Category: 25 Pins in a packet women creators

“They say we made it up” and other poems by Wes Lee

January 6th, 2020

Lifesaving

They don’t do it anymore,
breathe into the mouth to save.

We had learnt it reluctantly,
lined up beside a recumbent dummy,

waiting to take our turn to kneel at that mouth.
The simplest things disturb –

at night when the fluoros shut off and the cover is pulled,
the tiles swabbed – there it lies open,

not even a ventriloquist’s dummy
is so exposed.

Ointment

You always thought crazy
was a defection of the will,
you’d been in that place holding on
for months, and you managed
(to stay on this side),
so you made up your mind
that people choose crazy,
but that was just one time
in your life
you thought was the worst,
didn’t know
the worst comes like waves
and you are
Mickey Mouse
and you are the brimming bucket
the mop
the stone floor
the castle with its interior
arches, and the wizard.
And your sore arms
get sore
then relax
(by your sides)
and sore
then relax
and sore
then relax.
And sore
you are rubbed with Wintergreen
with eyes
with understanding
until
you aren’t.

Halocline

And I wonder at those two distinct levels:
fresh water meeting salt water in the cave.

The dark of dreaming and the further deeper dark.
Your shape under the duvet; a book

falling at some point from your hand. Did you feel a click
like an elevator coming to its stop, and

there the floor, there the opening, there the greater
dark that some keep believing is light? I am stuck here

in this moment. The duvet and the dream. Sleep
then something else. I want to know if you

struggled? If I could look close would I detect a twitch
of muscle? I am stuck here feeling the clicks.

The elevator. Trying to translate in language
the last seconds of your heart.

They say we made it up

and I ask Why separate ourselves
from the herd? Why divide?

Paint ourselves outcast white and wait
to be picked off.

Why would we make ourselves the wolf
with one blue eye to unnerve

enough to snarl and lash? Hiss out
into the dark of the forest.

Tyrannosaur

I suppose I used to have the youthful dream of many
mourners. Of a packed house. Now this numb state feels
like the way I was when I slipped into teenage
depression and my mother said: You’d move, move…
move… You’d move fast if a great big tyrannosaur came
barging through.

And I often think of those children in Jurassic Park
when you and I are eating. The children with jelly in
their mouths and ice cream, smiling with full mouths
across the dinner table; chewing and smiling. The jelly
wobbling on the spoon as the velociraptor is spied at the
murky edge of the room. And the jelly wobbles and
wobbles and the children know.

“They say we made it up” and other poems © Wes Lee

Wes Lee was born and raised in Lancashire and now lives in New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in magazines such as The Stinging Fly, New Writing Scotland, Poetry London, The London Magazine, The Stony Thursday Book, Banshee, among others. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including, The BNZ Katherine Mansfield Literary Award; The Short Fiction Prize (University of Plymouth Press); The Over the Edge New Writer of the Year, in Galway. Most recently she was selected by Eileen Myles as a finalist for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2018, and awarded the Poetry New Zealand Prize 2019. Her latest collection By the Lapels was launched in 2019 by Steele Roberts Aotearoa, in Wellington. Her previous collections include a pamphlet Body, Remember launched in 2017 by Eyewear Publishing in London as part of The Lorgnette Series; Shooting Gallery (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2016). And a chapbook of short fiction Cowboy Genes (Grist Books, University of Huddersfield Press, 2014).

Billy Mills reviews ‘bind’ at Elliptical Movements

December 23rd, 2019

Christine Murray is well-known as a champion of women poets via her Poethead blog and the Fired! project. It would be all too easy for this activity to obscure the fact that Murray is a poet in her own right, and on the evidence of bind: a waking book that would be a real pity. It’s a book in five sections, each consisting of short named or numbered poems that trace overlapping natural and temporal processes: the day, the seasons, the unfurling of a leaf, the pun on ‘waking’ in the subtitle, as both mourning and morning. The poems imagistic, fragmentary and echo the tensile logopoeia of Mina Loy:

cinquefoil the amberlight
purelit / renders in ‘leaf’
|unfurls|

fur, not claw,
can rend her nets
laid-out-on-grass.

(from ‘Dawn’)

Murray uses spacing and typography to serious effect, with a special focus on the use of the pipe symbol and italics and faint or greyed fonts as devices to (de)emphasise fragments of text, as in this couplet from the ‘Dawn’ sequence:

winter is a hard place,
winter is a hard place.

