The Pickled Body - Issue 2.1 Quantum

2.1 Quantum Spring 2015

the pickled body

Contents Editorial

3

Sean Ruane Scale

Kate Quigley 9

Inside the Orange

18

Kate Dempsey Equations on Waking

4

Iggy McGovern Quantum Clerihew

Angela T. Carr 10

Experimental Mathematics

19

Eabhan Ni Shuileabhain Flowers

5

Afric McGlinchey A Quantum of Happiness

bruno neiva 11

logistics

19

Noel Duffy Shapes That Fit Together

6

Paul Casey a small measure

Marjorie Lotfi Gill 11

Tessa Berring Etching

6

12

Shane Holohan 7

Eleanor Hooker 21

16

Justin Karcher The Great Abyss Where I Grew Up

7

is Being All Modernized and Gentrified

Michael Farry My Fish and I

17

Sheila Mannix 8

Kay Buckley Fields

Jennifer Matthews S.A.D.

20

Siobhán Flynn

Neil Fulwood

Bakunin’s Probability Clouds

Death Row Door

By the Barricade A Glimpse of the God Particle

Display

20

Featured artist Sean Hayes A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose

Two Become One

Low Tide

17

22

Review Dimitra Xidous on Dylan Brennan’s Blood Oranges

23

Pickled this issue

24

9

the pickled body quantum 2

Editorial A poem is unpredictable. A message, a feeling, sent from one mind to another, it is changed in ways the writer cannot know. In this issue of The Pickled Body, we have captured some of these slices of meaning yet let them slip out on a journey over which neither we nor the poets have any control. Make of them what you will, because a poem becomes something other – and richer – when it combines with the mind of the reader. !

Some of the poems presented here deal, on the face of it, directly with the theme of quantum mechanics. Others take the notion of Ian Fleming’s ‘quantum of solace’, his unusual tale of the death of affect, in which he illustrates the bare minimum of human feeling!– the least amount of hope, of consolation – required for a relationship to survive.

Others still are perhaps surprisingly spiritual. !

A few of the poets in this issue are physicists or have a background in the subject – offering us an insider’s perspective, if you will. All are first-rate explorers. We are delighted to bring their work to you. We are also thrilled to feature Sean Hayes’s glorious photography nestled among the poems. !

In choosing ‘quantum’ as our theme, we knew that poetry, like all art, like all communication, finds its true form when it is received, not when it is transmitted. And when that happens, both the poem and the reader are changed.

Engage. the pickled body quantum 3

Kate Dempsey Equations on Waking You cling to the brink of sleep your eyelid flickers, your mouth twitches. you turn, If it were dark as a shutdown mine dusky dizzy sweet; You breathe out, your pulse beats You teeter at the edge. sunshine around you. Closer. your skin, we share But skin is no barrier. to find my quantum tunnelling through you in me.

In the thin light I watch your dream, I touch your night-rough chin, I kiss your jaw.

I could still know your scent I breathe. to my heart.

I move, slow as dawn, spoon My skin to the warmth.

I analyse wave functions busy fundamental particles and fragments of you

the pickled body quantum 4

Eabhan Ni Shuileabhain Flowers I watched him turning through her gate, walking in her door.

I understood it all then, the late nights, how he seemed more sure, smiled more easily, brought so many more flowers than before.

Why he ran his fingers through my hair like he used to and cupped my face and started holding me again.

I had wondered was he trying to get back what we once had, wondered whether I still wanted it.

And then I saw him go to her.

I waited as night settled down and lights were flared behind curtains that shielded me from how his back would look, his spine marked out, his shoulders bared, the small hollows above his buttocks that I loved showing how his muscles worked giving pleasure to someone else, not me.

And waiting there, I wanted him again, wanted him to wrap his fingers in my hair and drag us back to life.

I put his flowers in all the vases I could find, in old jugs and chipped glassware, hoping the scent of his guilt would convince us both he wasn't leaving, he couldn't leave, hoping he wouldn't see the dread I hid on every windowsill and ledge.

the pickled body quantum 5

Noel Duffy

Tessa Berring

Shapes That Fit Together

Etching

The two elements exist as though predestined to make a perfect fit, like a see-saw pivot the molecule bent into a fixed contour— one oxygen with its partially empty shell, coupling with two hydrogen atoms each angling from the side— this their own unique and necessary marriage at the scale of the tiny, the weak charge each carries enough to draw these molecules together, grouping them into a liquid cluster giving us water, the cloud that hangs in the sky above, the rain that falls around us all; a substance so pure it carries no taste or smell, it the base receptacle for the elements that hide in its embrace, supporting all the living things in a given place.

