nicola, after one turbulent night of nightmares. She sought Jack out at breakfast between making toast and scraping the last of the marmalade out of the pot. Between all the chatter of the brood and mouthfuls of toast, she told him she was going to declare all, put her house in order, was how she said it.
Becoming compliant with revenue would be the catalyst for her to expand, she stated. She said, “I will take the responsibility for not filing my returns. You are not to be worried any more Jack. Not about the home front at least. I will explain all. It’s not your fault. I was not doing the thing right. Leave it with me. I will see an accountant today. This will be fixed.”
Jack was relieved. He asked, “What about Mike Lee. Is he going to continue living in the basement What will you do about him”?
Nicola replied to her husband, “Well, he might have done me a favour. I will never know. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. How else can we live in peace?
I will offer him a job. It will be up to him to decide , choose what he wants to do. He will have to be on the books. Work regular hours. I will go down to his apartment and speak to him, after I have spoken with the accountant.”
The atmosphere eased and the banter picked up around the table, broad smiles all round when suddenly the rapping of the umbrella hammered them into the moment. Sissy was looking for attention. The dogs began to answer her, barking furiously. Elizabeth raced upstairs with the toast and tea. Life at number eight was finding its own tempo again.
Maria Miraglia
Maria Miraglia, a poet, essayist, translator, and peace activist, graduated in foreign languages. She furthered her studies with a Master’s in Evaluation and another Master’s in Modular Didactics and achieved merit certifications at Trinity College in Edinburgh and the International House in London. Dr Miraglia taught in public high and secondary schools and served as a Ministerial Trainer for the English language. She was a member of Amnesty International and later of Ican. She was also Vice President of the World Movement for the Defense of Children (UWMC) in Kenya and founder of the World Peace Foundation (WFP). The poet is the Literary Director of the Pablo Neruda Association, a member of several World Writers Associations, an Honorary Member of Naciones Unidas de las Letras, Bolivia, a member of the editorial board of Afflatus Creations, Opa Archieve-India, and several other international editorial boards. She writes in Italian, English, or both languages. Her poems have been translated into over thirty foreign languages and are prominent in more than one hundred international anthologies. Her most recent collections are Coloured Butterflies and Echi nell’Aria (Echoes in the Air). Miraglia’s literary prowess has earned her numerous prizes and awards worldwide.
The Rouge Of The Soul
You fear exposing your soul its truths and look in the mirror staring at your image but almost frightens you to investigate to the bottom
Your soul is there well hidden you can hardly recognize it and soon realize of it you feel a little ashamed so immediately get organized to find remedies not to make it come out as it is and invent strategies to cover it with rouge
you dress your face with smiles your language becomes courteous and polished your lips always open to compliments or in defence of the weakest always the first to condemn injustices and hypocrisies
You love applauses and for this take care of appearances but sooner or later you’ll find again alone with your Self
Inquietudes
She arrives, comes in Slams the door furiously And throws the keys away To keep her far I beseech aid to Reason That smiles at me Like a mom does When a baby poses a weird question So I turn to Patience that in straightaway tells me wait wait but she’s been there a long time I say even when I feel like sleeping as an owl she begins to hoot and in the morning when silently I open the door to leave her inside she follows me like my shadow but what can I do to get rid of her wait and hope don’t you see how long and white my hair is ask your Sub-conscious she then softly whispers to me
After a long walk I meet this myself hidden and unknown and I also ask him to free me of the enemy that with bravado and arrogance stays in my mind occupies my thoughts With a lit torch The unconscious shows me infinite paths dark and intertwined with each other one life would not be enough she tells me to enlighten them all And so I go back and the banality of everyday life wraps me again like an airwave hot and stuffy while assails me the nostalgia for infinity for the immense meadows where free blow the winds.
Michael Durack
Michael Durack lives in County Tipperary, Ireland. His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications in Ireland and abroad as well as airing on local and national radio. He is the author of a memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (2016) and three poetry collections, Where It Began (2017), Flip Sides (2020) and This Deluge of Words (2023) published by Revival Press.
