Category: 25 Pins in a packet women creators

Sequence: “Motherhood” and other poems by Laura Daly

November 3rd, 2019

The Leaking Breast

Premature mother’s milk escapes my swollen breast
Unapologetically heralding the other inside.

‘You’ll never be lonely again’ the inane
distortion of the truth of never
Occupying aloneness.

Your body holds but a temporary occupier
Once released your mind will be prostrate before them
Forever.
Simultaneous ecstasy and anguish.

You will crave
The control of the cocooning womb –
Even now breached by the disruption of the leaking breast.

Washing my mother’s hair after an operation.

Bent over the under the showerhead,
Submissive as the child I was
I feel a strange feeling, knowing I too will wash the
Hair of my child growing inside me.
I occupy the position now of the in-between carer.

I lovingly smooth away suds
Under the steaming water
And wish she knew
How much in that moment that I cared.
I badger her restless nature in a vain, cyclical attempt to protect.
There is a comfort in this moment
Of vulnerability
For us both.

I will protect as she protected,
I will mind, as she has always minded,
And we will love intrinsically forever bonded, bound spiritually.

The Abortion Referendum – May 25th 2018.

She will bow to the patriarchal figurehead of the Church
and it’s grotesquely skewed morality and
Vote No.
Bitter words have passed between my mother and I –
Yet she is adamant.

‘Do you believe then that abortion should be illegal everywhere?’
‘What about all the women who will still want or need abortions if the vote does not pass?’

Silence. A superior, taciturn morality. Divorced from the reality of the human condition
And the female body.

My unborn inside me forbids me travel,
Medically,
I am ironically excluded, my adopted home holding my
Pregnant body hostage
As my maternal home does to thousands of pregnant bodies

I crave the little girl inside me.
For her future autonomy
I crave for her grandmother to recognise the nuances of female life,
Female choice, female autonomy.

But I crave in vain and look instead to my undecided father
To vote for his two absent daughters
His two granddaughters
His wife.

For the Pleasure of the Male Gaze

Have you ever seen a rose so riotous in bloom
that the inner petals outdo the outer
for the pure please of life, for reaching the sun first? –

Why should the gardener cut off the inner petals,
Harm the rose,
For the pleasure of the male gaze?

Who would look at the open fruit and then attempt to sew it up?
Who would mute and paint the vibrant colours of the butterfly
To fit with ill-fitting, fleeting trends of fancy –

Where else in this wonderful world of natural beauty
do we so utterly, subconsciously, unquestioningly exist purely for the pleasure of the male
gaze?

Our bodies no more than parenthesis encircling the vehicle for male desire.
Our minds continuously redrawn to mirror a society from which we are continuously
disempowered.

Go forth, bloom.

Chip

You called out to me in the semi-darkness on the naked street
On my way to the station
And I turned in the usual way to see if you were sneering at me,
half hoping for the friend who would return your call.
There was no one else there.

You chip away at my sense of freedom with your emboldened, unwelcome presence
Intruding into my psyche;
One of the lads.

Striking that you probably could barely make out my form
Detail still smothered by weakening night
Other you sensed instinctively and that yearning to assert ignited.
Interesting no one there to witness or applaud, habit.

My sense of caution heightened, exactly as you wanted
The power of my early morning commute marginally diminished
By wariness

Chip away with stares
Chip away with an unwanted brush against us
Chip away with sending pictures to your friends
Chip away with shouting ‘compliments’ at us
Chip away with beeping your horn while we are running
Chip away by asserting dominance in the home
Chip away by doing less in the home
Chip away by paying us less
Chip away by using pregnancy as subtle way to hold us back in our careers
Chip away by idealising unrealistic body types

Be sure not to recognise yourself here,
be sure to demonise me,
Be sure not to admit to the greatest oppression of our age,
Easier to label me, than see what we see.

Untitled

We force meaning on sadness and madness
to make it
bearable

We assign reason to the deep cracks in our souls
Building paper bridges over chasms on which to travel with fragile dreams.

To give the pulsing wound a rudimentary suture
And watch it scar ruefully

But happiness needs no storyline
It sits like a perfect, unexpected, dewy morning mist on a field
Being
Shrouding
Crystallising what it touches

Soon to vanish with the rising sun –

Sequence: “Motherhood” and other poems are © Laura Daly

Laura Daly is a poet, writer and teacher born and raised in Dublin, now living in Amsterdam with her husband and daughter. She holds a BA in English Literature, an MA in Gender and Writing and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education from University College Dublin. She also received her MEd in Leadership and Management in Education from Trinity College Dublin. Her passion is feminism and exploring and making visible the female experience through her writing. She is working towards her first collection of poetry as well as a feminist non-fiction book for teenage girls titled Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

“Edinburgh Castle” and other poems by Eva O’Connor

October 27th, 2019

I.

Edinburgh Castle

I proposition you
I splat my soul onto cobble stones
While you have a fag
You smell the same
Of sweat
and the burnt dust from shite parcans expertly rigged

You smell the same
But everything is different
Your edges are rougher ,
You are thinner now
Your eyes sparkle less than I remember

I know you broke your collar bone
I snatch glances
But there are no protruding bones

Your hands are red raw
They tell-tale betray you
your skin’s not good
I want to undress you
To heal you with kisses

You study the cobbles
perhaps you can see the vague outline of my soul
Like the coastline of a small country
bathed in the blue light of the castle

I proposition you
I tell you plainly
That there are others
But it is you.
That a year on
The cigarette burn you left on the white of my inside arm
Simply
will not fade

I want to hear you laugh
I want you to split me open with your smile
I could dance for you, I think
But not on these cobbles stones
Not in these shoes
Suddenly I am tired

as I speak I remind myself
Words are my weapons
My allies
I will bend and buckle them
Til you relent and hold me

But once they are borne into air
They do no float as I have planned

You inhale and meet my eye
You squint at me like I have slighted you
I think about how my vomit would look
A light layer of floating bits
Like packet soup
Spilled atop my soul
there on the cobbles

You drop my gaze again
Like I am a game that bores you now
You say something about keeping your hands in your pocket.