She is quietly anatomical, nothing gory, no ripped flesh or yellowed innards.

A flat sucked lozenge outlined on a tongue, intestines folding, paper walnuts, and limbs non-plussed by scissors.

Held up, splayed, dried frog in a tin, naked puppet in a turban, solemn lips to colour in.

Witness this symmetry of fists and feet soles, foetal snail knot, crouched.

Thought dares its way to surgery, remnants of a cutting out.

the pickled body quantum 6

Shane Holohan

Neil Fulwood

Two Become One

Display

Wednesday, September 12th, 2001

Overdue Africans babble competitively Bellies swollen, joints loosening, teeth less secure I should resent how their taut skin Mocks, but I don’t To my right you lean left A little more than you need to The pressure small comfort She arrives with a clipboard And the words that divide us

The kerbside is a gallery of broken glass, each exhibit a shattered portrait of the sun.

Petrol expands its debate on combustion across tyre-marked concrete, a dull rainbow smearing the surface of its latency.

Just uterine ballast, I sit, sit and wait With the babble, the bellies The heartwhoosh cacophony While you go with her Past the curtain, through the door To the room I remember But won’t see again You return moments later, Empty. the pickled body quantum 7

Sheila Mannix Bakunin’s Probability Clouds in a stone in a piece of wood in a rag in this state of barbarism and animal brutality particles seek each other in this state of barbarism and animal brutality particles seek each other

*

*

a particle of the infinitely great is necessarily infinitely small immediately god appears man is reduced to nothing immediately god appears man is reduced to nothing

immediately god appears man is reduced to nothing in a stone in a piece of wood in a rag in this state of barbarism and animal brutality particles seek each other

* * a particle of the infinitely great is necessarily infinitely small immediately god appears man is reduced to nothing in a stone in a piece of wood in a rag

*

god is everything the liberty of living men the sufferings of real men are nothing immediately god appears

immediately god appears man is reduced to

man is reduced to nothing immediately god appears man is reduced to

nothing in a stone in a piece of wood in a rag in a stone in a piece of wood in a rag

nothing

the pickled body quantum 8

Jennifer Matthews

Sean Ruane

S.A.D.

Scale

My disorder in this sunless fortress of brown stairs and blue bodies I’m told is to blame on a lack of vitamin D. Worse are the poisonous positive ions from computer screens— unhappy mirrors gazed into for days, weeks scrying eventualities, soaking up full spectrum gossip, up to the minute depressants & political-affective-contorters.

Metal at the smallest levels, so I’m told, May show differences beyond those of scale.

When gold’s reduced in size a billionfold It’s red, magnetic, liquid, a catalyst And hardly seems itself, torc stranglehold On our emotions loosed, pierced gilt chain-mail, The sheer awe lost it once inspired in bulk.

The solutions: milk with a green cap, saline baths in magnetised pools, high intensity yoga aerobics to sweat out ill will, stagnant karma and negative ‘I’ statements. Following, my yoghurt pot of drinkable serotonin to supplement my deficit of connectivity, of chemical facility, those leaps of light I crave from neuron to neuron.

But thriving somewhere behind my shaded winter eyes: mood sucking, white light eating machines.

That the ring thrown away here in a sulk Last August, when our hopes were at their brittlest, Was merely rust-prone, tarnishable gold; While your forgiveness, even at its littlest, To the tiny traveller down in the vale, Would glint as bright as a welcoming grail Raised on the walls of a noblewoman’s stronghold.

It strikes me, sitting by this mountain lake,

the pickled body quantum 9

Iggy McGovern Quantum Clerihew Max Planck is the man to thank for the mysterious phantom that is the quantum Louis de Broglie had the unholy idea that a moving particle wasn’t a definite article Werner Heisenberg Would not waste an erg On those who were unconvincible about his uncertainty principle Albert Einstein liked to opine: ‘it's not very nice for God to play dice!’

