Category: 25 Pins in a packet women creators

‘It Was I’ and other poems by Dolonchampa Chakraborty

January 16th, 2018


Perfect Storm

I look at my palm 
It’s full of scars, crosses and half-lines
        Neither money nor the life line is full
        Index finger bends a lot 
Which means I’m not rigid enough

Fingers of my feet are not feminine
A desirable bride would have 
Different set of feet. 

These are my favourite though
    They ran through the paddy fields
    Bent over the pond and picked lotus
    Danced in the rain 
To collect rhythm 
That would later become baskets 
Of rose and gardenia,
I now share with monsoon 

I hold them in the palm of my hands 
Doors of the seashore-huts open 
Children run out 

They come running towards me, 
The water and salt
The wooden boat 
And the grey bundle of clouds

They come running towards a perfect storm
 
The storm that will destroy the lines of nothingness
From every little palm


Lighthouse
 
I saw you beside the ocean, 
counting steps
Found you inside the lighthouse, 
Seasoning waves
 
Watched you through the storm, 
floating off the shore
 
In my silent cry 
I became the moonlight mirror 
And touched you—pining for more


Obituary 

It’s easy to write an obituary 
Of someone you left unheard
On a footbridge 

The story of an unfinished tree
Brewed with pain of freshly broken leaves
Untold

Drops of rain on your shoes and tie
Half dried by an oblivious bite 
Of a half-eaten moon 
Unseen

It’s easy to write off somebody 
With an obituary 
A death that happened 
By some careless notes of time


Summer 

A well is built beside a temple 
	Between straw houses 

Footsteps are born and erased 
Like daughters 
	And wild flowers
 
Moon-shaped souls 
	Serene, yet dry 
Walk behind their shadows 
Along the fishermen’s cry


It was I 

The girl who was burnt for dowry today
        It was I 
The girl foetus inside her body which was burnt too
	It was I 
The new-born girl who was abandoned in a trash bag 
        It was I  
They were nobody’s daughter 


The girl who was not paid her daily wage 
       It was I 
The girl who was paid less than her husband 
       It was I 
The girl who was not allowed to join a job
As her husband’s boss
	It was I 
They were nobody’s sister


The girl who was raped by colleagues 
	It was I 
The girl who was molested by an auto driver 
	It was I 
The girl who was pushed to bed by a filmmaker 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s lover 


The girl who wasn’t privileged by her right to education 
	It was I 
The girl who never got the privacy of a healthy sanitation 
	It was I 
The girl who went from one kitchen to the other 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s pride 


The girl who couldn’t practise her right to marry 
	It was I 
The girl who couldn’t practise her right to separate   
	It was I 
The girl who suffered a fruitless marriage 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s wife 


The girl who was sold by one
	It was I 
The girl who was bought by thousands 
	It was I 
The girl who made herself a sex-slave 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s friend 


The girl who sold her womb 
	It was I 
The girl who sold her baby 
	It was I 
The girl who made her baby an orphan 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s shelter 


The girl who was tortured in custody 
	It was I 
The girl who was beaten by a homemaker 
	It was I 
The girl who danced in a strip club 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s armour 


The girl who gulped her tears
	It was I 
The girl who couldn’t shed one 
	It was I 
The girl who got a slap on her tears
	It was I 
They were nobody’s precious  


The girl who slept on a footpath
	It was I 
The girl who slept in old-age home 
	It was I 
The girl who was kept hungry by her son 
	It was I 
They were nobody’s world 


Still, the girl who refuses to lose
	It is I 
The girl who refuses to drown or burn
	It is I 
The girl who fights back to victory
	It is I 
The girl who wants to float and fly 
	It is I 
The girl who is the lover of a gnome
	It is I 
The girl who forgets the obscure junctions 
	It is I 
The girl who pushes the darkness back into oblivion 
	It is I 
It is me who takes your hand and walks with you 
We make a destiny through the late night dew.

It was I and other poems are © Dolonchampa Chakraborty

Dolonchampa Chakraborty graduated in Calcutta and now studies Human Resources in Cornell University, Ithaca. She writes poetry in Bengali and has published two books of poetry. She is a freelance translator and editor working for United Nations, Doctors Without Borders and several other organisations. Her poems have been published in prestigious Indian Literature, a bi-monthly journal by the Sahitya Akademi of India among others. She has been a panelist in the Samanvay Lit Fest. For two years, she has edited The Nilgiri Wagon, a literary journal that focuses on translating literature of Indian and other languages into English. She is passionate about languages. Currently, she is learning Kashmiri and leading a translation project of Syrian Poetry into Bengali.

My Report from the Field at VIDA; Women in the Literary Arts

January 11th, 2018

There is a cruel lie in Ireland, that women poets’ and writers’ absence from our cultural narrative, and by extension from the imaginative creation of the state, is based on their invisibility within the literary canon. That lie is based in the failure of academia to contextualize and historicize the place of women literary artists within the development of an Irish literature that has focused its effort on the authoritative male voice, the heroic and triumphant post-colonial narrative that is taught in schools and universities throughout the island of Ireland. We’re now taking a pledge to fight for equitable gender representation.