You finish your cigarette
and toss the butt between two cobbles
I watch it glow a terrific orange before it dies
A tiny amber star
Beside the blackness of my soul

II.

I left beers in the fridge.
Two bottles of overpriced Beck’s from a stuffy corner shop, the one with the basket leathery apples by the till.

I hoped when you sipped from the hard green glass, you’d think of me and smile.

I left a pair of hoops on your bedside table, cheap ones from Penny’s, gold come greenish bronze.

I hoped you’d mistake them for expensive, a family heirloom,
And post them back with a note and your initial.
Or keep them in a secret drawer til next time.

I left a purple charger with an Eva sticker on the plug.
I hoped you’d find it, wind it up and wonder about me.
Marvel at my Hansel and Gretel trail on your home and in your heart.

I left a tiny piece of my soul I think. Triangular and glistening like a shard of glass.
It slipped down the gap between the wall and the luxury mattress I was using you for.

III.

I walk past your house
On Brick Lane
And tears spring up
Behind my eyes

You are long gone
But I’m sure I glimpse you
In the window
In those tracksuits bottoms I bought for you (soft and jaded and green) and a t-shirt with a loose neck.
I can nearly taste the Sunday sweat of you
Salty and warm
Crippled with come down

I remember that time I sat on your doorstep
crumpled and crying
an inflatable toy pierced with sadness,
i called your name through the letterbox,
Til i was hoarse,
Til the lad from tattoo shop on the corner offered me a green tea

Your street is thick with market now
Packed with the same over priced vintage junk
And white trainered tourists

We used to watch them from your sitting room
Of a Sunday
You
Smoking on the window sill
Crippled with come down.
Me draped across you
Smug in the haven of your half love

IV.

I hear you work in channel 4 now
the drama department.
congratulations.

One day i will sit opposite you
And sell you my ideas

I will pitch so hard
I will floor you with my composure
my unwavering conviction
my staggering original idea

My proposal to you
Is this

Be kinder
To future loves

V. I had a dream your mum kissed me on the cheek
And whispered in my ear
You cannot save a drowning person
if they already belong to the ocean floor.

And the warmth of her face
Was like a sea of calm
Against mine
Her skin
The same crepe paper feel
As yours

Edinburgh Castle and other poems are © Eva O’Connor

Eva O’Connor is a writer and performer from Ogonnelloe, Co. Clare She has written for stage, screen and radio. Her plays in include My Name is Saoirse, Overshadowed, Maz and Bricks, and MUSTARD (winner of Fringe First Award 2019). Her short story Midnight Sandwich was aired on BBC Radio 4.

“Alone on the Blackstock Road” and other poems by Aine McAllister

October 23rd, 2019

Alone on The Blackstock Road

I buy a yellow armchair
and a stone grey bookcase, carry books
from the attic in Ireland, choose titles
I think speak something of me.

I sit at the table and watch
buses stop outside and strangers look,
my hackles rise, I lift a shoulder
and twist my back to them.

I turn to write another
note to self and you: Finally
you came; distant as a far moon,
you didn’t look at my books.

But, close in the dark I opened
the book about words. You lit the page
with a candle’s light and I read
how to be ‘Alone’.

Aqui me pinté yo

I live alone above a Japanese take away,
the hallway smells like last night’s dinner.

I put flowers on the bookshelf,
beside the silhouette of a woman

pulling up her stockings. I stick
a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo to the fridge,

with a list of small domestic items
I need to make a house a home.

In my bedroom bits of clothing spill
from suitcases I’d like to give away.

Rain on Rathlin Island

The rain that salves,
that smoothes the fibres
of a frayed heart,

the rain that draws you into warmth
like the harbour
of your grandmother’s arms

or her bed at midday in childhood;
blanket cocoon.
That was the rain that day. Kind rain.

We walked to the other side of the Island
past yellow iris, rushes and the lough
to a family of mottled seals,

at the inlet at Ushet.
I planted my feet on the rocks
stood legs apart and gave myself back

my name, called it into the rain bringer.
I sent my name
where the Atlantic swirls up in the Irish Sea.

Murlough Bay

Rue lighthouse on Rathlin casts gold light;
a thurible swings the Sea of Moyle.

Western Isles of Scotland rise;
peaks in incense smoke.

Stones are lichen marked;
mushroom, terracotta, olive green.

Nettles spring, heathers crop, harebells drop,
thistles brighten violet to white,

they wisp their creamy beards to breeze,
to bird song, to a man’s voice from rocks above.

Sycamore’s arms reach,
gather honeysuckle in.

A six spotted burnet rests lace wings;
black, red, on stem green.

Bees move in blackberry flowers,
open, pink in bloom.

A daddy-longlegs floats,
trampolines the ferny verge.

The old mine in the mountain opens low;
dank – heavy drops fall slow.

The black lump rises fast – gut to throat,
a skim of coal is hard pressed in soft palm.

The long slow beat of a sea bird
brings blue expanse to basalt cliffs.