Erwin Schrödinger Was a real humdinger His eponymous wave equation, it’s said Was conceived in a mystery woman’s bed Paul Dirac Took a different tack People thought he was mad as a hatter With his prediction of antimatter Neils Bohr might feel sore if he heard my brother’s perceptive remark: something rotten in the state of the theory of Denmark

the pickled body quantum 10

Afric McGlinchey

Paul Casey

A Quantum of Happiness

a small measure

A half-wild boy, panting up the hill under a sky blue-swept, cloud-ragged.

His body asks a question, gives an answer.

stars are born people die more stars than people by far reborn as stars

A mosaic of light, like a secret, captured in this song of slanted movement; a half-wild boy, panting up the hill.

and more stars than grains of sand the number of grains of sand?

(7.5 x 1018 grains of sand)

His urge to run leaps from foot to foot, and earth exhales its pleasure in response.

His body asks a question, gives an answer.

seven quintillion, five hundredquadrillion grains we believe (give or take a few grains of sand)

The wind swings behind him, like memories shaken out, snapped laundry.

A half-wild boy panting up the hill. !

He flies through doorless rooms, across a private ocean, to a pinnacle.

His body asks a question, gives an answer. !

Each day’s discovery, a kind of grace.

Arms winged above his head, like a stork, uplifting.

A half-wild boy, panting on the hill.

His body asks a question, gives an answer.

the number of stars, 70 thousand million, million, million stars (the same number as molecules in ten drops of water) so there are more worlds in eleven of your teardrops than stars (or grains of sand)

the pickled body quantum 11

Featured artist

Sean Hayes A Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose

SiobhĂĄn Flynn A Glimpse of the God Particle The elusive Higgs boson may have been sighted doubts arise as it decays immediately after creation transforms into smaller particles which form the elementary units of the universe that is if it exists at all

I evaluate them every day cradle one in my palm apply gentle pressure but they’re always too hard until I forget my inspection too late I discover their time has passed

They speculate that it provides mass without it the atoms that make up the pears ripening in my fruit bowl would be zipping around the kitchen at the speed of light which is the same speed they turn from ripeness to rot

There is nothing official yet but the scientists are intrigued they have found clues spikes in their data which suggest that the Higgs boson did exist for a moment like a perfectly ripe pear

the pickled body quantum 16

Michael Farry

Kay Buckley

My Fish and I

Fields

(After a painting by Roisin Duffy)

I have no idea what it is— somewhere between trout and swordfish— but it’s mine and has been since my first fascination with the swirl of deep water, creatures too fast for me splashing to right and left.

You put your hand on the gate and a herd of grass warmth and wetness spies you shepherd.

Moving towards the metal, breath purling in patterns, the cows cross the field, collecting mass to their atoms Higgs boson. A world in particles, you and I, in the clear, as mud shod too, our love has grown, once apart to now near.

In these strange solitary times I hug it tight, enjoy its silent, wet companionship, knowing full well how fragile is my grip, how one flick would leave little, a few sad scales maybe, a damp memory and me, way out of my depth, drowning among seaweed fronds and the bright cold creatures of the deep.

the pickled body quantum 17

Kate Quigley Inside the Orange Your pithy skin, rent in a spiral on the desk.

It looks to the teacup & the dusty aloofness of books for help—

& sour face. But you, you were a good orange.

Your Spanish brains stuck in my teeth now, fizzy, a matador’s gored

Another, the drop of an earring, the fishlimbed flamenco dancer you almost got inside one crazed night.

No joy here.

Your juice is dripping freely now—yes, you were a good orange while you lived.

side-step, tanging blood on the bull’s muzzle.

A line of spat-pips, mapping the story of your ideas. One, half-

The last; strange; vaguely twisted & veined grey, a little dark spot liked a round eye:

Sweet, helpful, did not try to escape your net like some of the others; like that one, with a still-green hue

formed, browning; chipped bone from that unlucky matador, as you watched from between leaves, hushing scandalous crows.

the child you have purged here, far from your hot home.

the pickled body quantum 18

Angela T. Carr

bruno neiva

Experimental Mathematics

logistics

Experiment: two irrational primes shift the horizontal plane of an unswept floor; parabolic algorithms of Cuvier and tequila collide in a skitter of projectile shoes;

been there but couldn’t you know pull it off (it was so bloody whirlwind) the road was clear but all the cars looked the same from afar really they did blinking like dying soundless fireworks

a.m.’s rain-caked windows skew solar telegraphs, prismatic intersections no longer able to mathematically express the root of who fucked who first and where; Euclidean geometry tested, but data, ultimately, unproven; subjects exposed to relative uncertainty in the stark, glaring angles of noon.