But the most striking aspect of the book, to me at least, is her use of pronouns. The third person dominates, with ‘my’ appearing occasionally and ‘I’ not until the last few pages. The effect is to decentre or even deny the speaking voice as medium for the poems. In fact, the predominant pronoun is she/her and this female third person is frequently identified, directly or otherwise, with the natural world:

she awaits yellow spring
willow is the first to don her light-robes

a tree,
plain and ordinary.

(from ‘willow’s’)

The image of the fallen leaf, and specifically the recurring phrase ‘a leaf fallen is always a poem’, lends an autumnal, almost mournful, tone to the book that might be seen as appropriate in this era of ecological crisis, but Murray is not a bleak pessimist, it seems, and images of spring and of the rising sun point to a cautious optimism. Not that Murray is intent on using nature as symbol; her focus is on the world as-is:

the
actual bird,
the image of a bird

the real thing of it
grasps onto a branch.

And the result of this focus is one of the more interesting books of Irish ecopoetry I’ve read recently. Read all 6 Turas Press reviews at Elliptical Movements. Thank you Billy for such a sensitive reading of bind.

“Sing” and other poems by Jane Clarke

December 13th, 2019

Sing

Let choirs make frosty nights sing,
let them tell stories of shepherds

caring for sheep, a stable, a donkey,
a star in the east, while you remember

the road to the church in the woods,
the battened door, timber trusses,

peeling paint and plaster that fell
like snow on the christening font

and harmonium, the pot-bellied
stove that offered a smidgeon of heat,

candlelight soft on the bible
lying open to Isaiah,

For unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given…

Let yourself sing, diminuendo
or crescendo, as if you still believed.

Point of Departure

A Sunday evening in January.

My father is taking me to the train
because my mother can’t; her heart
is broken over what I told her.

Just my father and me,

unused to this time together,
quiet except for the engine’s hum
and the sweep of wipers

but in his silence I hear a rhythm —

he’s cutting thistles with a scythe,
a gate opens
into a meadow I’ve never seen.

When winter comes

remember what the blacksmith
knows — dim light is best

at the furnace, to see the colours
go from red to orange

to yellow, the forging heat
that tells the steel is ready

to be held in the mouth
of the tongs and it’s time

to lengthen and narrow
with the ring of the hammer

on the horn of the anvil,
to bend until the forgiving metal

has found its form,
then file the burrs,

remove sharp edges,
smooth the surface,

polish with a grinding stone
and see it shine like gold.

Every tree

I didn’t take the walnut oil,
linseed oil,

the tins of wax
or my lathe and plane

when I closed
the workshop door.

I left the grip of poverty
on the bench

beside my mallet,
whittling knife

and fishtail chisel
with its shallow sweep.

I quit the craft
my father had carved into me

when I was pliable
as fiddleback grain,

left all at the threshold,
except for the scent of wood,

a different scent
for every tree.

Point of Departure and When Winter Comes are © Jane Clarke from When the Tree Falls with thanks to Suzanne Fairless-Aitkin for Bloodaxe Books.

Every Tree and Sing are © Jane Clarke from The River (Bloodaxe Books, 2015)

Jane Clarke’s first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015 to public and critical acclaim. Her second book-length collection, When the Tree Falls was published by Bloodaxe in September 2019 and her illustrated book of poems, All the Way Home, was published by Smith/Doorstop in April 2019.

The River was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. In 2016 Jane won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary in 2017.

Jane holds a BA in English & Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales, and has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She grew up on a farm in Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator www.janeclarkepoetry.ie

When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books, 2019)

“Curlew” and other poems by Rosalin Blue

December 8th, 2019

Lonesome Occupation

Up – up and away
in my little studio
under the sky
drawn back alone
– to write

That loneliness
is the room for concentration
bears the space for inspiration
strikes the key of motivation
to create origination
with insane illumination
and a wild determination,
the poetic flow in motion
— oh that cosmic emanation
for the sake of word-elation

Yet, it requires segregation
and at times I miss emotion
wishing for some conversation
and a mutual revelation.
So I leave my elevation
seeking true communication
and some closer stimulation
—far beyond my meditation
of obsessive rhyme-creation

And when that space inside
of emphatic animation
and ecstatic evocation
with the strange amalgamation
of expansion and sensation,
that poetic incantation
that orgasmic culmination
fills me up to saturation,
then I get the urgent notion
to fulfill my true vocation

And again I draw back
to my lonesome destination
up – up and away
in my little studio
under the sky

— to write

Under the Silvermoon

And how often am I looking up with longing gaze
to your window high above under the silvermoon
where your sweet body lies already in the warm duvets
when inside me with desire now the night awakes

In many hours when the moonlight travels through the dark
and the muse of poems binds me in a writing trance
my tender feeler-cells are all consumed
in longing for the touch from your gentle hands

And my senses wander further down along your flanks
until with yearning quiver – when my night is done
I quietly can nestle to your supple curves at last
and disappear in bliss to sleep under the silvermoon

— And my desire is waiting for another night.