Purple waters rock and sway,
back again to Murlough Bay.

The Moon

for Christos

I thought the moon was a man,
slow hurtling
into the distance of a different universe.

I thought I was the earth,
the tide, the wolf;
the woman he turned his face from.

I thought the earth was dark, barren,
the tide, a witless,
loyal fool.

In my mind’s eye
I saw the wolf, dull-eyed and bent,
no light to cast her shadow into.

But you taught me the moon.
The moon, the moon, look at the moon,
it is a waxing crescent.

She is orange in the sky tonight,
low and full over Red Bay
and the world is pregnant with her promise.

“Alone on the Blackstock Road” and other poems are © Aine McAllister

Aine McAllister is a poet from the Glens of Antrim, who works as a Senior Teaching Fellow at UCL IOE. She is currently completing an MA Poetry at Queens University. Her work is published in journals and she is working towards her first collection. She is interested in exploring how poetry gives voice and using dialogue as a tool for writing and for facilitating writing.

“Needlepoint” and other poems by Erin Vance

October 18th, 2019


Hiraeth 

In the turpentine afternoon
I wanted to beat my wings— hollow

so       hollow.
  
And in the rectal evening  I wanted to be a hummingbird.
A hum   
    m      
     ing
        bird.

In the frost-swept night 
I wished you a Lamb.

Soft like cotton balls and languid 
                              with musk.

Turn me into a violent fresco,      Lamb,
and touch me like hot bricks

in the wet dawn.

I wanted to be a leaf lodged in amber.
               — — An insulin needle.
  
And at the musk-soaked August’s end 
I wanted to be hollow
                    t r a n s l u c e n        t
a hum
    mingbird 

with — — insulin — — needle— — 
                legs
lodged in amber.

My hollow wings snap
                   ping 
In your lamb’s mouth,
                  turn me into a violet fresco,           Lamb, 
                      
                    touch me like 
                       hot 
                     bricks.

Confession

After Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, photographers of The Cottingley Fairies

When Frances followed the little thing
into the shallow beck
I stayed back, watching her stockings
sag in the water, flapping at her ankles
like bloated second skins.

Frances batted her eyelashes
and the imp trusted her.
Confession: I wished to catch it
and place it in a box
like a little pet in a spider-silk dress,
pull it out at parties to flutter and tease
and spit.

When Frances giggled as its wings
tickled her rosebud cheek—
I confess; I wanted to hold
its gossamer body in my palm,
knowing that I could practically crush it
with my breath.

The waters of the beck leaked into my shoe
the cold water like tiny, elfin teeth
biting my toes. A gasp and— oh!
the thing is dead.
caught under Frances’ fat palm;
she slipped on a patch of moss like an oil slick.

The photos may be fake, but the fairies—
They were real.

Weren’t they, Frances?

Sister, Speak

I wonder where you are
where our home is
now that the skeletons of our earliness
belong to the birds

I wonder if the ground where we placed you
is infected with your dreaming

I sit in your closet
empty now, but the ghosts of your
dresses hang around me
like rainbows dripping lifeless from the gallows

I used to lay in your bed
wanted to feel everything you’d touched
for our skin cells to feed the same microorganisms

I’d lay in the dirt and imagine I was you
but when ants started up my neck I couldn’t help
but twitch awake and run back inside

Mirrors

Mother, can I have the velvet box of milk teeth
that you keep in your nightstand?
Every night I dream my teeth are falling out.
I think they miss me.

Mother, what is the combination to my middle school locker?
I rescued a bird fourteen years ago
and hid it with my gym clothes
I think it’s getting hungry.

Mother, can you braid my hair one last time before I cut it off?
Will you keep a lock of it for a day
when I am not picking up my phone
and you have bad news?

Mother, will you help me down?
This tree is much taller than I expected and this branch
is much thinner and I am much older
than I’d planned.

Mother, will you remind me
to wash between my toes and to take my glasses off
before I fall asleep
even when you don’t remember
who I am?

Needlepoint

When we were young,
Still slippery and mosslike,
Our father embroidered sparrows
Onto the backs of our necks
He held the whiskey bottle in his free hand
And like a mean waterfall the
Blue threads cut through our skin.

For our tenth birthday
Our father bought us stallions,
And after an afternoon of riding,
He added to the hieroglyphs on our necks;
Pomegranates that made our throats
Look like bloody gaps with yellow teeth.

We were fourteen when we stopped dreaming
One morning we woke up together
Our minds empty, our hands steady,
And we clutched the bone-handles of our
Hairbrushes, counting to one hundred
In each others’ hair
Careful not to pull a single stitch.

We worked like machinery and every five years
Father took the needle and we took turns sitting
At the oak table while he stitched
His memories into our skins.

Hatching

For Stacey Walyuchow

When I was six years old,
I played Odette in a Kindergarten production
of swan lake.

My movements were decidedly more
like that of a magpie
and my understudy was called in

after I broke my ankle tripping
over a gold watch.
I cried and watched the birds outside my room.

They played and threw acorns
danced and drew shapes in the dirt
I opened the window and called to them

in my best outside voice.
One by one they jumped onto the sill
and teetered on the threshold

of my world and theirs, their heads
cocked their eyes shifting their feet
twitching until they jumped hopped skipped

into my bed.

Needlepoint and other poems © Erin Vance

Erin Emily Ann Vance holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary and studies Irish Folklore and Ethnology at University College Dublin. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, including The Sorceress Who Left too Soon: Poems After Remedios Varo (Coven Editions) and Unsuitable (APEP Publications). Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, EVENT Magazine, Augur Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, and more. Her first novel, Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers will be published in Fall 2019 by Stonehouse Gothic.