the pickled body quantum 19

Marjorie Lotfi Gill Low Tide

Death Row Door

The water on the sea side of the harbour wall flashes like a child thrown in, a skinny child swimmer waving wildly and howling at the cold and the dark The marina side is calm as a sheet of window glass laid over its waves, the bottom revealed, like each of us, from its surface He sits watching, not at the end of the curving stone wall where the waters meet, but further back so his view is true east to west, facing the North Sea The boats in the marina wait like old men in a town square, rusted at the joints, names that once called to one another from the hull now flaked or gone— and those furthest inland sit knee deep in mud, anchored to breeze blocks beached in the sandy gristle, like a set of dentures left out in an empty glass A small school of fish, mackerel or saithe, wing through the water darting in perfect unison; when they hold still, he holds his breath, and gasping, looks away He reaches into the small pack of his possessions, all else given or lost, finds his passport, and hurls it into the sea, aiming for the water’s point of change

The door was like the skin of another man, a long back risen in places with leathered scars, welts grown dark with age, the whip’s strength still visible in repeating arcs along its unhinged edge.

Then it read to him like the patchwork of patterns she’d applied and pinned down, cut open before stitching together to be worn by him and, later, his brothers.

But tonight the door is his father’s fields, the spades of dark earth lifted high before turning, now waiting for the next crop, the markings of each life drawn out of the dormant soil and the hull, a husk left behind.

the pickled body quantum 20

Eleanor Hooker By the Barricade We are the survivors who wait by the barricade for the slow countdown.

Some of our dead slip through, stand beside us, unsteady, unclothed, low— we cannot take them with us.

I am a smashed pane, that lets the rained downpour in, in to vacant tenure.

As the countdown begins there is a clamour for the barricade.

This is where we’re obliged to live on.

The cry goes up for cheer, smile, they demand, be merry.

Fireworks tear the stars from the moon, pock the night with dissimulated Armageddon, the awed throng pitches forward.

Time takes its relentless hold, drives us through to this New fatherless Year.

It is unstoppable.

I look back as the barricade goes down on the old year, on my Dad, left behind.

If not in groups then kinfolk keep in hailing distance, their calls, inmost, distinctive, provisional. My Dad sees me first. He’s changed; parchment against bone, eyes gone the colour of vertigo.

the pickled body quantum 21

Justin Karcher The Great Abyss Where I Grew Up is Being All Modernized and Gentrified Steady, heavy rain throughout tonight and It’s worth mentioning that time is running out For me to be happier that I’ve ever been, That creatures are being catapulted into the neighborhood And that their sweat tastes like cool craft beer.

It’s madness!—me all drunk like this and growling At my telescope. It plays strip poker with the stars And always wins, but that doesn’t get me any closer To rolling around with them in mothballed beds.

I’m too old to become an astronaut, which sucks, Because darkness is exploration and the darkness Above is the best kind of darkness. The closest I’ve been To being an astronaut is that time I was drunk and snuck Into that bounce house on Niagara Falls Blvd. in the dead Of night. It was a clear night so the stars were dandruffing Like dogs all over Western New York and it felt like I was Caught in a snow globe of astronomy and zodiac vomit.

It was great—the way the moonlight pulverized me into Earthly submission, the way I drunkenly bounced like An inner city basketball with a death wish. It was great Being swallowed up into the emptiness of space. It Sounded like the desert, the interplay between light

And shadow. The true emptiness in our lonely lives Is starkly apparent. We Americans know backwards And forwards the vacant industrial buildings, how after Heavy rain, human teeth and bones can become exposed In the burial pits of ghost towns rotting right on the Rust Belt. It’s tough to clean up this mess. The universe on the Other hand is concise. Its long dark hair isn’t pulled back into A loose ponytail and messy bangs. Ah well—steady, heavy rain Throughout tonight. A stormy night of severe starlessness.