Hussey’s Banjo
Two pounds per man the weight allowance for the personal belongings of the men of Endurance when they abandoned the ice-floe they named Camp Patience to hazard survival on Paulet or Elephant Island. Two exceptions to that two-pound limit: the surgeons’ medical supplies and Hussey’s musical instrument, a five-string zither-banjo that Shackleton deemed “brain food” and “vital mental medicine.”
So, while The James Caird rode the monstrous waves of the Southern Ocean seeking a lifeline in South Georgia the men on Elephant Island formed a male-voice choir for Saturday concerts in The Snuggery or Billabong, and the little meteorologist with his six-tune repertoire lifted their spirits. They say the penguins, though repulsed by his Scottish airs, warmed to It’s A Long Way to Tipperary.
At the mercy of fate, back of beyond, twenty-two men sheltering under two upturned boats, the stuttering notes of Hussey’s cheerful banjo perforating the endless Antarctic winter night.
Heading South
Some day I will head south to Antarctica, via Punta Arenas, The Falklands, South Georgia to rest my gaze on Mount Marston and Mount Macklin, to view the Worsley Icefall, the Crean Glacier, the Cheetham Ice Tongue, the Wordie Nunatak. Some day I will round Cape Hurley and Cape Wild, sail by Bakewell Island, McCarthy Island, McNish Island, the Vincent Islands, follow the contours of the Shackleton Coast in remembrance of those scientists and stokers, cooks, engineers, carpenters, surgeons, artists, dog handlers, jacks-of-all-trades, officers, seamen, survivors, The Boss
Two Photographs
One hundred and seven years apart. Frank Hurley, Australian, pictorial artist, his flashlight portrait of the listing vessel, a night spectre haunting the polar ice. And the submersible camera’s shot of a ship upright and substantially intact, two miles deep on the floor of The Weddell Sea. Below the taffrail, across the stern, bold as brass, clear as day, the letters E N D U R A N C E.
Ndue Ukaj
Ndue Ukaj was born in Kosova. He is a writer, essayist, and literary critic. To date, he has published five poetry books, one short story collection, a novel, and two literary criticism books. He won several awards, including the national award for best book of poetry published in 2010 in Kosovo. His literary works have been published in distinguished international anthologies and journals and have been translated into many languages
Translated from the Albanian by Vlora Konushevci.
There’s no formula on happiness
Once, I wrote about things I didn’t fully understand. About physical phenomena, but the matters of the soul strip you bare of all the lessons, schools, doctrines, statistics, and mathematical equations.
Even today, I’m not sure I’ve understood many equations, but I know that all the schools in the world aren’t enough to explain the phenomena of the soul.
Once, I carried dreams on my back and said: the world is small, and my steps are large.
Now, I see the years around me, and carry the vast world on my back, measuring it with my small steps.
Today, the days are short and the nights long. And I no longer wish to write about grand things, like dreams of conquering galaxies.
I’ve told you: we never truly know what we lose or gain, though each day we love to raise the banners of triumph. It is said, the gods of loss know no defeat.
People
“What is human in a person cannot be burned.”
Kjell
Espmark
Our time has been baptized as modern and everyone agreed to this. Even those who were never asked.
Modern people, armed with smart tools, wander dazed through the virtual world, they see things they like, yet are more tempted by the things they dislike.
The sky opens and closes like a grand stage, where voices intertwine and pigeons in sorrow gaze.
People often believe they hold enchanting formulas in their hands, and equipped with smart tools they wander, dazed, in the virtual world scattering virtual feelings.
They see things they like, but are more tempted by the ones they dislike. And each day they get surprised by things that have existed for millions of years. People today have smart phones, and navigators to lead them to their desired destination. They cross the borders of states and continents unnoticed, sometimes like white clouds, sometimes like somber clouds, yet they don’t know the way to a tender heart, a soft and humble heart, or a sorrowful, lonely heart, whose tremors are stronger than a tsunami.
Those who feed on the sludge of words and have learned the tricks of time never plant their own garden.
Experiments are carried out in laboratories insisting discoveries are made daily, but no one bothers to discover an atom of love that could heal a wounded heart or free a heart consumed by hatred.
Turns
Turns are not merely winding roads, a landscape we leave behind, and another that unfolds ahead. Turns are not merely a change of mind, a late regret, a return home, a cry in the night, a whispered prayer for forgiveness in the lonely hours, when the unity between yesterday and tomorrow deforms, and dreams melt among the clouds.