Unterm Silbermond

Und wie oft sehe ich mit sehnsuchtsvollem Blick
hinauf zu Deinem Fenster unterm Silbermond,
wo schon Dein süßer Körper warm in Kissen ruht,
wenn voll Verlangen erst in mir die Nacht erwacht.

Zu mancher Stunde, wenn das Mondlicht durch das Dunkel zieht
und mich die Dichtermuse in den Schreibwahn bannt,
verzehren meine zarten Fühlerzellen sich
vor Sehnsucht nach Berührung Deiner sanften Hand

Und meine Sinne wandern weiter Deine Flanken lang
bis mit ersehntem Beben ich – wenn meine Nacht getan,
mich leis an Deine weichen Kurven schmiegen kann
und selig unterm Silbermond in Schlaf entschwinde –

— Und mein Verlangen wartet auf die nächste Nacht.

Curlew

You tell me
of the call of the curlew
Its curling cry haunting
through the bogland
How it weaved through
the mornings of your childhood
How it echoed through
the darkness of your nights

The curlew’s call has fallen silent
over the years gone by
The mottled messenger stolen
as the numbers of birds
migrating the wetlands
drained now and laid dry
have from hundreds plunged
sheer into near extinction

The curlew’s trilling song
the melody of coastlines
harmony of the island
has gone quiet with the winds
The seeker of the sand
leaves behind a land
void of music luring
the boy in the evening sun

You mourn the echoless silence
in the mornings of your prime
No slender legs stalking the plains
or stoking mud with curving bill
No curlew calling evermore
the empty coastline still
Nothing more than a memory
left behind at the end of dusk

Metal

After we invented the wheel
we learned how to melt the metals
from the rock, and the gold-rush
began, as we dug and drained
all the gleaming precious treasures
from the veins of the Earth,
forging jewels, coins and wealth,
hoarding them like magpies.

Red hot, like liquid fire flowing,
a crimson burning river glowing,
molten copper, iron, silver
slither smoothly through the grooves,
pouring into casting cauldrons,
shooting into foundry molds,
smouldering, steaming – zosh
the streaming gold is cast to form.

We made tools from the new metals
and axes for slaughtering trees
and arrowheads for felling animals.
We made ploughs to sow the seeds
and blades to cut the deeds
and steal the riches from the land
and rightful owners, and we cast
our wildest dreams into reality.

Then we made dooming cannonballs
to cast on human enemies
and iron bars to capture freedom.
Our bullets pierce through history,
reeling round the golden throne,
our babel titans slice the skies
and we’ve made drills to bore
the very bedrock of our waters.

Now hard and cold our steel-towns
gleam in the sunlight like blue ice.
The shimmery promise of gold
holds the core to precious pride.
But the price of power was high
and now the golden calf is sold!
And our hearts like bloody swords
from wealth and greed are growing cold

Beyond compare we hoard and kill
like magpies – merciless as steel.
And the glowing stream of gold
from liquid fire freezes cold
and our hearts become the stone
that once we dug out of the ground
from the gleaming veins of Earth –
blinded by the promise from Her core.

We are Receivers

Staring into the night
eyes fixed hard
on the bridge in the dim light
until the mind cannot understand
the image any longer

Repeating a word – repeat repeat
so often that to the ear
it loses its meaning
becoming a mantra
of higher consciousness

Chanting the Om
until we rise from lightless night
benighted mind filling
until aglow with the potential
that is the eternal light

Seeing the Ocean of love
and the breath halts
the heart spreads its wings
and the tongue
knows no words

We are receivers
of a brighter light
than our eye can ever see
nor our mind can ever conceive
But our hearts can feel

Quiet I stand
in the stillness of the Divine
the brightness of love
the silence of awe

Curlew and other poems © Rosalin Blue

Rosalin Blue is a cultural scientist, translator, and poet who began performing in 1995 in Hildesheim, Germany. Linked to the literary scene in Ireland since 2000, her poetic home is O Bhéal in Cork. She has performed in Cork City and County, Limerick, Galway, and Dublin, and at festivals like the Electric Picnic and the LINGO Spoken Word Festival. Blue’s poems have been published in Southword and the Five Words Volumes in Cork, Revival Poetry, Stanzas in Limerick, and in Crannóg Magazine, Galway. She has been included in two Cork Anthologies, On the Banks (2016) and A Journey Called Home (2018). Her poetry collection In the Consciousness of Earth was published by Lapwing, Belfast in 2012, and her translation of love-poetry by the German Expressionist August Stramm You. Lovepoems & Posthumous Love Poems came out in 2015. Find her on Youtube and facebook.