Learn more at erinvance.ca.

Erin’s social profiles

website www.erinvance.ca
@erinemilyann

“Poem for Kate in Chemo” and other poems by Alexis Rhone Fancher

October 17th, 2019

CRUEL CHOICES

When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them, yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer. Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favorite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world.

First published in ASKEW, 2016, Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, 2016 Winner of the Pangolin Prize, 2018 Nominated again for the Pushcart Prize, 2018

THE GOD FOR BROKEN PEOPLE

There is a god for broken people – Roxane Gay

This is the god for the second rate, the one who waylays you at the party, plies you with bourbon, fucks you in the kitchen, makes you walk home in the rain. This god shines in the runoff. This god hustles the night. This god mines the maimed, culls emotional cripples off the top like cream. This god is a shape-shifter, a dumpster diver, the god who loiters at the corner of Dolorosa & Despair. This god drinks alone. The god for broken people trolls the city for discards, marries the exploited with the lost. This god sweeps up the miscreants, gusts their darkness into night. This is the god of no hope. No money. This god has your back when you backslide. This god bets on you to fail, hides in your broken places. This god is willing to wait. When you’re ready to surrender, remember: this is your last, best chance. This god will not stick by you, won’t give you false hope. This god will kill you. Or save you. Choose.

Published in The San Pedro River Review, 2018

Poem For Kate In Chemo

Above where your right breast used to be
the oncologist implanted a port to make things easier.
“It takes forever,” you say. “An hour’s drive, each
way, an entire day used up, laying
there.”

But first, the tourniquet, tied to your upper arm,
the cheery nurse, tapping for a working vein,
your thick blood at last flooding into one syringe
after another. Then the weigh-in, each time
less. “Bone and skin now,” you say.

If your numbers are good, you head
to the chemo room, rows of cushy
recliners, supplicants tethered to plastic bags
held high by IV poles, a forest of metal trees.

You unbutton your blouse, offer up the convenient
port to a flush of saline – like ocean, you tell me,
like waves.

Next, the chemicals, those shimmering droplets
riding the plastic tube into your chest,

a kind red blanket, thrown
over your legs.

I tear the best New Yorker short stories
from the magazine and mail them
to you in Port Townsend.
Something to pass the time. Something non-
medical to discuss when we chat each week.

We both know you’re dying, though
your husband still has faith, and you cling to
his hope, coming back week after week because
it makes his life bearable.

When the chemo bags are empty,
and the stories read, you leave the pages behind
for a needful stranger.
In 2000, when you lost your breast,
your husband insisted you have
chemo then, too.
“It makes me feel more dead than alive,”
you confessed to me after the first week.

Appointment days, you’d leave the house,
drive to the woods, walk the trails
instead of treatment, those
huge redwood trees shading your path.

Each evening you’d return to your
husband’s innocent embrace.

You made me promise not to tell.
And I never did, until now.

For Kate O’Donnell, (1949-2014)

First published in the Nashville Review, 2016

when your mother convinces you to take in your homeless younger sister

She will date your boyfriend.
She’ll do it better than you ever did.
She’ll have nothing but time.
He’ll start showing up when you leave,
train her to make him the perfect BLT,
(crusts off, avocado on the side),
encourage his cheating heart,
suck his dick so good he’ll think
he’s died and gone to Jesus.

Your sister will borrow your clothes,
and look better in them than you ever did.
Someone will see her with your boyfriend
at the Grove, agonize for days
before deciding not to tell you.
Meanwhile he’ll buy her that fedora you
admired in Nordstrom’s window, the last one
in your size.

When you complain, your mother
will tell you it’s about time you learned to share.

While you’re at work, your sister will tend your garden,
weed the daisies, coax your gardenias into bloom.
No matter how many times you remind her,
she will one day forget to lock the gate;
your cat and your lawn chairs will disappear.

Your mother will say it serves you right.

Your sister will move into your boyfriend’s
big house in Laurel Canyon. He will ignore her,
and she will make a half-hearted suicide attempt;
you’ll rescue her once again.

Your mother will wash her hands of the pair of you,
then get cancer and die.

Smell the white gardenias in the yard.
Cherish their heady perfume. Float them in a crystal bowl.
Forgive your sister as she has forgiven you.

First published in RAGAZINE, 2015

When I Buried My Son I Became Someone Else

When I buried my son    I became someone else
the motherhood part     written out of my script;

I should have felt lighter.
			    An alternate narrative ran alongside
			    the dead kid one where he wasn’t dead.

It remains the preferable scenario. 
			
I buried my son and now 
I don’t know who walks 
on eggshells                 the living or the dead, and sometimes  
			     I think the dead one is me, especially
                             when I look 
in the mirror.
		           I am coming to terms with mortality:mine/his. 
			   I’ve dumbed down my dreams.

If you look hard enough,    you’ll see the skewed trajectory, 
the fizzle.                 the off-track, you’ll live the devastation, 
                            sip the dregs.
When my mother died, 	    I wore a lavender dress to her funeral. 

I stuffed it into  	   where it lived for thirty years. 
the back of my closet	   When I found it again, the dress still fit.

But I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.