Turns are not merely serpentine paths, like the roads of life or the roads of my land. (The roads of my land are serpentine, lush, worn down by the footsteps of wary travellers, the feet of scoundrels, and often watered by tears of sorrow.)
You know there is no path nor human life without turns, and perhaps that’s why we learn their tricks too late, the need for caution whenever we take a turn and head toward a new road.
A new road is a new turn, a landscape brimming with colours, where confused gazes drown and people chase after their dreams, like a child searching for something lost.
You, drowsy, ask: where does this night road beaten by fierce winds and travellers clothed in strange attire lead?
I am no weather forecaster, nor a prophet to calm storms and rough waves, I cannot predict the tricks of life and its grand turns.
I have learned to grasp their significance quite late, the need to find a new path, a return to the harbour of memories or a sail through tumultuous waves. We know that a ship in harbour cannot fulfil its purpose. So why all this unease each time we lose a road and find ourselves in a new space, amidst daunting waves?
Again, you ask questions shrouded in the unknowns. Turn. Fog. Drowsiness. Enchanted eyes. A landscape ahead and one left behind, and you say that walking through turns means walking through mist.
I slip through your words as one slips on old cobblestones wet from the August rain, and I see many roads that lead to the valley of sorrows.
You grow wistful and fall silent, silent as the calmed oaks after the storm has passed. But the storm of the soul does not pass easily, and the branches of life are not spread like the wings of birds, who, though frightened, always know how to fly.
When the sky clears and its dome appears endless, memories weigh upon your neck like a millstone, and you cannot see the new horizons. When you find yourself in the valley of sorrows, a turn is not enough, you need laboured breathing, a sigh, and an ascent upward, for in life, we must always rise.
continued overleaf...
Geographical maps say that at the end of every road, there is a new possibility, but the maps of the soul are not aligned with the geographical ones. The maps of the soul say that in the turns, there are endless dangers but one cannot move forward otherwise, for turns are as inevitable as the paths of rivers.
Rivers swell, recede, cross fields and mountains, and flow into the sea. But what happens to the waters that don’t reach the sea?
Waters that rot!
What about ideas that rot?
Ideas have the power to preserve life, to sow mist, and to scatter sadness. And in the turns they are guiding signs, warning beacons.
A turn is a great road that reveals a new view, a beautiful memory, eyes full of longing or slender hands, waving like clouds as they bid a tearful “farewell”.
A return pulls behind it a cart full of memories, soldiers who have survived adventures, and generals who parade triumphantly in the squares, declaring victory.
But in life, there is always the other side, like the opposite side of the earth when it bids farewell to the sun and is cloaked in darkness. They are the others, the defeated, pulling another cart, inevitably called the cart of loss, with desperate travellers, heads bowed, stern-faced generals, and tattered flags.
(The people of my land have pulled many carts of losses, and often confused them with those of the victors.)
And the elders like to say that a turn always comes late, when we emerge from a wasteland or, conversely, rush into it, as a lonely boat rushes into the storm.
When we stop, we remember the hours of joy, the nightmares, the sorrowful things, an escape from hell or an eternal entry into it.
Noel Monahan
Noel Monahan is a native of Granard, Co. Longford, now living in Cavan. He has published seven collections of poetry with Salmon Poetry. An eight collection, Celui Qui Porte Un Veau, a selection of French translations of his work was published in France by Alidades, in 2014. A selection of Italian translations of his poetry was published in Milan by Guanda in November 2015: “Tra Una Vita E L’Altra”. His poetry was prescribed text for the Leaving Certificate English, 2011- 2012. His play: “Broken Cups” won the RTE P.J. O’Connor award in 2001and Chalk Dust, a long poem of his, was adapted for stage and directed by Padraic McIntyre, Ramor Theatre, 2019. During the Covid-19 lockdown, Noel had to reinvent his poetry readings and he produced a selection of Short Films: “Isolation & Creativity” , “Still Life”, “Tolle Lege” and A Poetry Day Ireland Reading for Cavan Library,2021. Recently, he edited “Chasing Shadows”, a miscellany of poetry for Creative Ireland. His ninth poetry collection, “Journey Upstream” was published by Salmon Poetry in April 2024..