“We see the Cambridge Companion as a single stark iteration of a much wider problem” (Preamble To The Pledge)

In fact, since we proposed a pledge of withdrawal of participation in readings, events, reviews, books, and conferences that do not adequately represent the contribution of women in literature, many people have contacted us with increasingly stark figures of taught texts that absent women poets including, The Rattle Bag (edited by Heaney and Hughes) at 7.2% women poets, Poets From The North Of Ireland (edited by Frank Ormsby) at 3.7% women poets, and A Choice Of Poets (GCSE Text) edited by R.P Hewitt (1968) at 0% women poets. The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets includes four essays out of 27 written by women, and even fewer women poets. A consistent and willful erasure of women’s imaginative dialogue within the foundation of the Irish state, their relation to their language, and their taste for experimental poetry. (read more at VIDA)

Useful Links

Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-prosaic-lack-of-women-in-the-cambridge-companion-to-irish-poets-1.3336413?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Lagan Online https://awomanpoetspledge.com/2017/12/16/anthologies-show-lack-of-representation-from-female-irish-writers-lagan-online/
Sign The Pledge https://awomanpoetspledge.com/

‘Briar Notes’ and other poems by Marian Kilcoyne

January 9th, 2018

Spectre

When I saw you, the earth went silent
and the chattering birds sawed off their
beaks. The breeze hushed and gulped into
itself. If there was a cicada, it choked on a
stone. The trees donned black tie and
straightened up while the mouse, mole, and hedgehog
died in their sleep. The fox darted further into the
amaranthine garden, nose quivering, inhaling fright.
When I saw you, the moon strangled the sun, then
spat upon the stars. Now, see what you have done.

First published in The Frogmore Papers (ed. Jeremy Page).

Girl

Since I saw the girl who does not eat,
or trade in food currency, to keep the
breath even, or the gaze straight. Since
then. Since then ago to now, I cannot
bear to watch a robin hopping nervously
on skinny legs, or jaunting around the
patio, perilously balanced.
Averting my eyes from the bird, I think
of her. No part of her was right. I wondered
if when she crossed her clanking legs, she felt
her skeletal reality, but there was no room in
her for thoughts. None. Her spider web being
flushed all joy from me that day. How heavy her
head must be, I thought.

First published in Cyphers (ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Macdara Woods).

Briar Notes

Faster than light or sound
the night star slinked, arced
and shot to a spot in the
clayground, festooned with
spiky plant.
When my time comes, I want
to slink, arc and shoot to bog
and botanist paradise. My only
witness, the white line of the
shore and the visitor fox holding
his breath.

First published in Prelude, NY (ed. Robert C.L. Crawford,
Stu Watson).

Liebeslied *

Marsh brown fields clutch bog cotton
in fairy clusters, while the Heron lands.
Its harsh ‘kaark’ a battle cry, shaving
peace from a hazy afternoon. In a moment, you
are born over and over again to this Atlantic
refuge with its teeming silver hues; safe place & padlock.
Close the eyes now to sounds of breaking waves
on the shore. The smell of it, the teasing umami taste
of it on lips forming words. The commotion.

*Love song. From the German
First published in Prelude, NY (ed. Robert C.L. Crawford,
Stu Watson)

The Heart Uncut

It’s strange how you sleep well now,
twice removed from land and self.
Strange how the prairie of your face
eludes me. Lately I wish you well, or
as well as mint beetles are liked by
many. With detached regard.
Stranger still, the way time holds you
and carries you alive through owlish
afternoons, your breath a lattice flung
upon a thousand vistas. Strange how a
fearful ego can remain intact, the
heart uncut. But listen, I want to know
if your spirit has healed? Have you
aligned peace with being, and have
I made myself clear? Finally.

First published in Right Hand Pointing, US (ed. Dale Wisely).

Briar Notes and other poems © Marian Kilcoyne

Marian Kilcoyne is an Irish writer based on the west coast of Ireland. She has, in the past, been a teacher at senior level, worked professionally in education and management for an Aids Organization, and reviewed fiction and non-fiction for the Sunday Business Post, Ireland. She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre summer school at Queens University Belfast in 2013. She has been published or is forthcoming at Prelude (US), The Louisville Review (US), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), Crannog (IRL), Ofi Press (Mexico), Frogmore Papers (UK), Cyphers( IRL), Apalachee Review (US), Foliate Oak Literary Magazine (US,) New Contrast (Cape Town), Quiddity (US), Right Hand Pointing (US), Grey Sparrow Journal (US), Off The Coast (US), The Galway Review (IRL), The Liner (US), Into The Void (IRL), Roanoke Literary Journal (US), The Rockhurst Review (US), Banshee Literature (IRL), The Catamaran Literary Reader (US), The Worcester Review (US), The Stonecoast review (US), The Main St Rag, (US), Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, (US), and others. She was short listed for the 2017 Dermot Healy International prize for poetry.

Marian Kilcoyne’s website

Merry Christmas 2017 Dear Poethead Readers!

December 22nd, 2017

Poethead will return in January 2018, moving into its tenth year platforming women poets, their editors and their translators. I will be reading and responding to your submissions in the intervening period. Thank you for your emails, your queries, your support and responses over these 9 years. It is heartening and wonderful to have such engaged and friendly people along for the ride.

Image © Theo Crazzolara

Read Women Poets

and then some

‘Invisible Insane’ and other poems by Afric McGlinchey

December 20th, 2017

Traces

You can’t decide, you keep glancing
between two lines of thought
the whole length of the tree-hung street;
and you recognise someone saying your name,
and you go right up to the moment,
right up to the third person within you,
but they’re a different shape
in some essential way,
and you re-read your traces,
like a tree, stroking
its silver leaves against the wind
a tree in the cold,
a tree its own breath.