Grafted: Referendum 2018 and other poems by Ann Leahy

December 1st, 2019

Making for Open

Today she is learning to walk
again. One month after
a minor fall, my mother
heaves and plants

each foot in turn,
toes dragging the hardwood floor.
Her eyes are fixed ahead
as far as they can go

beyond her new walking frame,
which she grips and shoves,
elbows unbent, as if it were
some brash sergeant

who she must keep
at arms-length, and who
has ordered this stop-start
frog-march down the hall.

When the shuffle and thud ends,
I come, find her standing,
arms elbow-deep in the hot-press.
She turns, says, with a little edge,

“you’re watching me like a hawk today”,
as if I’d thwarted plans to plumb
the depths of the town watercourse
and to make for the open sea.

And this was before, by one month,
her death – a week when time
seems now to have been
advancing and receding at once,

a week of fierce, contained ardour
for her life, or for whatever parts
of that life – just then a pile of laundered
night-attire – were still hers to rearrange.

My mother is learning freedom
again. Today freedom means
to stand unravelling a ribbon
that loops the neck of a nightdress.

See how calmly she pulls it towards her,
worries its knot between thumb
and forefinger, plays it through her hands,
till the slip and fall of its unmoored end.

In the Fitting Room with Mary Hick

We’d say, ‘It’s Mary Hick,’ to put a stop
to trying-on; a name to jinx
a certain look – a skirt in chequered folds,
or gathered sleeves with lace around the cuff,

a something dowdy we could always spot
if not explain – a fatal glimpse
of what we feared was dull or old
and not supposed to manifest in us.

Later on, I learned
that other women knew her as well
or knew her by a different name:
Wee Maggie, Minnie Banger, Martha-Anne,

tools in a cruel arsenal of terms
we trained upon ourselves
to self-police (mousy-haired)
and grade (mutton-dressed-as-lamb).

Now in that no-man’s-land
of comfy flats and shapeless layers,
Mary Hick remains the mirrored form
of frowzy that I never wish to own.

And here’s to the everyman who gives a damn
for chic or anti-chic in leisurewear,
for mates who caution round his fitting-room
of risks in patterns, safety in monochrome,

for homely cousins they invoke to chasten with:
Fred Flump, Cracked Alf, or little Jimmy Hick.

Grafted: Referendum 2018

The cherry-blossom burst in two that year,
clashing with itself in the verge before the town.
Half its branches grew light-green leaves
and flowers – not blowsy pink, but artless and wan –
that betrayed its foundational family secret.
Behind it, amongst the thistles, a dog-rose
flushed puce (whether with glee or regret)
that its neighbour’s subterfuge had been exposed.
And visitors observed how closely
houses rub shoulders here, how paint
blisters on closed front doors; how the grim
intimate makes public property,
and how all our wishes and constraints
come grafted on the same lopped limbs.

Mince Customer

Pinned to the door
was a diagram of a heifer
with sections straight-lined

across her side: sirloin
jigsawed between rib
and rump, shank slotting

into round. And the people
who came in, we sorted them
by the cuts they bought:

Mince customers wanted cosseting,
all the work done for them;
A fillet woman wanted only lean,

leaving all the fat
and gristle on our hands;
But a brisket man

was a prince, who’d take
his lean where he could get it
between the bone and thews.

Inside too a series of lines
ran through the house like skewers.
As a child you couldn’t see them,

but bit by bit you’d puzzle out
the no-nonsense pattern they laid down,
plot yourself a course in which

your silverside was out
with your flank protected
your tenderloin concealed

or else you’d feel the chill
from the refrigeration unit
as sure as any mince customer.

Published in Collection: Ann Leahy. The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards. (Arlen, 2008)

A Good Rogeting

I keep to myself on one side of a bed.
Its other half is occupied by books
meant to match my moods, catch the thread
of all my thoughts, from hard-angled works
of reference, to magazines, loose-leaf pads.
A collection of love-lorn verse
hugs an impenetrable masterpiece
while Judith Hearne’s eclipsed by glamour ads.