Translation of the poem from Irish to English.
An Píobaire Uillinn
Is mise Tomás Ó Kerrigáin
Píobaire uillinn as Granárd, Rugadh is tógadh mé ann
Igceart lár:An Gorta Mór, Prátaí lofa,lán de smoladh
Caillte udir dhá chultúr:
Na Tithe Móra agus na botháin. D’éirigh mé as Mar ní raibh duine fágtha an Píobaire a íoch, D’éalaigh mé Ar bord loinge Chuig na Stáit Aontaithe, M’uillinn píopa Im ghlac agam.
Iontas an domhain orm
Ag caint liom féin go hiondúil:
“An Tú atá Ann “? “Is Mé Go Deimhin”
Seinm mo phíob uillinn
I síbín ceoil, Sráid Daicheadh a Dó, Nua Eabhrach.
Caillte San port, mo shúile leath dúnta, Mo cheol aitheantais I gcónaí: “ An Maidrín Rua”
The Uilleann Piper
I’m Thomas Kerrigan
An uilleann piper from Granard, I was born and reared there, Right smack in the middle of: The Great Hunger, Potatoes rotting in the fields, Caught between two cultures.
The Big Houses and the thatched cottages, I Got Out: since there was nobody left To pay the piper, I escaped on board a ship To the United States of America, Clutching my Uilleann Pipes.
Wonder of the world
Forever talking to myself:
“Is it you that’s here?” “It is for sure” Playing my Uilleann Pipes In a Speakeasy on 42nd. Street, New York. Lost to the tune, my eyes half shut, My signature music always: “The Little Red Fox”
Paris Rosemont is an Asian-Australian poet and author of poetry collection Banana Girl (WestWords, 2023), shortlisted by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for the 2024 Mary Gilmore Award for a first volume of poetry, and longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards 2024. Paris’s poetry has won awards both locally and internationally, including first prize in the Hammond House Publishing Origins Poetry Prize 2023 (UK), second prize in the Whitsundays Literary Heart Awards Poetry Prize 2024 and shortlisted for the International Proverse Poetry Prize 2023 (Hong Kong). Paris has featured at events including the Red Dirt Poetry Festival 2024 (Alice Springs) and Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2023. Her second collection of poetry, Barefoot Poetess, is due for release in early 2025. www.parisrosemont.com
Film credit: Girl #3 in the canteen
My mother—in her heyday—had been quite a looker. Pretty enough to have been a Bond girl, framed in a sniper’s scope to the brassy vibrato of Shirley Bassey. As a teen, poring with fascination through plastic sleeved albums (eight curved-edge retro-tinted photographs to each braillebacked double-page spread, fizzing lightly with clingy static at each turn of a page), I wished I’d inherited her gamine charm instead of the broad-nosed, dark-skinned, stocky sensibilities of my paternal line. My father gave me his buck teeth. Most people leave them in denture cups on nightstands. But I keep them in my mouth. I s’pose I should’ve been thankful I hadn’t been pretty enough to have got into any real trouble. I was simply a supporting sidekick, blending blandly into the smoothie of society, like a carrieringredient nobody ever requested by name.
Richard W. Halperin. Photo credit: Joseph Woods.
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections since 2010) and Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert (eighteen shorter collections since 2014). In autumn 2024, Salmon will bring out a Selected & New Volume, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon most of these. The seventeenth and eighteenth Lapwing, The Painted Word and Three Red Hats, appeared in July 2024.
Of the Mind
I listen to Mahler. I when young listened to Mahler but there is more in him now, a companion in eternity. I listen with the mind, but what is mind? It is not thought, sometimes I have no thought but I still have mind. Is mind God numbed? a little less numbed when in Mahler? I am awake now, as I often am before bed. Today a friend sent me red roses for his own birthday. Zig-zag. There is no old. There is no Mahler. There is only red roses.
Lest she dash her foot against a stone
A psalm in the morning, A psalm in the evening.
A psalm when I got up dispersed the upside-down of the night.
Something budges. Something – Yeats was right –dances.
A friend now dead seemed to me to be an actual angel. We would meet over pots of tea. He was what actual angels may be like. Solid. Kind.
The dearest psalm is a fiction of that.
Possible Things
I am a possible thing and here I am for a while.