Published in JUNIPER Literary Journal, Feb. 2019 
& in THE DEAD KID POEMS (KYSO Flash Press, 2019)

Poet and photographer Alexis Rhone Fancher has work published in over 200 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, The MacGuffin, Plume, Tinderbox, Diode, Nashville Review, Rust + Moth, Nasty Women Poets, WideAwake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, among others. Her photographs have been published worldwide. Her books include: How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen & other heart stab poems, Enter Here, and the autobiographical, Junkie Wife. Her chapbook, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies was released in 2015, and its companion, The Dead Kid Poems, published in May 2019. EROTIC, a volume of her new and selected erotica, will be published in 2020 by New York Quarterly. A nominee of multiple Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net awards, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly.

“Dive of the Kingfisher” and other poems by Ria Collins

October 13th, 2019

Dance of the Samurai

I danced in my Communion dress
barefoot dervish
mother read aloud from Illustrated Poetry,
I found my plastic sword.

I dreamt I was a samurai
lived at the foot of Mt.Fuji,
wore armour and mask
raven hair in a top-knot.

Princess Tsuru, daughter of Ochi Clan.
I practiced the Five Rings Of The Sword,
meditated and studied
the way of the warrior.

Father transformed an old camogie stick
to a majestic Naginata sword.
Grandmother gave me a gold silk skirt,
jacket of azure velvet
with extended shoulder wings.
I wrapped black calico around my waist
and placed my sword in the Obi.

At school, I carved a mask of such ferocity
teacher placed it in a bag,
told me to carry it home.

Now, in the evenings, I put on my wedding dress,
let folds fall over hidden scars,
I lengthen the woven rope
feed it slowly towards him, and wait.

My mask slips down. I prepare for war.

Dive of the Kingfisher

I am tired of being a woman
suckled and torn from childbirth and men,
hands wrinkled from years submerged,
I clasp at dreams that trickle through the plughole.
Forgotten, uncoffined. I must wait.

I am tired of grinding cumin,
coriander, mustard, and cardamom
while I taste only emptiness.
Children loved and well-fed have left,
I move from person to person.

I shoulder the clouds of my mother,
blackened January,
rain falls inward, time contracts,
chalk bones, weightless, skinless,
unseen madness in colourless veins.

A sparrow of small movements
I move around crumbs, claws light
ready to dance through the sky.
I should be a bird
a thing of beauty.

Perhaps a kingfisher,
with azure underbelly
cloaked with emerald wings,
a brilliant blue flash
across the Universe.

Elegy to some Mysterious Form

From Katy in Dublin to Ruby in Liverpool

Misshapen walnut
nestled hard against my palm,
as I searched for your soul
in pitted holes.

I looked for a connection
to your core,
all I saw was
mismatched joints, a jellied eel
of jumbled vertebrae.

I held your flaccid nothingness,
soft against the dampness of exertion,
translucent beads like tears
dropping from my skin.

Should we wrap you tenderly
in love and lace,
or allow you to be sluiced
In some unknown place?
I do not regret
housing your short journey.
please try to understand.

When they informed me
of incompatibility,
my body spilled,
the severed cord
my decision.

Now the jagged space
blurs without sides
where you should be,
you haunt my melodies
with your legacy.

I see you in some mysterious form,
tall and proud, watching us.
exotic plumes, unruffled,
having waged a war
of constitutional law,
about our rights
but what of yours?

You left us here to wonder.

No Survivors

Translucent shadings, surfacing gut thrusts
which threatened to choke
their broken promises.
It had to stop.

Lost in make-believe, she was cold,
hardened as ice-cubes,
used up tulips returning to the soil,
or curled magazines yellowed with time.

He never faltered, dull ink-coloured
the crushed bloom of her dreams,
no milk or honey to soothe
saltwater dabbed on the ache.

Friends safely distanced, children cowered,
insulted in his world of men,
his dammed silt anger –
she, his punch-bag.

She fought for a job, trialed escape –
sick-days, unhealed wounds
bones protruding through the stretched skin,
always in denial of one-way dialogue.

Sun glinted on flint through glass,
she grabbed her chance, danced around a shadow,
left hand raised in defence as he sniggered
the air bent blue.

In her cell, stone wrapped retreat,
memory dimmed, she stares through the edge
a closed loss, broken children in care.
– no survivors.

No glory, just burn of pain
but she loves him still.
Long before the beginning
there was going to be an end.

To Rothko

I would like a lover like you
concise, with depths of colour,
a definite touch
to reach the heart in me,
brush me with strokes,
urge me outside myself
until my breath gasps.

You would show me
how form subsides then soars
from cobalt to violet
crimson to gold
a tightrope between worlds,
absorb all fear and thought
in a perfectly formed frame.

Feet firmly planted on wood, unshaken
like a tai-chi stance,
“as above so below”.
A white line spills across canvas,
in the centre, stillness.

The Stanhopea and the Mexican Boys

In the shade of a tropical garden
under a sherbet sky,
the Stanhopea orchid stretches
purple daubed petals
emitting its scent,
vanilla and chocolate peppermint.

Hundreds of orchid bees
lured from twenty feet
by two blood maroon eye spots
beneath the belly of the sepals
suck the essence for propagation
in the sweet seduction to follow.

Twenty yards away
in parched streets,
young boys caught, waving guns,
drawn to crimson sorrow,
fall with a kiss of gunshot
while the Barons watch.

The Stanhopea ripens,
in one short burst.
Like the Barons the bees will leave
when the petals fall.

Ria Collins worked as Director of Nursing for many years. Now living in Galway, she has read at Clifden Arts Festival and Galway Library open mic events. She has been published in Skylight 2016, shortlisted for Over the Edge New Writer of the Year 2016 and longlisted in 2017. She was shortlisted for Poems for Patience 2017 and in 2018. She attended workshops in Galway with Kevin Higgins and Dublin Writers Centre with Mark Granier, Jessica Traynor and Adam Wyeth. Most recently she has performed a collaboration of her work with music at the Cuirt International Festival of literature 2018.