Nothing to do but keep a watchful eye on the parking lot adjacent To my house, pockmarked with rusting cars, abandoned buildings, And the nation’s last train blasted by war. Lifeless bodies hanging By chastity belts from the city’s only tree. Postpartum duchesses Using sledgehammers to remove the paint on their faces. Frat boys Binge drinking the liquid nicotine used in e-cigarettes and looking For love. They’re tossing a box of Soviet-era condoms around Like some prophylactic Frisbee. I envy the reckless evilness Of their youth, how their faces leap from mask to mask, Manmade satellites launched into the emptiness of space, Hot sticky masses that will undoubtedly never make it back home.

I wish I was the first animal sent into space. What brings them here Night after night? To the parking lot adjacent to my house? Some Gentrified wormhole dragging them all into limbos of overpriced Identities? Did they fall into the great abyss of finding yourself?

Nah – nobody falls into the abyss of finding yourself. It’s the Bluffs of finding yourself and the abyss of losing yourself— That’s how they getcha. Yeah, that’s how they getcha. the pickled body quantum 22

Dimitra Xidous reviews Blood Oranges by Dylan Brennan Brennan has flung his bones on a high temple.

Blood Oranges, the debut collection by Dylan Brennan, begins with a broken promise, of bones and ‘skinless fingers’ – and, at the risk of stating the obvious but mindful also of the need to find an opening, to begin somewhere, there is much about bones in the collection. There are bones in the titles, as in Bones of Anonymous Children – a jolting piece about the skeletal remains of two sacrificed children: […] There was evidence of cranial cranial irregularities – deformed babies skull-smashed for ritual.

Sometimes restraint goes a long way. Knowing when not to say something is a skill. The opposite is also true and what gives this poem its muscularity, what makes it matter, is Brennan’s ease with which he rubs our noses in this: […] unholy mess. The spiritual and physical constructs of all those years would come crashing down around us. We’d never clean that up.

You’d have to have been living under a rock not to draw parallels between this poem and the Tuam babies scandal of 2014. To paraphrase Brennan – here in Ireland, an unholy discovery of a holy mess).

Elsewhere the issue of bones is there in the bodies of the poems themselves. The Ethnographer carries the stench of wet bone/ …[…]

Riddled with moist infection – skin, bone and a pencil, while in Here and Now Upon this Earth, a stand-out piece, the explicitness of bone is to be found in the absence of flesh:

you’ll have to go you’ll end up fleshless and I say

don’t let me go to the place of the fleshless

Even in fruit, in the spat-out pips, Brennan manages to echo the idea of bones: In that place we spent an entire day eating and burying our dead under spat-out cherry pips All that said, not every bone reference or bone poem in the collection works. Bone Couplet is a misstep; here, knowing when not to say something – when to leave a poem on the cutting-room floor – would have been the wiser choice. Desire, the poem preceding it, could have suffered the same fate and I for one would not have mourned its loss. Brennan does better in some of his longer pieces, while some of his shorter poems are, pardon the choice of words, just the bones of ‘not yet there’ pieces. Sometimes I need my poems to have a little more meat on them. On this point, Irma is a poem with meat, and a lot of it.

Irma is one of the more sensual and visceral poems in the collection. It looks good on the page – one gets the sense that Brennan worked hard for this one, tweaking line breaks, fattening up or leaning down the verses until they were just right. Read this poem in silence and feel momentum as your eyes run along each line, across and down each verse; read this poem out loud, and you almost taste iron as you hear yourself say lines such as: Iron Woman – your pose is insubmissive and I will not look away.

The soil beneath you smells fertile.

Irma you are made of iron While this is not the only poem in the collection that focuses on the female body (‘Between your thighs, the cunty/petals of Longley’s Sheelana-gig’, from Danzante) and pregnancy/birth (Silent Birth) it is the strongest. The references to blood recall the cover image – a bleeding orange sphere, a blood orange; and for a moment I am left wishing there was a poem on menstrual blood in the collection. I think Brennan could (and should) write one on the topic*. A final comment on Irma – ‘from whence/he landed’. A more contemporary word than ‘whence’ would have served the poem better. Of course, this is a small gripe on what is an otherwise voluptuous and well-formed piece.

There is much made of Mexico in the collection, which is not surprising when you consider that this is where Brennan currently resides. While the collection is written in English, the work benefits from the poet’s fluency in another tongue. There is a liveliness, something alive throughout the collection; and nowhere is it more lively, more alive than in The Men in Fake Uniforms: I would have begged for mercy.