When I bring a new one back
over dinner with a glass of wine
I imagine removing its paper bag
running my fingers down its spine
how I’ll fan the pages to inhale
its pristine smell, then make it my own:
easing back the sleeve and going down
on the biographical detail.

Sometimes that’s the best bit
on evenings when I’m not in form
to get stuck in or to commit
not even to paper. One volume
alone then seems able to interject:
Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary –
something new with every read
and no long-term effects.

I can fall asleep over a phrase whose
meaning remains a stranger and wake
in the morning with Roget’s Thesaurus
poking me urgently in the back.

Published in Collection: Ann Leahy. The Woman who Lived her life Backwards. (Arlen, 2008)
.

Grafted: Referendum 2018 and other poems © Ann Leahy

Ann Leahy’s first collection, The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards (Arlen House, 2008), won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Individual poems have twice been commended in the British National Poetry Competition and have also won or been placed in many competitions. Most recently, a new poem came second in the Yeovil Literary Prize, 2019, another was a prize-winner in the Troubadour International Prize, 2018. Poems have been widely published in Irish and British journals (including The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Stand, AGENDA, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Cyphers) and have been included in several anthologies. She used to work as a lawyer and now works as a policy analyst and researcher. She recently returned to writing poetry after taken a break from it while completing a PhD on ageing and disability. She grew up in Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary, and lives in Dublin.

“Feather Quill” and other poems by Deirdre Gallagher

November 20th, 2019

Teanga le Teanga

Ní mise an leannán Iodáilise
a bhreathnódh ort go paiseanta
le súile donna doimhne na foraoise
a chuirfeadh faoi gheasa cosúil le Naoise
le sruth órga meala focal binn
a thabharfadh ar chliatháin an aoibhnis thú
ach ar deireadh
a d’fhágfadh tú gan puinn scrupaill
ar bhóthar an chroíbhrisidh.

Ní mise an leannán Fraincise
a chaithfeadh leat mar rí is banríona
le plámás moltach bréagach
a chuirfeadh do cheann ina roithleán meidhreach
le hamhrán grá síoda fuaime is gutaí
a tharraingeodh go géar ar shreanga do chroí
ach ar deireadh
a thréigfeadh tú gan fiú súil siar
ar bhóthar an eascairdis.

Is mise do leannán Gaelach
a mhaithfidh duit é
nuair a chasfaidh tú do dhroim orm
a fhanfaidh dílis duit
nuair a rachaidh tú ar tóir suiríoch eile
a gheallfaidh buaine duit
nuair a shéanfaidh tú ár ndlúthcheangal
cé go mbeidh mé díreach os do chomhair.

Lasfar splanc an aitheantais eadrainn aríst
Lonrófar síol labhartha tréigthe na nglúnta
Preabfaidh comhcheol ár n-aontachta trí chuisle
Is tuigfidh tú m’fhiúntas.

Ar shaighead an ghrá
a scaoilfear ár snaidhm seirce
trí spéartha na maidine nua gile
Is buailfimid teanga le teanga.

Sea

Silks of waves
fold and unfold
in pleats akin
to sapphire skin.

Ribbons of waves
dance and swirl
curl and furl
in decadent twirl.

Ripples of waves
sugar-coated sprinkles
murmuring dustings
of iridescent twinkles.

Sighs of waves
heave to a swell
the lappings onshore
in reply do quell.

Caresses of waves
soothe whispers deep
secrets of loss
untold she keeps.

Yet be not deceived
by her velvet foam
on the glint of
iron fist, we roam.

Feather quill

In skies of pouring creams and azure silks
A feather swoons to sun kiss breeze
Rose petal swirls and spiral arches
Dipped in liquid gold of a melting sun

Pirouetting on an eiderdown of ripe green grass
It cushions itself next a glistening blade
Curling tips in slumbered plié meet-
Peace falls lithely, as a feather quill.

SONGBIRDS

Songbirds joined by fine gilded thread
Weave their motif, a tapestry bed
Embroidery petaled in flints of gold leaf
Spools intertwining shimmering sheaf

Spinning wheel hums to pleated crochet
Seams gleaned by yarns day and by day
Snowdrop lilting heads in blissful repose
Honey dawn strums stream on silvery sloes

Seasons gliding and spinning wheel ceases
Doré thread clipped, songbird releases
Woven spools lost to land and to sea
Satin love tails soar into winged infinity –

Feather Quill and other poems © Deirdre Gallagher

Deirdre Gallagher has works published in A New Ulster, Crossways Literary Magazine, Poethead, Comhar, Feasta and upcoming in The Stinging Fly. Literature is passionate, powerful, restorative and transformative. It makes an immense contribution to our evolving world. A language enthusiast, she believes that we can dispel the shadows cast by checkered history and disconnection to see the emergence of a bright, compassionate, and equitable future that celebrates the advantages of multilingualism within national and global contexts.