“Fireflies” and other poems by Christine A. Brooks

October 6th, 2019


house of beauty

just three houses down 
from my 
pale green house
a magnificent dark red house
sat 
regally
on a throne of both beauty &
possibility
on a street that never quite
fit in
with the rest of the city

it was a dead end, 
in a time & place undefined by class 
middle, less than that,
but 
all otherwise, the same
—more or less

except #44

it was the only house on the street
with a fence around the front

how rich they must be, I thought
to be able to have a fence
in the front

a small white sign with
black writing hung & 
swung from a black post
behind that fence
with scrolled letters

Willie Mae’s
House of Beauty

my mother would send me
if I was lucky, with 2 quarters
to buy us each a candy bar
that Willie Mae
would stock on a small shelf
in her makeshift waiting room
in her basement

I would look at myself in her big
mirror that sat in front of her 2
chairs,
that spun around

soaking in the smells of hair products, so different than my
own & listen to the women
talk about their lives
that somehow existed
outside
the House of Beauty

their hair so curly & beautiful
made my own
brown, flat hair feel lifeless
and 
vanilla

she would explain to me why
she could not make mine, look
like theirs,
but still,
every time I walked down her
backstairs
quarters in hand
I dreamed that she could make
my hair kinky & shiny
while I talked & twirled 

because
in the House of Beauty
anything was possible

or so I wanted to believe.


nothingness

I was drunk when they came
for me,
to keep me safe from myself,
he said 
but that was a goddam
lie & everyone knew it

broken knuckles, bruised 
beaten, wrapped tightly but
the silicone pink bracelet twisted
and rubbed under my cast

pushed, taunted & reminded
that I was no one
no one that could fight
no one that could win
and
no one that mattered much
to anyone 

neighbors peeked out, 
porch lights flicked on
I could see them 
from my place, 
face down on the hood of the
dirty police car
click click
went the handcuffs

it was summer not so long ago
really, but a lifetime for
her and many
but that didn’t matter either

nothing did 
or ever would again
not in any way that mattered
anymore


Newbury Street


my Papa smoked a pipe &
 watched hockey with the sound
off, in another
room
from where I played    quietly
with my Lincoln Logs

Nana, who was supposed to die
long before I came around,
had the doctors been right about
her throat cancer

sat in the corner, surrounded by various
clocks 
that ticked on

knitting & clucking trying to keep her
mouth moist somehow since her body
stopped making saliva 

she made gawumpki’s
he gave butterfly kisses &

we lived with them one
summer, so very long
ago 

most days I had a bellyache

nervous, she’s just nervous
my mother would say

    dismissing my pain, probably
to dismiss her own

it didn’t matter though &
eventually we moved, but my
bellyache stayed


A Date with the Lord   
  
the morning I met the 
Lord was exactly as I 
imagined
it would
be. 
 
the air,
    both, briny & candied
plump with salt from the
Irish Sea & 
sweet from the
River Liffey
tickled as I inhaled
but that did not stop me from
breathing in
    life.
 
 
some, even most,
— maybe,
would not find it
pleasant or pleasing, but
for me it was
perfection,
on an early summer Dublin morning,
before businesses opened, but not before business
happened, 
 
    with horse drawn carriages & guitar players
& those offering blessings of good fortune,
wishing me well,
after several donations. 
 
I paid the price,
   I owed
maybe even, a little more than that
which pleased us both
  —equally. 
 
God bless you said more than money could buy
   maybe
I’m hungry, she said, although
she looked neither the kind
 of person to offer a blessing that had the chance of
sticking, or someone whose dinner plate was
empty often
 
but, I had seen her before,
believed her then, that blessing 
so, I dropped another heavy coin into her
   cup, clanging
& shuffled along Dawson Street
because,
     it mattered not
 
I had a date with the Lord after-all & had no time to
 wonder
if the woman I never thought I would see again
—but did
could grant the wish offered up to
Eire.
 
finally, I had come upon the Mansion House
more than what
it seemed, initially
set back without the warmth
& cool of thick mossy blades
of emerald patchwork
 
still though, warm enough
welcoming enough, although no
mat said so, and the giant
brass, doorbell that rang to the
unknown, still, did
not dissuade me from my
date with the Lord. 
 
I had an appointment
    after all. 
 
my clothes, comfortable but
not my finest, reminded 
me, without knowledge or
preconceived notions that
   I was,
home
in a place that accepted me
as is. 
 
and in that moment,
those moments, 
as we sipped tea
& the outside came to life 
I was
     —happy.



Fireflies

I recall them, 
as beacons of hope & faith 
 from my childhood

buzzing and banging,
gently
 against the glass walls of my
Nana’s mason jar
lighting the way, selflessly
 just for a moment, a heartbeat 
 tick between the tock
contained. 

I unscrew the lid,
 set them free, and 
watch
them blink into the hush
of the late summer’s night. 

I recall them,
these memories 

  not as the embers
they were - hovering, clanking
 against the mental box I
 put them in, 
 As they feverishly try to burn
  down 
  my construction paper 
childhood. 
 