First published in Tears in the Fence (Ed. David Caddy)

On the Road to Westport

I’m trying to shift
focus to the brain, but my heart’s driven
all the blood to my gut, which is churning.
Didn’t know that I’d lost it, till I found
myself halfway to Westport, following you,
a BLT in my lap, cappuccino
in the console, cats’ eyes leering. On the stereo,
Oblivion.
You knew all about the racing start
of the heart, then the skidding halt at the trespass.
I race onward, into the dark,
letting my terror be for the bends I’m going round.
It feels like some sort of countdown.
Eleven years ago, I thought about the lesson
I’d learnt from you. Had it at the start
of the journey, alongside this pot
of gladioli, flashing their bravado.
Sit tight, I tell them. We’re taking off.
You knew all about hitting the road
in a rage. The time you rocked
up at our student digs, surprising me and the lads–
and you didn’t bat an eye when you found
I was sharing a room with one. The fellas
adored you, the way you flirted, sitting on the counter
top, impressing them with your rugby know-how.
Praising Robbie for his cooking.
Four long days of liberation,
swimming in the sea
with a boogie board, margaritas
on the roof. Then, you tucked
tail for home. Ah, mum.
I only know that it’s Westport I’m going to,
because I passed the signs three weeks ago.
How long have I been on auto?
See the shovel in the footwell? It’s to honour
a runaway rebel. I’m going to plant
these brazen beings on your grave.
Then follow through.

Invisible insane

‘It was always the other way round’
– Margaret Atwood

Not merging
with your reflection in a shop window,
or your shadow up against a wall,
or three-legged jaywalking
across the city’s
huddled roundabouts –
but no matter where,
there’s no getting you out
of my mind.
After all, our planet’s just a snowglobe
for the angels.
Are you google earthing me?
Is that you I can hear,
between bells, faintly?

(‘Invisible insane’ is Google Translate’s Japanese version of the English proverb: ‘out of sight, out of mind.’)

Storm, passing

All kinds of things are happening to me.
Skin’s becoming scaly, forehead a terrain of anthills,
and my feet are stiffening as though belonging to a corpse!
Hair’s falling out of course. And there’s my vision.
I try to read, but words swirl
in little whirlwinds on the page;
even when they’re behaving, I feel
I’m gazing at some complicated log of random numbers.
Enough of this I say aloud, take to the beach –
perhaps it’s distance my eyes are seeking.

But there I find fish tumbling from the sky,
myself face up in a clump of seaweed
foamy wavelets eddying about me.
Almost blinding,
the light is different from what I’m used to.
and I wonder if I’m dreaming,
back in the southern hemisphere,
if this sinking will have a rising too.
The next cat out the bag’s
a girl, fifteen or so,

standing, mouth ajar,
saying nothing.
A mackerel on my belly, flapping.
I see her stare,
want to reach a hand, see if I can touch her
but suddenly she’s not there, and I come to,
still lying in damp sand like a heavy log.
There’s nothing for it but to roll over,
watch the water gouge a groove
where my body’s been.

Back home, I make a cup of tea.
The kettle boils. I lift a green mug from a hook
pour, and squeeze a lemon in.
So far, so good. I wash pots and plates, utensils.
Stare out at laundry, ponder.
The light is dimming and a rush of heat comes over me.
A massive bank of thunderclouds controls the sky.
I put on headphones, turn up the volume,
dance until my body feels fifteen. Rain pounds against the window.
I close the blinds, keep dancing.

(First published in the Italian journal, Inkroci. Ed. Sara Sagroti)

In an instant of refraction and shadow

A plane floats overhead,
lethargically as feathers.
Egyptian cotton billows.
A train somewhere whistles.
You aren’t happy, he tells me,
until you consider yourself
happy.

The afternoon light is falling
in a diagonal the length of the floor.
An arrowed line
of black gun powder.
I follow it, feel him
brace for it, my familiar cry…
and then I’m migrating, I’m gone
and there’s only grief here.

(First published in Poetry Ireland Review, ed. Eavan Boland)

Imprint

i

it overwhelms me, an instant of ocean,
delayed grief for the lost years

ii

i dream you back into existence
i dream you back into
i dream you back
I dream you
I dream

iii

i follow you to an unknowable past, mama
each detail of the journey becoming a magnified ignorance
it’s taken this long to find that a solitary walk can result in a headful of light;
returning, i step into my footprints, a kind of retrieval …
cradled in a closed palm, the ring of plaited light

iv

i write until my fingers bleed, i write out my sorrow,
i write into the terror of forgetting

v

listening to leaves settle, like the drift of a gown on ceramic tiles,
telling you: i think of you, sometimes,
and the sky is infinite, maybe.

First published in Southword (ed. Leanne O’Sullivan)

Afric McGlinchey is a multi-award winning West Cork poet, freelance book editor, reviewer and workshop facilitator. She has published two collections, The lucky star of hidden things (Salmon, 2012) and Ghost of the Fisher Cat (Salmon, 2016), the former of which was also translated into Italian by Lorenzo Mari and published by L’Arcolaio. McGlinchey’s work has been widely anthologized and translated, and recent poems have been published in The Stinging Fly, Otra Iglesia Es Imposible, The Same, New Contrast, Numéro Cinq, Poetry Ireland Review, Incroci, The Rochford Street Journal and Prelude. In 2016 McGlinchey was commissioned to write a poem for the Breast Check Clinic in Cork and also for the Irish Composers Collective, whose interpretations were performed at the Architectural Archive in Dublin. Her work has been broadcast on RTE’s Poetry Programme, Arena, Live FM and on The Poetry Jukebox in Belfast. McGlinchey has been awarded an Arts Council bursary to research her next project, a prose-poetry auto-fictional account of a peripatetic upbringing.

Invisible Insane and other poems are © Afric McGlinchey

Website: www.africmcglinchey.com
Ghost of the Fisher Cat: http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=380&a=221

Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon: Preamble To The Pledge

December 16th, 2017

Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon at RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally, QUB)

This is the preamble to a pledge aimed at redressing the gender imbalance in Irish poetry. The pledge, which we invite scholars and writers of all genders to sign, commits signatories to asking questions about gender representation.

