Category: Blasphemies

  • “Magic Bullet” and other poems by Rus Khomutoff

      Untitled for Andre Breton   Nostalgic sentiments and new wave nocturnes intersecting in a normal chaos of life an hourglass of neglected affinities idols of saturated phenomena night of filth, night of flowers the aporia of revelation   Magic Bullet (for Tristan Tzara)    Smell of death smell of life of embrace a medicine…

  • “Fabric” and other poems by Kate O’Shea

    Fabric Italians hunt song birds, gawping silence, decaying rope from where a small girl hung in the rubber hoop of an old tractor tyre a lifetime ago, no limits on adventure growing up to carry the fire not knowing about box files, computer monitors the prescribed texts and reading lists that deformed desire replaced it…

  • “Treatise on Uselessness” by Kevin Higgins

    Treatise on Uselessness after Rosita Boland Throughout my truly enormous life, I’ve never found a use for gypsies. When one decides to spend the night searching online for a worse deal on one’s house insurance, there’s never a gypsy about to help. Or when one advertises a vacancy for Associate Professor of English at Trinity…

  • Four voices confront the absence of women in Irish poetry

      I have endured the scholastic training worthy of someone of learning. I am versed in the twelve divisions of poetry and the traditional rules. I am so light and fleet I escape from a body of men without snapping a twig, without ruffling a braid of my hair, I run under branches as high…

  • ‘Cry Oceans’ by Mary Cecil

    Cry Oceans   Cry oceans and weep the seas Where waves flow over The endless motions of life The swimming perfection that flees   The Armageddon of destruction By all means possible The mechanisation of death The beginning of the end   For whales and tuna to consume The mercury to garnish The insatiable greed…

  • ‘Janus- His Mistress Responds’ and other poems by Peter O’Neill

    Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, by Diego Velasquez (1617-1618) For Máire Holmes Through the serving hatch, or silent butler, The Christ is seen at the moment of revelation, While the maid, in the foreground, averts her eyes From the immediate task at hand. The bowl, which is falling from the table, Like a…

  • ‘Punishment’ and other poems by Mary Kennelly

    Punishment   The music woke me up To early morning winter dark. I have been neglectful of my craft These past few months. Now this new dawn is filled With unexpected promise. Before long all those other things I had set before the sound are gone. I am the mad dog Chasing the wild boar…

  • ‘The Haircut’ by Kevin Higgins

    The Haircut   I had it imported from Ancient Egypt, installed upon my skull by JobBridge slaves grateful to be allowed touch a scalp as potentially valuable as mine.   I can smell opportunity at a thousand yards, and in the blink of a synthetic eyelash, I’m off sniffing its however questionable arse. I’m Hillary…

  • ‘When You Are Old’ by Kevin Higgins

    When You Are Old . after William Butler Yeats When you are old and bald and full of crap and sitting there in threadbare rags, reach across to your old bookcase for a dusty old copy of a girlie mag. Fondle it, then, a little sadly in your withered veiny hands. If you can manage…

  • Renewable Energy: Cora Sherlock’s Excellent Suggestion by Kevin Higgins

    “Over 15,500 human remains incinerated to heat UK hospitals over 2-year-period.  #800babies #outrage @amnesty” Tweet by Cora Sherlock of the Pro-Life Campaign Renewable Energy: Cora Sherlock’s Excellent Suggestion     We must stop giving it away for nothing –our greatest natural resource – the Department of Finance estimates Tallaght Hospital could heat itself entirely on foetuses…