I would’ve licked milk off a grey carpet, tasting the calcium tinged with the salt of my teardrops and snot.

I would’ve shouted at them, go ahead and do it, I always hated that fucking finger so go ahead.

I would have gotten through the anger, somehow.

In Blood Oranges, Brennan shows us Mexico through his eyes. It is a land of blood and sacrifice. There are moments of acute visceral pleasure in reading these poems. While it isn’t perfect – debut collections rarely are – Blood Oranges does what most debuts should: it whets one’s appetite. To draw from the title poem, Brennan has ‘flung [his] bones on a high temple’. For my part, I came to pray (and prey). *pretty please, with a cherry on top Blood Oranges is published by Penny Dreadful Press.

the pickled body quantum 23

Pickled this issue Kay Buckley lives in Barnsley. She was overall winner of the 2014 York Mix poetry competition. Her poems have been published in magazines, e-zines and anthologies including Antiphon, Brittle Star, Butcher’s Dog, Proletarian Poetry, Three Drops from a Cauldron and The Darker Side of Love by Paper Swans Press.

Tessa Berring is an Edinburgh-based artist and poet. A!lot of her work centres around!histories of!human anatomy!in both!art and medicine.

She!frequently!combines!words and!images,!and has also had poems published separately!in both!print and!online journals.

Angela!T.!Carr!is!a!poet!based!in!Dublin,!with!work! published!in!a!number!of!UK!and!Irish!literary! journals.!In!2014,!she!won!the!Allingham!Poetry!

Competition,!was!selected!for!Poetry!Ireland!

Introductions!series!and!published!her!debut! collection,!How!to!Lose!Your!Home!&!Save!Your!

Life.!www.adreamingskin.com Paul Casey has published poetry in five of his six spoken languages. His début collection is home more or less (Salmon Poetry, 2012), with his second due in 2016. He is the founder/director of the Ó Bhéal reading series in his home city, Cork.

Kate Dempsey’s poetry and fiction is widely published in Ireland and the UK and has a degree

in Physics. Her debut collection, The Space Between is forthcoming later this year with Doire Press. She reads with the Poetry Divas Collective who love to blur the wobbly boundaries between page and stage.

Noel Duffy’s debut collection In the Library of Lost Objects (Ward Wood Publishing, 2011) was shortlisted for the Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet. His second On Light & Carbon followed in autumn 2013, again with Ward Wood. He lives in Dublin.

Michael Farry was was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions in 2011 and his first poetry collection, Asking for Directions, was published by Doghouse Books in 2012. He won the Dromineer Poetry Competition in 2014.

Siobhán Flynn has been placed and shortlisted in a number of poetry competitions including the Percy French prize in Strokestown and the Desmond O'Grady prize.!She!lives in Dublin with her husband, two sons, a dog and the hope that she has a collection published some day.

Neil Fulwood is the author of film studies book 'The Films of Sam Peckinpah'. His poetry has appeared in The Morning Star, Butcher's Dog, Prole, The Black Light Engine Room, Obsessed With Pipework, Art Decades and Ink Sweat & Tears. He lives in Nottingham, holds down a day job and subsidizes several pubs. He is a member of the Alan Sillitoe Committee, a group who are raising funds towards a permanent memorial to Alan. Neil co-designed their website www.sillitoe.com.

Marjorie Gill’s poems have been shortlisted for both the 2013 and 2014 Bridport Prizes and the 2014 Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition.! Others have been published by, or are forthcoming in Rattle, Ambit, Gutter, Magma, Mslexia, The North, the reader and The Scotsman.

Sean Hayes is a advertising art director with over 30 years’ experience working for clients and ad agencies in Dublin, Paris, Brussels and Warsaw. He has worked with creatives from Los Angeles to Lublin and clients from Tokyo to Tallin. He started shooting with his iPhone in 2010 and has since become an avid iPhoneographer. His mobile photography has been selected for exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Milan, Paris and Brussels. Sean received an honorable mention in the landscape category of the MPA 2012 and 2nd place in the people category of!the MPA 2013.!http://mobilephotoawards.com/ 3rd-annual-mobile-photography-awards-winnershonorable-mentions/ He publishes a blog dedicated to celebrating the best in photography and cinematography past, present and future, at http:// seanhayesphotography.com Sean lives and works in Brussels, Belgium with his wife and kids.