“Mná na hÉireann” and other poems by Anne Walsh Donnelly

November 18th, 2019

Mná na hÉireann

To die not having known the frenzy
of making love with a woman
is to live without ever jumping
over the bar of your crib.

How could you not want
to watch a woman fling her underwear
on your bedroom floor
present you with soft skin

for your nails and teeth
to score like blades on dough.
How could you not want
to feel your edges

slip into her hollows, like a spoon
folding flour into cake batter.
How could you not want
to hear her whimper,

crescendo to a jungle roar
while your fingers move inside her.
How could you not want
a denouement to your play,

when secret stories leak onto ivory sheets
then tease tongues and start the sequel.
How could you not want
to drag a woman to bed

at seven on a Saturday evening
rise at two on Sunday afternoon,
sleep-deprived
and smelling like a marathon runner,

race outside to tackle
weedy flower beds
gleeful that soil will not rest
in your clipped fingernails.

First published in Animal Heart Press, 2019, Editor Amanda McLeod

Being in love at fifty

plucks me from death row,
Hands expunge
the curdled cream & bitter fruit
from my body. Medley of skin & bones
sink into a bowl of Eton Mess.

Being in love at fifty
makes me wonder if Eros will crumble
like Wensleydale cheese
or taste like Blue Stilton, after a year or two,
or if it can be transformed
into the perfect soufflé.

Being in love at fifty
makes me cry, my daughter’s image
of me, creases, feels like
she’s lost Santa all over again
has to make room for someone else
to sit beside her in my heart.

Being in love at fifty
makes me grin, my shopping bag
contains a birthday card
& polyester shirt for my daughter
to give to her father. Lying on top,
a cerise lace bra for my lover.

First published in New Irish Writing in The Irish Times, 2018, Editor Ciaran Carty

My Menopausal Womb

Hairdresser empties tubes
into a black bowl, stirs a mixture
of what looks like day-old blood.
366, he calls the dye.

He pastes my greying hair,
doesn’t take long to cover.
Thirty minutes of flicking through Image,
Hello and Good Housekeeping
and I’m scarlet again.

Gynecologist puts my feet in steel stirrups
tells me to spread my legs
covers his hands with latex gloves
grabs a speculum
tells me to cough and inserts.

When he withdraws I know
what he has to say before he
opens his mouth. And I wish
there was a colour like 366
that would turn my shrunken
womb, scarlet again.

First published in Spontaneity, 2019, Editor Ruth McKee

The Day My Vagina Spoke To Me

After Martina Evans

Don’t you dare, write a poem about this conversation,
said my vagina to me, as I toweled myself dry.

You’ve enough written about sex, vulvas,
and unsatisfying penises. Get over it.
Write something different, use the Irish Sea,
Croagh Patrick or Clew Bay as your muse.
Everybody loves poems about landscapes.

I’m sick and tired of seeing my personal details
all over the web. Who wants to read about a menopausal
vagina or any other type of vagina?
Nothing glamourous about what’s happening to me.
If you paid a bit more attention you’d see that.

You should be out looking for a man
instead of spending so much time writing.
Delving into the unconscious, you say.
Load. Of. Bull.
It’s delving into me you should be doing.

That vibrator of yours is crying out to be used.
Though it’s the real thing I want.
The buzz from that yoke, used to give me a terrible
headache, the few times you did use it.

That gay phase didn’t work out very well either, did it?
Still, that doesn’t mean you have to close up shop.
It’s a bit of fresh air I need.
Can you not smell the must?
There’s mould starting to grow down here.

Anne Walsh Donnelly lives in the west of Ireland. Her work has appeared in many publications including New Irish Writing in The Irish Times. She was nominated for the Hennessy Literary Award for emerging poetry and selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions in 2019. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Woman With An Owl Tattoo, published by Fly On The Wall Poetry Press and the short story collection, Demise of the Undertaker’s Wife, published by The Blue Nib.