Since the penning of this pledge was prompted by the announcement of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, ed. Gerald Dawe (Cambridge University Press, 2017), we include here a brief account of the misrepresentation of women’s contribution in Irish poetry in critical volumes like the Cambridge Companion as well as in anthologies, conferences and other publications and events. We see the Cambridge Companion as a single stark iteration of a much wider problem.

We suggest some of the ways in which this volume might have acknowledged the contribution of women to Irish poetry. By drawing attention to women’s contribution, we intend to set a positive example for future editors, publishers, teachers and organizers in Irish literature.

Critical volumes such as the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets are presented as surveys of the canon of our national literature, yet they frequently misrepresent our literature by failing to take account of the work of women writers. The absence of women poets from this and other publications leads to a distorted impression of our national literature and to a simplification of women’s roles within it. The implication is that women are a minority in Irish poetry and literary criticism. They are not. In fact, it would not have been burdensome for the Cambridge Companion to more truthfully represent the gender balance in Irish poetry, since women’s contribution to Irish poetry and Irish literary criticism is plentiful and rich. We find it difficult to comprehend that the gender imbalance of this volume was not questioned at any stage of the peer review process.

The recently published Cambridge Companion repeats the minimization or obliteration of women’s poetry by previous anthologies and surveys. The most famous of these is the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Field Day, 1991), but the process of exclusion pre-dates the Field Day project (Ní Dhomhnaill 2002, Keating 2017). The Companion is part of a larger process by which the significance of works by women is attenuated as they become inaccessible or obscured, simply by virtue of their absence from canonical text books.

No women poets from the 18th, 19th and earlier 20th century are included in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion. Among the poets of the 18th century who might have been included are Laetitia Pilkington, Mary Barber, Mary Tighe and Dorothea Herbert, while Charlotte Brooke’s creative translation Reliques of Irish Poetry is unquestionably influential (Ní Mhunghaile 2009). The influence of the 19th-century poet and novelist Emily Lawless on 20th-century Irish writers, to take another example, is repeatedly asserted in scholarship (Calahan 1991, Hansson 2007). The Cambridge Companion does not take advantage of the work done on Irish women poets in the early Romantic period (Wright 2006, Behrendt 2010). It does not take advantage of the work done on women’s participation in the archipelagic coterie poetics at the time of Anne Southwell and Katherine Phillips (Prescott 2014, Carpenter and Collins 2014.) Nor does it attend to the poets of the Irish literary revival and the First World War, who include Katharine Tynan, Susan Mitchell, Dora Sigerson Shorter, Ethna Carbery, Eva Gore-Booth and Nora Hopper Chesson. The anthology Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight has made work by these poets widely available and has argued for the centrality of women’s writing to the Irish literary revival, when considered in its European context (Nì Dhuibhne 1995).

In a volume that includes less well-established male poets from the mid-century, the absence of mid-century women poets is particularly striking. It is not new. The repeated neglect of these mid-century women poets in constructions of Irish literary history has been addressed by Fogarty (1999) Clutterbuck (1999), Schreibman (2001), Sullivan (2003), Collins (2012) and Mulhall (2012). The critical anthology Poetry by Women in Ireland 1870-1970 has made the work of women poets from the mid-century widely available (Collins 2012). Despite this availability the powerfully subversive poetry of mid-century women poets is completely omitted from the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets.

The Cambridge Companion misses an opportunity to introduce students and other readers to modernist, avant-garde and experimental Irish poetry. Poets such as Lola Ridge, Freda Laughton, Blanaid Salkeld, Rhoda Coghill, Sheila Wingfield, Catherine Walsh, Maighréad Medbh and Mairéad Byrne are poorly represented as it is, since there are few anthologies which highlight modernist and avant-garde Irish poetry. To redress this neglect, the current volume could have taken advantage of, for instance, Susan Schreibman’s work on the poets of 1929-1959 (2001); work done by Daniel Tobin and Terese Svoboda on Lola Ridge (2004, 2016); Anne Fogarty’s work on Rhoda Coghill (1999); Emma Penney’s work on Freda Laughton (forthcoming); Alex Davis’ work on Sheila Wingfield (2001); Claire Bracken’s work on Catherine Walsh (2005, 2008, 2016); Lucy Collins’ work on Catherine Walsh (2015); and Moynagh Sullivan’s work on Blanaid Selkeld (2003).

Failure to pay adequate attention to Irish-language poetry compounds the exclusion of women from the Cambridge Companion, since it mitigates against the inclusion of, for instance, Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Caitlín Maude, Biddy Jenkinson, Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, Celia de Freine and Collette Ní Ghallchoir, as well as 18th-century oral women’s poetry. There is significant scholarship to be drawn on particularly in the case of Màire Mhac an tSaoi (De Paor (ed.) 2014, De Paor 2013, Titley 2012). The volume risks forfeiting the opportunity for a new generation of students and scholars to interrogate the place women poets writing in the Irish language have occupied in our national cultural development.

Finally, we note the absence of working-class women’s poetry from volumes such as this. While little enough scholarship has been produced in this area, we might point for an obvious example to the work of Paula Meehan, who has engaged explicitly with the landscape and history of working-class Dublin in her poetry. We call on scholars, editors and publishers to attend to diversity in Irish poetry, in all its dimensions.

The absence of women from our critical volumes, literary surveys and anthologies alters literary history and distorts the way we read contemporary women’s poetry, raising a question for readers as to whether Irish women writers existed or exist today in any number. What message do we want to send to our young scholars? Will their contribution to Irish literature or literary criticism be deemed less valuable because they are women?