I recall them, as 
 — fireflies


"Fireflies" and other poems are © Christine A. Brooks

Christine A. Brooks is a graduate of Western New England University with her B.A. in Literature and her M.F.A. from Bay Path University in Creative Nonfiction. A series of poems, The Ugly Five, are in the 2018 summer issue of Door Is A Jar Magazine and her poem, The Writer, is in the June, 2018 issue of The Cabinet of Heed Literary Magazine. Three poems, Puff, Sister and Grapes are in the 5th issue of The Mystic Blue Review. Her vignette, Finding God, is in in the December 2018 issue of Riggwelter Press, and her series of vignettes, Small Packages, was named a semifinalist at Gazing Grain Press in August 2018. Her essay, What I Learned from Being Accidentally Celibate for Five Years was recently featured in HuffPost, MSN, Yahoo and Daily Mail UK. Her book of poems, The Cigar Box Poems, is due out in late 2019.

Christine A. Brooks links

“Sundowner” and other poems by Clare McCotter

September 29th, 2019

The House

The regularly-occurring representation of the human form as a whole is that of the house
~ Sigmund Freud

This is my house my place my home
first one I ever owned
leave now you dirty scum
she screams at auxiliaries gripping
wrists and raging elbows
washing face and neck
and shoulders.
This is my house where stairs climb roots
to a crouching door
there an old key turned in a raven’s heart
spreads out blankets of bare brick
a pear tree’s silver fruit
a skylight in low rafters
its pendant handle – first night’s umbilical.

This is my house it is mine alone
one tramps like you could never own
she shouts as holding her hands tight
we chisel faeces off nails
ours wrapped in disposable wipes.
This is my house, these high windows –
a geometry of winter echoes
dreamt in dusky corners.
And over there a rosewood armoire
its soul kindled with rags and linseed oil.
In its lacquered drawers
prayers and poems
laid out like ammonites and white shells.

This is my house always my house
so get out to hell
none of you are welcome to stay she sobs
while we insert a catheter tube
dodging flailing fists
and sputum heavy with MRSA.
This is my house, these the contours
of worn cellar steps
where stars born under earth
flower on a cobbled floor.
O my house, my heart, my home
your hearth stone drawn from the west
all your great timbers, all your dark arches torn.

The Stache

He had buried strange things
in that great drooping Mexican moustache.
There were the lines, two from Saint Luke
five from Frank Zappa,
printed on tiny scrolls
rolled up inside a wren’s hollow bone
and somewhere near the corner of his mouth
bleached seahorse ribs
strummed with selenic whispers
and a plectrum of green ship’s glass.

First and only rebellion against a father
who knew a bloody gimmick
when he saw one
the Zapata had been there right under his nose
for the best part of forty years.
She liked it from the start
thinking that first winter
it made him look like Omar Sharif
in Doctor Zhivago
and during the long laudanum summer
a badass cowboy kicking up dust in Dodge.

Settling soon after his appointment
to a grammar school where that pelmet of hair
was quietly at odds with the navy suits
and brown brogues
he wore weighing words like emeralds
each and every morning assembly.
For some a mask hiding scars or jutting chin
his shielding nothing behind
rather a holding within.

Exposed in white astringent light
after cerebral vascular accident swept him
down long corridors in a centre of excellence
to his very own primary nurse.
With reports and care plans correlated
and risk assessments all up-dated
what could he say when she asked to shave
his food-stained moustache?
Six weeks to the day since a left-sided stroke
what could he say what could he say?

Sundowner

Reciting place names bright with the smell of opals and sun
he leans in close to her chair.

Stooped forward she is silent, her arms
like the thin lucent wings of a bat

mark X on her chest. With the fading of the day outside
her neighbour begins to shout for mother

while a small man driving a wingback chair
screams can someone open the door

soon the shuffling, the banging, the pacing; her Cuban heels
deafening among soft slipper soles.

Up and down, up and down,
up and down the long corridor he walks beside her

past doors with pictures of toilets
past the woman strapped to a wheelchair

dragging herself along with two bare feet
but when he begins to hum a song from Street Legal

she stops, stares at his face
and for a second something

then on her way past the window framing a solitary star –
a chamois of starlings shining the grey.

Early Dementia

Crisp like the accent you brought back
from the south
your hair is snow
fresh and falling on a spine
so silently straight
as he says
only for a short time only for a short time.

Spancelled to minds wandering
the blue borderlands
patients’ bodies trudge past
the Lenten chapel of your hands
its ciborium – a locket
bought years before he said
only for a short time only for a short time.

Sifting memories in that silver heart
you recall the night he returned
in a clapped out Ford
your name encrypted on his arm
but not the hour
since he said
only for a short time only for a short time.

Chic in black beside a bed not your own
you are unsure how to act
here where there are no maps
no neatline or legend
to quiet the wings in your breast
till he says
only for a short time only for a short time.

Self-isolating no longer you have become
a good mixer, stains on your clothes
mixing well with stains on others
the weekly bath four days away
settles grime under nails
and still he says
only for a short time only for a short time.

Confused by the new roads he travels
you ask
why a woman’s wayfaring soul
cannot follow, watching him
punch a keypad at the door
before reaching out
to catch for you a falling petal from a rose tattoo.

Advanced Dementia

Matisse dancer tripping chemical light
he comes to me

naked and pale at four in the morning.
Arched arms held high

are courting cranes; wrists and palms
buttocks and thighs glisten

with night soil as turning he sings
Scotland the Brave.

No longer can he recall a walled garden
cut from purple and muslin

where in dusk he walked, and stooping
whispered at the mouths of roses.

Self-Neglect

Thin winter moon
set on the pale blue edge
of an orthopedic chair –
her spine (like her face
her heart her hands)
has a history
going back a good three years.