To find out more about Anne and to order her books go to her website: annewalshdonnelly.com

‘Three Red Things’ by C. Murray

November 12th, 2019

Poethead by Chris Murray

Three Red Things
the three red things are:
a red umbrella with a black lace trim
spoke-shattered it belongs to my mother,
does not match my abstract and faux
snaky blouson jacket,
Alfred Schütze’s The Enigma of Evil
a memento-mori from his old library,
its red cover is rain-glued-sodden.
I bind myself to a tree,
a shopping bag, berry-red
not much to say about it
is the third red thing.
And I am in the park,
moulded to the body of a tree
its roots are moving beneath my feet.
I am afraid it will tear up from the
soil’s hungry drinking as,
form crystallises
assumes its
almost shape,
within the silica of
this holding-skin,
beneath crystal swipe
and tungsten-lunge
into the exact point
and drain,
then seep
from the vessel-encasement,
not sustainer.
Form crystallises
until
form becomes
a stone dress
press-to
drop-by-drop
raindrop-and-sinew
the whole woman
not tamp-in
onto…

View original post 110 more words

Anon | Shreds of Colour

November 12th, 2019

Shreds of Colour

Black

Black seeping
from pores, I choke
on its own smoke
– unspoken words,
A fire has been lit.

Standing in flames,
drawings and words
of what you think
to do, on once blank
canvas’s now speak

of what you drew,
Isolated four
seasons, almost
a fifth – silence,
A fire has been lit!

Blackbird beckoned
from the trees
of nearby eyes
in darkness
– peering

into the warmth
and light
of my nest,
young awaits
her food,

she sings, unaware,
protected from
your secret and
I draw – curtains,
A fire has been lit!

Every pulse fills
a rage, spins the air
around me,
Standing in armour,
I draw a sword

My blue eyes
change to Red,
with each and every
single
blink

I. drip. flames,
my hair
now charcoal black,
sweeps across a gaunt
pale face,

a barefoot thud
across the earth,
no longer high
heeled feet,
black cloak rattles

in the wind,
a primal roar
shows my cutting
fangs, fiercely
ride a horse

as dark as me.
A fire has been lit
and a mother sips
flame dripped tea.

Red

Is the colour
of every word, etched
canvas in a self-made
studio that hangs
a degree of fine art –
put a noose around
once welcoming

paper, spits
your vulgarity now,
menacing smile,
gritted teeth
and stinking
mind,
etching, etching, etching

your paint-stained
hands, blood-coloured
dripped and dried,
shakes the hands
of unknowing
artists and smiles.
“congratulations

free expression,”
must have watched
my smile a million
times, each tooth
aligned
and imperfections
– mine, anonymous

skull exhibit –
My pale white skin
shows no other shade
or marks, yet,
a sable brush
painted my
insides

out,
my pale white skin
shows no other shade
or marks, yet,
a sable brush
painted my
insides

out,
My pale white skin
shows no other shade
or marks, yet,
a sable brush
painted my
insides

out !
– lyrical, visceral sight,
shreds of colour
beckoning to write.

White

Is the colour of the sheets
to write and to sleep,
a moonlit sky
that once shone on two,

the colour of the walls
that held the night
secrets for too long
and the once crisp

laundry you splashed
with paint and hung
to dry in a gust
of colour and wind,

I wished you painted
the flowers instead
thrown from a
window at your feet,

smiling, hushed
hearts – my own
left me before
now

– a betrayal known
to only the walls
and I, birthing
colour’s while others

in whispering
winds of an artist’s
frenzied brush
and I’m almost blue

in pretentious walls
as though they are
still white,
shreds of colour
beckoning to write.

Blue

Is a sparkle of colour
left behind (- White -)
an enraged heart,
a gut that churned
in pencil grey

and contemporary art
-I rolled in darkness
of early morning birds
that sang yellow
songs reminding me

some things are still
the same and even
if they are not,
poetry won’t set
them free

so I retreat in colour
new, to never write
of shreds again
or infinite blue
– the colour of my silence.

Ana-Mai Smith lives in Ireland. She holds a business qualification and she has a passion for reading, writing and reciting poetry.Ana-Mai has been writing privately for some years, she has began to submit her work. She enjoys to experiment with non-traditional structures and styles and she writes various different themes. She loves to incorporate colour intermittingly into her poetry.

“Cinderella Tráth” and other poems by Aoibhe Ní Loingsigh

November 10th, 2019

Cinderella Tráth

Chaill sí a bróg (agus a croí) I bpobal I gConnemara,
Rud simplí ab ea é ag tarlú ó thús staire,
Cad a tharla dár gcailín óg, dár ‘Cinderella,’
Phóg a buachaill álainn deas cailín éigean eile,

D’Fhág sí cuid dá anam ag glanadh miasa go tapaidh,
Tom-Bán ag míniú nuacht dóibh “Bhreatain, cinnte rachaidh,”
Ag an am rinne siad iarracht an seanfhear bocht a éalú,
Beagnach am don chéilí, cad mar gheall ar smuidiú?