More Information at RASCAL

‘When’ and other poems by Alice Kinsella

December 16th, 2017

Periwinkle (I)

Your fingers unveiled the shell,
like the unwrapping of a present.
Little twirls on the bright jewel found
amongst greys, greens, muddied sand.

Words whistling through tooth gaps,
excitement brought by being somewhere new.
Finding me still at home, unchanged,
ready to believe any adventure.

Curled sunshine shell like the buttercup
reflection on your chin,
shimmering summer sea surface,
as we held our fingers too close
to each other’s faces for the first time.

The swirl of it, poised to spring,
and unravel into something new,
something other than the little yellow
shell, carried home from your holidays,
to share a little of the sunlight with me.

Periwinkle was originally published in The Galway Review

Tír na nÓg

In lieu of history classes we learned legends of warriors,
fierce fighting Fianna we were sure lived in our blood.

Neart ár ngéag

We waved ash branches for swords,
flew down hills on steeds with wheels,
foraged berries, scaring magpies with screams,
cleared the stream in one leap — this was our land.

My favourite was the story
of Oisín, little deer bard boy,
bravest of band of brothers,
tempted by beauty and promises,
he left for the land of the young.

We watched the tape of Into the West
while eating beans on toast
we pretended we’d cooked in camp fires,
you laughing at my Dublin dialect
dissolving with Wild West warrior words.

Beart de réir ár mbriathar

Ears hanging on the telling of legends
round camp fires, the memories of
stories, the bravery of Oisín the poet
prince and his fairy love laying siege
to time with their eternal youth.

You ran home in half-dark before bedtime,
I watched the film to the end,
read the whole story in the illustrated book

learning that no amount of love
could keep him in the land without death
that the call of age would always test.

Glaine ár gcroí

One snap of the rope, the saddle strap broke,
the fall of a warrior that could not keep fighting.

Tír na nÓg was originally published on the Rochford Street Review

The ends of it

I want to watch the clouds melt into Croagh Patrick,
sitting on the stone wall of my parents’ drive,
one more summer night that is miles past bed time.

I want to watch tadpoles grow legs
while they still have tails, trap them
in a jar and marvel at their ability
to be at once both and neither.

I want to watch the calves stop being cute
until only syrupy brown eyes remind us
they were ever splayed bloody and new on the floor
of the barn while we looked on in fleece lined pyjamas
and wellies, red-eyed and giddy.

I want to watch you smoke your first cigarette,
feel the burn of it when I try,
and the wet of your mouth on the tip of it,
want to dig a hole in the field and bury the ends of it.
Bury it deep,
where no one will find it.

The ends of it was originally published in The Stony Thursday Book

Cooking Chicken

Pink is the colour of life
of new babies’ wet heads
and open screaming mouths.

Pink is the rose hip of a woman at the heart
of what’s between her hips
and the tip of my tongue between bud lips.

There’s the hint of pink on daisies
when they open their petals to say
hello to the birth of a new day.

But pink is also the colour of death
as the knife slides between the flesh
and separates it into food.

Pink is a suggestion of sickness when I pierce the skin,
dissect the sinews, glimpse the tint of it and turn
it to the heat to kill the pink and the possibility.

It’s the quiver of the comb atop feathers,
and the neck as it’s sliced from the body
by the executioner’s axe.

It’s the colour of cunt
and the hint in the sky
when the cock crows.

Cooking Chicken was originally published in Banshee Lit (Spring 2017)

When

When you can say the words that are not listened to
But keep on saying them because you know they’re true;
When you can trust each other when all men doubt you
And from support of other women make old words new;
When you can wait, and know you’ll keep on waiting
That you’ll be lied to, but not sink to telling lies;
When you know you may hate, but not be consumed by hating
And know that beauty doesn’t contradict the wise;

When you can dream – and know you have no master;
When you can think – let those thoughts drive your aim;
When you receive desire and abuse from some Bastard
And treat both manipulations just the same;
When you hear every trembling word you’ve spoken
Retold as lies, from a dishonest heart;
When you have had your life, your body, broken
But stop, breathe, and rebuild yourself right from the start;

When you can move on but not forget your beginnings
And do what’s right no matter what the cost;
Lose all you’ve worked for, forget the aim of winning
And learn to find the victory in your loss;
When you can see every woman struggle – to
create a legacy, for after they are gone
And work with them, when nothing else connects you
Except the fight in you which says: ‘Hold on!’

When you can feel the weight of life within you
But know that you alone are just enough;
When you know not to judge on some myth of virtue
To be discerning, but not too tough;
When you know that you have to fight for every daughter
Even though you are all equal to any son;
When you know this, but still fill your days with laughter
You’ll have the earth, because you are a woman!

When was originally published in The Irish Times for International Women’s Day 2017

Making Pies

We picked blackberries
after school for three weeks
before dressing up and dreading
the púca’s poison spit.

We munched as we gathered,
were left with only half our spoils,
licked our fingers dry of juice,
we always came home late.

To protect their labours the briars
attacked and tore into soft finger tips.
I delved into the gushing wound, lapped up
the coppery flow and sucked out the hidden prick.

I always said it didn’t hurt.

There was an orchard in my back garden
there we could pick our second ingredient;
Apples, six apiece to make a pie.

They were high up, buried in the auburn curls of autumn.
You’d give me a boost, half the time we’d fall over,
and stain our trousers with the dewy evening lawn.

You always said it didn’t hurt.

Once, they were sparse: a bad year my mother said,
so she bought cooking apples from the new Tesco in Town.
I had to peel the stickers off before she skinned them.
That was the year I learned to use the sharp knives,
and we didn’t go trick or treating any more.

