Category: How Words Play

“The Women Who Loved Me & The Women Who Couldn’t” by Clodagh Mooney Duggan

February 22nd, 2020

R.

There is a guilt attached to needing,
You were trusting and deceived.
Coins that were used to cover eyes, lie broken,
And trampled upon.

Uncovered scars lie dripping
And untended to.
Five men travel across the deserts for you.
You breathe in life,
And I took it.

Children beside a fire see something in the future,
A smile upon lips that was never passed.
There was a contract I never signed or intended to.

What can we say if sorry isn’t sorry enough?
Glass, and water dripping on the coffee cups.
Unread letters in shoe boxes.

Do you think there was ever a music in silence?
Tunes that hit upon our ears as we danced,
Unassuming and undressed
In the tiled kitchen.

I never did.
Not really.
I wanted to
Desperately.
To fall into something that wasn’t my own
Striking distance from a championship.

The words fall from our lips and out the window.
I left.
I think I always intended to.

Unwanted villains sneaking into the wanted mundane.
Coffee and two sugars
Black only on one side.
What can we say if sorry isn’t sorry enough?

A.

Never be,
Never be sorry or fearful.
The faint sounds of birds and school children outside your window.
As I press my body against the glass.
You behind.

I am crumbs,
The sun that hits the back of your neck
Lie in me.
Bathe in me.
You are the presumed safety net.

The walker never sees,
Just trusts.
And in the moments of falling,
Prays to a deaf god.

But on you, was a need hope.
A safety bridge,
A maturity.
Love is thing with imposed memories.

You are a heartbeat.
A thing I wish I could drive from my chest.
I thing I wish I didn’t need
But live without.

Smiles happen without
Impulse.
Bare
And happy

The pause will resume and she will wake
I did
I was
And cannot be

M.

Crumpled flags are upheaved from the ground.
Mud and grit,
Red fog fills the air as footsteps are retraced.

Young children holding near gold awards.
Broken ankles and legs
From running without the knowledge of how.

The stands have forgotten our names now.
There are new uniforms.

New teams.

The blues and the pinks fade.
And distance noises are muffled under the shroud of years,
With faded scars and scratches.

We have
Did
Win
I remember.

From the growing pains and memories lost
An untouched wrist
Kisses faded on necks
Sprouting from our backs.

The clouds burst
And maybe we will find each other beneath one.

M.

Heavy. And Moving.

The first sprinklings of green,
With it
The faintest
Feeling of something being unearthed.

There was something there years ago,
A life of something longing,
Trailing behind a mouth that never moved
And words that were never rasped

How do we portray the thing we having being fearing.
A fearlust of sprinklings from a fractured podium.
How do we list the pain that is buried beneath the skin
Coming out in small intervals
Barely voiced but shaking in the body

I was stronger before
Hidden behind snapshots of sensitivity
There is a faithfulness in an unknown truth.

I give you a flower,
As if the cliché of the manner will be renewed
For only us.
Smiling with the innocence of a child running from their mother.

Possession presents a conundrum,
Withering in hands unsure of the level of comfort.
Fragile
And shattered glass.

A glistening bead of sweat rolling down the nose of a rearing horse.
A guard,
Broken down for a moment of stillness
Only to be rebuilt more so.

The bedframe creaks and moves under
The heaviness of a light-hearted laugh.
I draw a map on your skin.

Noting the moles and freckles like consolations
To find home by.
The nape of your neck a sort of memory
Or creation of such.

What do you say to the person that saved your life?
As old flowers decay on the mantle piece
Dusts of pollen linger like fingerprints.

Reaching for a taut rope,
Based purely on an unspoken promise
Love bursts on our lips,
A question unasked.

I will follow you.

S.

The segments of memories are strewn on a plush carpet
Pink and oranges
Bursting behind a low section of glass.

I give you a lie.
It’s all I can offer without plunging from my chest
I am
Lost
In the cemented memory of a child reaching for a hand that wasn’t there.

What do you think is the lifespan of heartbreak?

A crumbling brick
A grandfather clock unticking in the hall.
I fix myself in an image.
Adjust the lipstick to a smile that was there before
You remember that song, don’t you.

That chest tightening
Notes being added to a pile

What books did they burn in Germany?

The Women Who Loved Me & The Women Who Couldn’t © Clodagh Mooney Duggan

Clodagh Mooney Duggan is an emerging poet. She originally trained as an actor, graduating from The Gaiety School of Acting in 2013. Since then, she has begun writing for the stage and is currently writing Made from Paper, which will premiere in Dublin 2020 in The Scene and Heard Festival. The Women Who Loved Me & The Women Who Couldn’t will be her first published collection.

“Harbour’s Mouth” and other poems by Annette Skade

February 22nd, 2020

Threnody

I know why the sea churns.