Shane Holohan lives in Stoneybatter in Dublin, in a house full of books, some of which are about Quantum Mechanics.

collection, a poem from which is nominated by the Ofi Press for a Pushcart Prize.!Eleanor is Programme Curator for the Dromineer Literary Festival. http://www.eleanorhooker.com Justin Karcher lives in Buffalo, NY. His poems have appeared in Melancholy Hyperbole, Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, and more. You can find him on Twitter (@justin_karcher) Sheila Mannix lives in West Cork. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming!in Irish Left Review and!Burning Bush 2 (IRE); STRIDE and!Tears in the fence (UK); Tripwire: a journal of poetics and Akashic Books' Thursdaze series (USA). ! www.sheilamannix.wordpress.com Jennifer Matthews writes poetry and book reviews, and is editor of the!Long Story Short!literary journal.

Her poetry has been published in!The Stinging Fly, Mslexia, Revival, Necessary Fiction, Poetry Salzburg, Foma & Fontanelles!and!Cork Literary Review, Poetry International Web!and anthologised in Dedalus's collection of immigrant poetry in Ireland,!Landing Places!(2010). In 2012 she read at Electric Picnic with Poetry Ireland, and had a poem shortlisted by Gwyneth Lewis in the Bridport poetry competition.

Her poetry was recognised in both the 2013 and 2014 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year competitions.

Eleanor Hooker's first collection of poems!The Shadow Owner's Companion!(Dedalus Press) was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine award in 2013.

Eleanor is currently completing her second the pickled body quantum 24

Afric McGlinchey’s !collection, The lucky star of hidden things !was published by Salmon Poetry.

Achievements include the 40th Hennessy Emerging Poetry Award, !2012 Northern Liberties Prize !(USA) and 2015 Poets Meet Politics award. She is currently Poet in Residence at the West Cork Uillinn Arts Centre. www.africmcglinchey.com Iggy McGovern is Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Trinity College Dublin. He has published two collections of poetry with Dedalus Press. His most recent title, A Mystic Dream of 4, a sonnet sequence based on the life of Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, is published by Quaternia Press. bruno neiva!is a Portuguese text artist, poet and writer. He’s recently published!washingup!(zimZalla, 2014),!dough!(erbacce press, 2014), and!averbaldraftsone&otherstories!(Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013). More of his work can be found in several magazines and anthologies worldwide.

He’s currently working on!Servant Drone, a collaborative poetry and performance project with English poet Paul Hawkins.

Sean Ruane lives in Meath. He read at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh in 2013. Short films ‘Sean Ruane Poetry Live’ and ‘Sean—Harlequinade’ are available on YouTube. His poem ‘Squares’ appears on Soundcloud.com Eabhan Ní Shuileabháin, daughter of an IrishAmerican father and an Irish mother, grew up in Dublin, Ireland, but now lives in Gwynedd, Wales, with her husband and son. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals throughout Europe and America.

Erratum. In our ‘Bull’ issue we printed an incomplete biographical note for contributor Maeve O’Sullivan. We are happy to correct this now: Dubliner Maeve O’Sullivan’s work has been widely published and anthologised for twenty years. Her collections of haiku (Initial Response, 2011) and poetry (Vocal Chords, 2014), are from Alba Publishing. Maeve is a member of Haiku Ireland, the Poetry Divas and the Hibernian Poetry Workshop. www.twitter.com/maeveos

the pickled body www.thepickledbody.com !

Also: Facebook: /ThePickledBody Twitter: @thepickledbody thepickledbody.tumblr.com

! !

Since 2013. The Pickled Body is an online poetry and art magazine edited, designed and produced by Dimitra Xidous and Patrick Chapman. The poems and artwork featured in this issue are copyright © 2015 by their respective authors and artists, and may not be reproduced without permission. The Pickled Body is copyright © 2015 by Dimitra Xidous and Patrick Chapman. All rights reserved.!

Kate Quigley’s work has appeared in a number of Irish & UK journals including The Stinging Fly, The Shop, The Moth & Orbis. She is one of the cofounders of Flying South), a mental health themed open mic night/artists’ collective - http:// facebook.com/FlyingSouth2015.

the pickled body quantum 25