An earlier version of Making Pies was published on Poethead in 2015

Alice Kinsella was born in Dublin and raised in the west of Ireland. She holds a BA(hons) in English Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin. Her poetry has been widely published at home and abroad, most recently in Banshee Lit, Boyne Berries, The Lonely Crowd and The Irish Times. Her work has been listed for competitions such as Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition 2016, Jonathan Swift Awards 2016, and Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition 2017. She was SICCDA Liberties Festival writer in residence for 2017 and received a John Hewitt bursary in the same year. Her debut book of poems, Flower Press, will be published in 2018 by The Onslaught Press.

‘When’ and other poems are © Alice Kinsella

For more information visit aliceekinsella.com or Facebook.com/AliceEKinsella

‘Aleph to Taf’ and other poems by Emma McKervey

December 11th, 2017

Aleph to Taf

The magpie uses a rudder to steer by.
I watch the long feathers of its tail
turn according to its needs.
The women here swear they see them singly
for weeks before a death, but that
is only said after the fact and I know
you can see as many as you wish
wherever you look. Now there are seven
moving about this field; I think nothing
of it. I hunker the tip of the long drill
which runs to the North and is ghosted
by frost in winter’s milky light.
The dibber is in hand. It is not a strong name
but I know it carries force,
carries the moment of force in its twist.
Torque it is called and the dibber
forms the T of that turn.
It is a brand in my hand which separates
death from life, beginning from end,
from Aleph to Taf as the Hebrews say
and I rotate the taf, the true cross,
opening the ground with its shaft
and turning the raw soil with membranes
of unlifted root; the worm’s excretions
all split and bound in the hollow’s walls.
It is the constant light and the constant dark.
I force it down and feel its force.
Into the earth’s gape I place the seed.

Originally published in the Community Arts Partnership anthology Matter 2017

Hera and Persephone

My eyes stare out from the fanning peacock’s tail;
she is wilfully unaware of the silver thread
which binds us by blood, or whichever familial bonds
the Hellenic gods possess to recognise their tribe.

I preside over the marital bed of her winter hibernation
fallow, with her legs spread wide, waiting for Spring.
She has forgotten the pomegranate was held in my hand
long before she spat its seeds to the earth and claimed it as her own

and now she has ordinance in her chthonic kingdom
my peacocks wailing about her feet, my fruit split and scattered,
my watching her, my niece, as she blithely dances
along the terminus between the dark and the light.

Originally published in The Rag Tree Speaks (Doire Press)

Beyond the Mussel Banks

On the Lough’s shore it is possible to find partially knapped flints,
rejected as arrow heads when the line of fracture
was not right -a misjudged strike by the knapping stone.
The chippings have been ground to sand by the tides,
lost as varying shades of grit compress in the damp,
unnoticed when trailing across the beach by the tideline –
picking a path carefully in May to avoid the ragworm’s
death throes above their hidden eggs, and in August
when the lea shimmers with dissolving corpses of jellyfish.
There is no liberty found here mixed with splinters of shells
and rotting sea brack, the soft parts of dying things
and the broken fragments of what was intended to fly –
but beyond the mussel banks I have ridden the wake
of the ferries, astride the prow of the fishing boats
shoulders untensed and neck unbowed in the lash of the brine
where, from the dissipating crest of each wave, my cry was barbaric.

published in The Honest Ulsterman

Patagonia

I have read there is a tribe living in the mountains
and lakes of Patagonia who can barely count beyond five,
yet have a language so precise there is a word for;
the curious experience of unexpectedly discovering
something spherical and precious in your mouth,
formed perhaps by grit finding its way into the shellfish
(such as an oyster) you have just eaten.
Or something like that. I identify with this conceptual position.
And as I listen to my children debate on the train
as to which is the greater – googolplex or infinity –
whilst knowing they still struggle with their 4 times table,
I can’t help but reflect that maybe we should be
on a small canoe at great altitude, trailing
our semantic home spun nets behind instead.

published in The Compass Magazine

Wind Phone, Otsuchi, Japan

In Japan, on the north eastern coast, there is a phone box still,
with few windows if any left, although it is swept clear of leaves

and dust each morning. It stands on the lip of a hill from where the sea
can be seen, and the village, which is mostly rebuilt by now.

A stuttered trail of pilgrims is received to its door, to spin the rotary dial
although it is unconnected to any source. They whisper small things;

the weather, the spring blossom, the seizing up of joints, to the wind
in the mouth piece before setting it gently back in its cradle,

and they walk down to the village, or to the bus stop for a bus
to take them to the larger inland towns where they have been rehomed.

published in Banshee

Emma McKervey is a poet based in Holywood, County Down. Over the last few years her writing has been published in a number of journals and anthologies including Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, The Compass Magazine, and The Emma Press Anthology of Urban Myths and Legends. She has work forthcoming in the next editions of Southword and Coast to Coast to Coast. Her debut collection The Rag Tree Speaks was published in Autumn 2017 by the Doire Press, and she was a featured poet on the recent Intersections tour of the island of Ireland sponsored by the Arts Councils of the North and South. In 2016 she was shortlisted of the Listowel Writers Week Irish Poem of the Year in the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards, and in 2017 two of her poems were highly commended in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Damian Smyth recently described her writing as ‘tiny, ordinary miracles‘ and Carolyn Jess-Cooke has said Emma is a ‘dazzling new voice in Northern Irish poetry.’

‘Aleph to Taf’ and other poems are © Emma McKervey

‘The Maze’ and other poems by Sarah Al-Haddad

December 2nd, 2017

In The Ocean’s Company

The ocean converses with my soul,
Its waves constantly break at the shore,
With such delicacy that it calms my very core.

The composure of the waves
Against the conflict coming from within
Poses a pronounced contrast.