Cé go bhfuil sí arais I gCorcaigh fós cloisfeá a guth ag gáire I nGaillimh,
Insóidh na scéalta grinn is fearr, coast a dhó ar an dtalamh,
(An cúinteoir crosta bocht …bhí a fáinne cluasa mar éin),
Scéalta naemhdíobhálach ar an mbus ina bhfir grinn dóibh féin

Mo hata

Look keep your warm calloused hands and your smiling eyes,
Keep those sea wet salty eyebrows under Connemara skies,
Keep the easy-going attitude “Beidh gach rud ceart go lóir,”
Stay there and sit in factor 50 on the sandy shore
Keep the dances we danced together and try to dance like me
Think of Fiachra eating lunch in a jellyfish sea
Keep the classroom coincidences I don’t even care
Sometimes I wish I’d never met the loveliest boy from Kildare
Keep your kayak bravery and your rounders skill
Please promise me you bless yourself when an ambulance passes still
Keep a list of people and counties and keep the Cork lads close
Ní raibh mé do chailín níl mé anois ach b’fhéidir go mbeidh mé fós
Keep “tá Oisín chomh deas” yeah keep especially that
Keep it all ná bach leis but give me back my hat

Jack Hall

His hair was long and greasy to his waist it did fall,
His face was yellow from lack of sun poor ol’ young Jack Hall,
His Father stood, on one leg, at almost six foot two,
But when he leant on the other foot the opposite was true,
His mother who once long before he was told had been pretty,
Now wore within her hair, heart and clothes the griminess of the city,

An army of ivy leaves held their house under siege,
“Gone too far,” “Nothing to be done,” this was of course agreed,
Outside the back, their garden ran a short mess of Bush and tree,
So overgrown that out the window one could barely see,
In the overgrowth danced fifty to seventy very well-fed rats,
A happy coincidence altogether for next door’s tabby cat,

The weather outside brought about the temperature inside,
In winter months their bones d’shiver in Summer months they’d fry,
Electricity had yet to reach, this last house on the road,
And would not for many years until it would at last be sold,
He spent his evenings at the gate confined behind the wall,
Watching the other lads kick a ball, poor ol’ young Jack Hall,

Sometimes alas by accident the ball would bounce up to,
The peeling door of house number a hundred and fifty two,
The woman with the raggy clothes and the horselike mouth,
Would brandish a sharpened butter knife and from the door she’d shout,
“I swear to God the Lord above ye’ll not me disrespect,”
Each time the plastic pound shop ball would soon be truly fecked,
And cast aside in the overgrowth, of grass beyond the knee,
A reminder if her triumph that everyone could see,

One Summer day our Jack he stood and maggots he did make,
Inside his heavy big black coat. He drummed his fingers on the gate,
Music filled the terraced street amplifying as it drew near,
The promise of something sweet that his mother deemed ‘too dear’,

The ice-cream van skidded to a halt in the middle of the road,
It’s tinny song advertising what it was he sold,
A father sauntered out of his house and walked up to the van,
He smiled and chatted on and on, he clearly knew the man,

“Six half cones, Murphy, that’s it for me”
He took the six cones with a wink and quickly paid for three,
A cone for each of his three sons and for their friend Big Noel,
And for the youngest Healy boy who they’d always stick in goal,
He then began to walk, where people didn’t go,
To the ivy house with the tall tall grass nobody’s mow,

He handed Jack the bit of ice cream sliding off the cone,
(Jack Hall the crater who spent his time standing all alone),
Jack’s two eyes lit up with joy, a smile slid across his face,
The ice cream that was in his hand he could all but taste,
For once and not in some cruel game,
He truly felt the same.

Aoibhe Ní Loingsigh is a poet from Cork. Aoibhe writes both in English (her first language) and as Gaeilge (her favourite language). One of Aoibhe’s Grandas inspired her love of Irish at a young age. Time spent in the Gaeltacht helped to further this grá. Aoibhe hopes to work in an Irish college (that she previously attended) in Connemara during the Summer. A short story of Aoibhe’s won a competition in her local library and a past English teacher read a poem of hers at her wedding. Aoibhe wrote a book last summer (while helping with the Leaving Cert exams) in English with the dialogue as Gaeilge. Aoibhe is an aggressively (the word agressive is used for emphasis) optimistic person and decides to see the good in everything. This is reflected in her poetry. Her sense of humour is evident and helps to give her poetry a universal appeal.