All there
documented in black biro –
the food stains
round her mouth
the whiff of urine
on her clothes, the first fall
wearing carpet slippers in the snow.

A voluntary admission
coming without any trouble
she melted
into the routine.
The face
of an old woman called Pet –
soon the only one she remembers.

Until a nurse fills her lap
with the sepia tones of a girl
grinning at someone
behind the lens.
Five-ten-and-a-half in heels –
a girl in a pencil dress
click-clacking down

A garnet-dark evening in Berlin.
.

Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won The British Haiku Award 2017, The British Tanka Award 2013 and The HIS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2011 and 2010. Her work has been included in the prestigious Norton anthology – Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. Her longer poems have appeared in over thirty journals including Abridged, The Blue Nib, Crannóg, Cyphers, Envoi, The Honest Ulsterman, Iota, The Interpreter’s House, The Moth Magazine, The Stinging Fly and The Stony Thursday Book. Awarded a Ph.D from the University of Ulster, she has also published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Clare was one of three writers featured in Measuring New Writers 1 (Dedalus Press). Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, appeared in 2012 (Alba Publishing). Revenant, her first collection of longer poems, was published in 2019 by Salmon Poetry. She has worked as a lecturer, a teacher of English, a psychiatric nurse and a full-time carer. Home is Kilrea, County Derry.

“Animals are in Communion” and other poems by Polly Roberts

September 20th, 2019

Animals are in Communion

I came home

to find him

doing nothing.

Limp armed.

Could do nothing.

Sat on the sofa

lost to the world.

I have some bad news

I’ve been seeing ghosts. Birds on water.

The day before I received the news, two swans flew low over my head. Their
wings thrummed like a helicopter.

Eyes turned to watch the rescue vehicle, and instead saw white bellies.
The sound travelled, nothing like their usual flapping, as they soared over and onto water.

Returning to my boat, a shadow shifted on the river bank. A furry creature – small, sleek – edged
its way through the grass, took a moment to drink, then slop, slipped in.

Animals are in communion for you.

As are we,

nosing each other’s armpits

as we bed in

for warm companionship.

Because you went cold.

Though the civility of civilisation frightens me, I visit somewhere populated.
A graveyard made squirrel territory. One squirrel for every gravestone.
They mount lichen-covered peaks and keep lookout.
They claim the trees, the abandoned church.
Nobody will make them leave.

That night, I dreamt the answer to the universe.
It was blue,
inside a conch shell. Spiraling
in and out of crystal moments.
Eggshell blue.
In and out of images of the hospital bed,
and these dreams.

Polly Roberts grew up in Devon. Three years studying Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia left her with an inextricable link to the landscape, compelling her to continue to write about the creatures and habitats encountered there.

Observations of both the non-human and human world continued whilst living on a houseboat on the River Avon near Bristol while completing her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Polly has run creative writing workshops for refugees, detainees, and young people and curated two exhibitions in response to her writing, both displayed at the Norwich Arts Centre.

In 2018, the British Council awarded Polly a Writers by Nature scholarship, during which she wrote this debut poetry collection, Grieving with the Animals.( 2019, Dempsey and Windle)

“Poem for the Female Unspoken” and “Daphne’s Riposte” by Emily Cullen

September 8th, 2019

Poem for the Female Unspoken

Perhaps you’ll excuse my lateness…I’m on my period.
– MP Danielle Rowley to the House of Commons, July 2018

This poem goes out to generations
who had to keep confidences
about the curse, clots, bloodstains,
cotton wool bulk between their legs,
menstruating in harsh climates
with minimal comforts.

This poem flies in the face
of centuries of social mores,
honours loose pelvic floors,
the sanctity of feminine secrets,
universal female fear of leaking
crimson through smalls, seeping into

jeans, onto crisp white linen. How many
women through history have shared this
worry when they slept on foreign sheets?
This poem bears witness to small,
hidden woes endured in silence: that
morning she inserted her first tampon

in anticipation of a rough sea crossing,
her acute unease, swaying back and forth
above a choppy ocean; her mortification
about that fourth-degree tear after the birth
of the baby, the soreness and weak bladder
she’s suffered ever since, secreting just

enough urine, as she coughs or sneezes,
to force her home from functions too soon
and those perimenopausal bleeds: a Red Sea
deluge that borders on a haemorrhage,
leaves her on the brink of going to A&E.
Today a fearless MP has announced

to her peers in the House of Commons that
she was late because she was on her period.
Good on her. If men had menses I venture
they would be leaning over bars and fences,
chatting about the relative merits
of moon cups, pads and Tampax.

Daphne’s Riposte

Apollo, you made me
a laureate of sorts,
sentenced for all time
to be trophy wife,
to crown the heads
or deck the necks
of your chosen jocks
and dilettantes.

Listen up Lord of Delphi,
so you think you can
define my destiny?
I’m no accessory
to festoon the victor,
delight your eye,
heighten your appetite,
garnish whatever is on
your plate, or placate
your mounting desire.

I was the huntress, not the prey,
freely scaling forest and glade
under the freight of your gaze
until I cried out to my father
and Peneus heard my pleas,
hid me in this bark, these reeds.

You couldn’t possess me,
yet still you snatched my bloom,
just as I found myself rooted.
How could you read my swaying
branches, shimmering foliage,
as consent to thieve my leaves?

Emily Cullen teaches Creative Writing with the School of English at NUI Galway. For the past two years, she served as Programme Director of Galway’s annual Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Emily’s third collection of poetry, Conditional Perfect, will be published by Doire Press at the end of this month (September 2019).