I tremble and agonize with self-doubt,
“Will I ever be as healthy as the others?
What about all that I’ve been blessed with?”
The ocean’s waves continue to break.

I envision the future in black or white,
And I am convinced that it is not right,
So I attempt to dismiss my concerns outright.
The ocean’s waves nod in agreement.

Exasperating anxiety and dark depression
Subsist on my debilitating thoughts,
Leaving me depleted of ambition and drive.
The color of the ocean fills my soul with hope.

The waves gently pat my feet in succession,
Grains of sand lightly tickle my toes,
And my unfavorable thoughts leave in regression.

Just beginning to apprehend my potential,
Yet I am certain I possess power that is
As challenging to fathom as the depth of the ocean.

The continuous battle within myself
Threatens my existence as it always has,
But I refuse to permit it to be my last.
The waves quicken in support of the notion.

The ocean chants in tranquilizing harmony,
I become utterly mesmerized by the melody,
Blessed by its presence and virtuous company.

Betrayal’s Embrace

You were Venus in my eyes,
I admit I was mesmerized.
I let my heart be my guide,
To safety rules I did not abide.
Now my regrets are all amplified,
As I reflect in the dead of the night.

It was me you carelessly betrayed,
Me, who used to come to your aid,
Whose affection still won’t fade,
Even though you dug a blade.
Oh it’s such a cliché,
That I feel compelled to portray.

You played me like a game,
Have you no shame?
The hurt is ingrained into my brain,
And I have only myself to blame.
This was never my aim,
But it could have been all the same.

I admit I was already broken,
Seeking comfort in you often.
I should have had caution,
When you made me into a burden,
And left me when I had fallen,
Of that I am certain.

You seemed so transparent,
I thought you’d never be distant,
Especially when it was urgent.
All of a sudden, you were arrogant,
And of me you were avoidant,
Much to my bafflement.

Inside a Poet’s Mind

Whenever I write poetry,
The process tends to be messy.
I start shedding layers of negativity,
Enhancing my wellbeing greatly.

There’s something unapologetic
In writing in a style that is poetic,
Even when feeling claustrophobic,
Living in a world far from idealistic.

When my patience is exhausted,
And my judgment becomes clouded,
I turn to my pen that have I befriended,
Of its companionship I have boasted.

Through my darkest gloomy phase,
It is poetry that has sent me rays
Of sunlight deserving of praise.
I appreciate it even more nowadays.

The Maze

I was lost in a maze,
Lost in a state of daze.

I saw Alice and befriended
The mad hatter,
And everything between the latter.

Some I wish to unsee,
It has reached that degree.

But it is alright,
I have won that fight!

Under the Rain

At night I sway under the rain,
Deliberately neglecting the pain,
Under pretense of scarcity in strain.

The morning sun gleams with its rays,
I exclaim telling the world I’m okay,
Despite it not always being that way.

It was in fact a forecast of their offering
That I will become adept at conquering,
I say there is to be no more foreshadowing.

It is noteworthy and good fortune indeed
My wishes were met as per my need
In managing my temperament at ease.

I will go forth with living my life as I please,
Exercise being my euphoria at the very least,
To its endorphin rush I say, ‘yes, please.’

And to take note of the music’s flow
Is another joy, even at the lowest of my lows,
I strongly testify that it makes me glow.

In between letters I find comfort as well,
And although it occasionally makes me dwell,
It can be immensely therapeutic, I can tell.

Toying With Fire

Toying with fire is what I do,
Fear my strength,
Forgive me for being crude.

Living on the edge of existence,
I challenge the concept every day,
Who is to say it is not true?

It is notable that I care not if they agree,
For I see myself handling dismay with ease,
No matter what they may think or feel.

Dismay comes crashing down,
Similar in pace to stones rolling off mountains,
But it will not be at the expense of my serenity.

It has been a long quarrel with my emotions.
Now that I know that surrendering is strength,
I grant it permission to course through my veins.

With each day is renewed strength
And a renewed will to live a better day,
And that is how I get through every day.

Sarah Al-Haddad is an aspiring professional writer who has been writing poetry since the age of eleven years old. She is yet to finish her college education. In the past, she started a YouTube channel where she delivered her original poetry. Al-Haddad is now focused on running her poetry blog on WordPress and on being a freelance English tutor. Sarah Al-Haddad resides in Saudi Arabia.

Sarah’s Website

‘The Day Of The Angel” and other poems by Clare McCotter

December 2nd, 2017

Goose

in memory of Anna McAllister

Walking evenings stretched out
into a prairie of stars
it seemed crimson and gold
would not rise
through bark and bole
and the goose following celestial cues
in the music of the spheres
would never leave
the soft bed
you spun for her
compassed by a newly hatched sun.

Falling like the bitterest snow
the moult had been hard
leaving her weak
till tail feathers
started to bud
on a harvest moon’s pink edge
its strange light
striking lodestones
behind dull eyes
sparked the fires of flight
ancient watchers
of southern skies had described.

Navigating night’s ametrine heart
she left without a word
each wing flap creating uplift
for those trailing after
on a journey
to the land of musk ox white bear
arctic hare and fox
drawn along
earth’s magnetic course
she separates milk from water
feeding on pearls
deep in the silvery reeds
back once more in her true north.

(Published in Envoi)

The Soul Maker

for Anne McGill

Year the blue planet’s icy moons
stole the show
and a Tibetan pony nosed
the starry heavens
she came at harvest equinox
carrying copper scales
brilliantly balanced
with corn and snow swept feathers.

On a black mineral glittered island
she was taught
all the holy place’s names
safest paths
the purest stream
running through meadows
where she planted
a silver ring among wild poppy seeds.