The Grand Canyon is a possible thing. Nothing should look like that.
Vertigo is a possible thing while it is happening.
Marriage is a possible thing, no divorce can end it, it keeps on going.
Tragedy is a possible thing, which happens.
A composer once suggested that God created the universe by playing the flute. Possible things.
Roisín Browne
Roisín Browne lives in Rush, Co Dublin and has been published in A New Ulster, The Galway Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, Poem Alone, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Flare, Black Nore Review, Ragaire Literary Magazine and Mnemotope. She was commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue Awards in 2018, shortlisted in The 7th Annual Bangor Poetry Competition in 2019 and was highly commended in the Seán Dunne Inaugural Poetry Award 2024. You can find Roisín here @ismiseroisinbrowne.
I take a walk on the seventeenth day of March to fresh, green, fields, with bluebells and daffodils bobbing in an easy wind. I look across the dipping land, to the horizon cutting sky and Irish sea, and think Thank God I was born here, free.
In another land to the East, on a Mediterranean Sea there is no green, but broken shards among obliteration. Dust and death the only food to eat. And to the West of me, an emerald shamrock bowl being offered in a large White House. We speak.
Words cannot free, so it seems. Yes, who are we? A dust mite of a nation, while today, the globe goes green.
I take a breath, shake my soul at this idyllic scene, feel sick, look out to sea.
*Lá is the Irish for day.
On delivering turf
It’s nine days into July and there’s a Status Yellow rain warning. I’ve laid sods of Island turf on wet grass, against a wooden suburban fence. One log on top of the other, to create a stacked square.
The grass gleams against the deep brown. It makes for a perfect Insta post. Tomorrow I will deliver this turf,
to a coffee shop in Swords, to a man, whose middle name, mirrors the middle name, of a man from Peru. An alchemist of earth,
he will take these sods, break them back down, create black butter, and turn it to gold
recalling, hot, honey days, where boggy ground and green swatches, glistened yellow, for us all
Sinéad McClure’s writing is published on radio, in anthologies, in magazines and online including; HIVE, The Long Poem Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, The Cormorant Broadsheet, The Stinging Fly, Southword, Live Encounters and many other fine publications. She was recipient of the Roscommon Bursary Award for her first solo chapbook The Word According to Crow. She was shortlisted in the 2024 Fish Poetry Prize and Highly Commended in the 2024 Patrick Kavanagh Award. www.sineadmcclure.com
These are the days of the Brewer’s Sparrow
Flit, and peck, poke and prod, the day disturbs my lidded eyes.
Sagebrush in summer. Desert in winter.
Weeks without water my unremarkable shape a lean shadow in the dark outline of a quickened wind.
How Mojave creeps into my salt bones leaves its parched seal on my heart.
I am almost invisible. An inconspicuous bird blended into ragged earth.
When the wind shifts I crave to hear the long trill of my lover gasping, unrelenting, as if a thousand chimes dangle from a thousand Joshua trees.
Greenfinch
I have the disease it spread through my family almost unseen I appear robust, my large head, host of brains
What is melancholia?
Is it that feeling you get when you hear the other birds cantillate? Slow, solo, piano of the forest, trees turn branches inwards, hug themselves.
When my great uncle was at the asylum They tried to stop him whistling.
What is mania?
Is it seeing grape-hyacinth stiffen with frost And not hearing any bird at all?
When they stopped him whistling, He began to chirp.
Mania from grief turns loved ones into butterflies Or robins or white feathers descending?
Hereditary
Unknown
Sunstroke
Poverty
Religion
Grief
Alcohol
Congenital
Hurt
I wait in the hedgerow for the cutting machines.
Autumn Father
I remember the Autumn Father through black and white photos of my sisters turning harvested potatoes on the loamy soil of the far backs. Fields that ran for what seemed like weeks down Killiney hill to the sea. I wasn’t in that autumn, father, I was in yours. The father with the walking stick schoolboys called granddad.
They didn’t know that stick was also a staff that traced the shape of Cassiopeia on warm, dark nights. They didn’t know that stick was also a baton that conjured Tchaikovsky in the living room. They didn’t know that stick was a wand that cast spells on schoolboys, turned them into potatoes, soil filled heads rolling down the far backs.