Patch of carmine becoming garden
tilled from the hour of the hare
to night’s fringe
by hands that fed the dark goose
sedge roots
and mosses, helping it
leave the gently lake lapped grasses
for its wide unfettered north.

Gentian and larkspur and columbine
spreading with scarlet vine
to other grounds
blur the boundaries
she crossed
travelling in the storm’s bright eye
all the way out to the marshes
just to glimpse the otter’s silky length.

(Published in Envoi)

Bone Constellations

in memory of Maggie O’Brien (née Flanagan)

In a graveyard searching among the stars
for the bones of a woman
dead over thirty years
I see something glimmer
on the floor of the water carrier’s jar.
It could be a femur, tibia or fibula
long bones in a pitcher of sky.

If reaching could draw them down
to where time and patience
perfectly placing each turn all
to a cathedral of white opaline
I would ask the wisest in these woods
to thrum up flesh and blood
with a low-voiced journeying drum.

Calling you back to the far hill
you walked with a small bird man
the tart-tongued said
you should have been glad to get.
And there we might speak
of mornings at your well
ankle deep in pale blue larimar light.

Under a roof of rented tin
talk might turn to a mare’s amber eye
to the final tear you cried
to nights you walked
a high path through whins and ice
leaving what offering with your God
half hawthorn tree half Christ.

(Published in THE SHOp)

Something Back

in memory of Julia McAteer (née McGuigan)

Today your daughter said everyone wants something back
the site she sold where an old house tilted like a womb
our now gone backfield that oblong of pristine green
the root of a lushing lilac bush earthed for a hundred years
a white-scarred gelding traded how many snows before

you died gaining in granite a syllable you never had in life
an absence filled with ibis and orioles and waxwings
your name in that girl’s ear a rare fleeting foreign thing
you would never have claimed your own
you never did the two bedrooms sleeping five

the living room clean of ornament and antimacassar
the two postage stamps of grass separated by a short path
host to a boy hatching joy from a gnarled brush shaft
the books you read but did not own or want to own
circulating like wandering stars through silver poplars

their light barred always from your grandson’s satchel
empty of paper and pencil those tools of an intellect
I doubt you would have wanted back
knowing his dawns break in water clear and deep and wide
no man with line and plumb will ever come.

(Published in Abridged)

The Junior Room

in memory of Annie McGill

Annie’s classroom was the only one in that small school
without pupils planted in rows
slicing the crumbly air straight as Christ’s crucified stare.

Junior room sans roof sans floor was a lake of islands
slowly flowing from some geography of grace
in pale blues and milky opalescent silks.

Lanterned by liquid moon and serous stars floating
under the firmament of fish she fed with strange fruit
gathered down deep on the gravel’s unmade bed.

Sediment stirred by flitting bats and the molten patterning
of their crystal chatter spreading as she held
between her thumb and finger tip a seed of water.

Swollen with three syllables sounded out
on a girl’s new exercise book – pig-e-on. Turning to two
rising from the prow of an out-rigger canoe.

(Published in Revival)

Mary of Fallagloon

in memory of Mary McKenna (neé McCotter)

The wedding name he gave
unused in our lowlands
where you are place.
Blanketing bog
gaunt supplicant thorns
beseeched amaranthine hills.
Sheltering three zinc roofed
rain serenaded rooms.

The rumour of furniture
two beds one wardrobe
and looming large
a rangy table
holding lessons
prepared at an oil lamp.
Grammar and composition
Greek and Latin roots
arithmetic, algebra, geometry
music and drawing.

Next to no interest
in those hasty concoctions
conjured in gurgling pots
stalwart on open fire
long after others
switched to stove switched
to shining enamelled cooker.

Your well-weathered door
always on the latch
no caller leaving
empty handed
cupboard scoured
for a brown egg
yellow pear or last blue fiver.

Sharp suited cattle dealer brothers
only half amused
by the tall ship
sailing down Glenshane:
black hat clamped on
verdigris round rim
black overcoat
fastened with old safety pins.
Till heavy hems stilled
that night winds and stars
died out there among the marigolds.

(Published in THE SHOp)

The Day of the Angel

in memory Mary McGill (née Moran)

A week of waiting and yellow roses, of winter benediction
in artefacts of light – lustral shapes or communion of dust and water?
Cold consecration sealed in an origami of doubt.
The healer left you nothing but her tears and a royal covenant
of wings, malaaikah, mal’ach, messenger
or your own heart’s breath diaphanous in lazuline and white?

It is four in the morning and you are still here; beyond
the night-struck glass a chaos of silence crowds eucalypt and beech.
Once a child’s time thronged cathedral, you always near
lambent lark light hands signalling encouragement and reprimand
to family and those where bloodlines run less clear.
Now they lie calm and lovely in a galaxy of spheres.

I wish you had worn the earrings I wear today for this poem
symbol of an adopted land, the studied stars you bought
when I was twenty one; long before these hours of astral ambassadors,
of lucent pale blue orbs, of a young saint’s favourite flowers.
Before I saw feathers of morning and gold gleaming there
in the unflinching black of your daughter’s black hair.

(Published in Abridged)

Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won the IHS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2010 and 2011. In 2013 she won The British Tanka Award. She also judged the British Haiku Award 2011 and 2012. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Her poetry has appeared in Abridged, Boyne Berries, The Cannon’s Mouth, Crannóg, Cyphers, Decanto, Envoi, The Galway Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Iota, Irish Feminist Review, The Leaf Book Anthology 2008, The Linnet’s Wings, The Moth Magazine, A New Ulster, The Poetry Bus (forthcoming), Poetry24, Reflexion, Revival, The SHOp, The Stony Thursday Book and The Stinging Fly. Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, was published in 2012. Home is Kilrea, County Derry.