A woman gets the news,
drops to the chair, floor – further,
the quick in her bleeds out.
She is liquid now, leaching away,
this hour, this day, day-on-day.
At the back of her eyes
a face ebbs and flows:
his lop-sided smile makes room
for her touch,
the tilt of his head
calling drinks at the bar,
wide arms swinging his kit,
their young child,
onto working-man shoulders.

Can God breathe underwater?

Each year a sacrifice:
the man in blue overalls,
flower-blue eyes, who loved his wife
at first sight; the ready-laugh man
collecting glasses in the pub
in off times; the dancer
bending into sound like a squall;
the dare-devil larking about
first night back, caught up
in the dizziness of breathing;
the ones who tread water, the ones
who don’t know what hit them,
the ones dragged down
in sight of shore. All lost.

They slipped from sight
like water through our hands;
our hands are empty of them,
our mouths are empty of them,
our chests are hollow,
our eyes are expanses
to search.

Fishermen search. Mates, fathers,
brothers, in-laws, cousins,
make late night calculations
where the body might wash up,
rake inlets and coves
along this torn coastline,
fishboxes are body blows,
spars are pins in their eyes.
On stormy days they are too big
for their own kitchens,
too restless for the hearth,
gaze ever on horizon,
for a break in the weather
to renew the search.

What else is there?

Bringing in the Washing

Rain whips window
like flex,
we break mid-sentence,
head out.
At the side the washing line
takes off
in wild geese formation,
the prop
tethers and leads
the V.

Hands snatch at
shirt flaps
grown strong against grey sea,
shape shifters
we pin by one cuff:
blue cliff,
chough’s wing,
white strand,
creased headland,
tattered island.

We fold them fast into us,
tuck away,
the bundle swells under elbow,
rain-spotted.
And in before they’re soaked,
pile all
on the chair while we finish
our tea.
I take my leave of you -as usual,
arms full.

Harbour’s Mouth

There are people here so much part
of the place that they are named after
headlands. They have the look
of the raw-boned earth about them,
hair the colour of dillisk, eyes taking on
the changing shades of the sea.

The rich morning sun draws us out.
We check the storm’s leavings: pebbles
salt the boreen, bladder wrack drapes
the harbour wall, gobs of sea-spume
float in the air. The Lough is still choppy,
made into peaks by the wind’s flat blade.

Neighbours untie shed doors, clamber
into tractors, hammer fence posts.
The fisherman has been up for hours,
meets me at the pier, a coiled rope in hand.
We talk of the weather, face away from
each other, watching the harbour’s mouth.

Between sheer sides of rock, a glass dam
is piled with boiling layers of saltwater.
Lines of blue and white snap and curl,
lash some high invisible wall,
threatening to shatter whatever power
holds them back. He tells how once

a great wave came thundering, crested
over this broken ring of hills. Came
in the night − 1966 it was − they all heard
the roar of it. He points to a spot up the hill,
a field away, the place where a boat was hurled
that time, hefted by the force of the Atlantic.

Current

The gulf stream makes
a micro-climate here,
nurtures palm trees
and New Zealand ferns.

The current is born
in the isthmus of Mexico,
awash with the energy
of two great Oceans

almost meeting. It leaves
us with a deep-rooted thrill,
like the quick intake
at the glimpse of a lover,

flip in the gut as hands nearly touch,
breath exchanged between mouths.

Meeting William Blake in the Library 1980

Unfinished. I hold
the weight of paper,
the lightest sketch,
a man in a crown,
clown’s hat,
hair streaming.

Wonder came first.
The tip of the brush
found its place,
dropped wild yellow
to leap from the head
over pencil strokes,

onto page after page
on this serviceable desk,
to skim along roads,
cover the sleeping child,
charge the muscles of man,
stars and moon.

A grain of colour
rubs off on my hand,
passes over time
into bloodstream,
works its way up
slowly to my soul.

Annette Skade is from Manchester and has lived on the Beara peninsula, West Cork, Ireland for many years. She is currently in her final year of a PhD on the work of Canadian poet Anne Carson at Dublin City University. Her poetry collection Thimblerig was published following her receipt of the Cork Review Literary Manuscript prize in 2012. She has been published in various magazines in Ireland, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia and has won and been placed in several international poetry competitions.

⊗Annette Skade

A Celebration of Poetry for International Women’s Day 2020

February 21st, 2020
Papyrus Fragment

It darts, bares a blaze
of underwing to plain sight;
this endless fragile need
to make a mark,
to come to light

Papyrus Fragment is © Annette Skade

‘Secrets of a cartographer’s wife’ by Katrina Dybzynska

The cartographer’s wife never told him
about her contributions to his maps.
A few tiny islands hidden in the middle
of an archipelago in the name of symmetry.
Some borderline moved to resemble
a face shape. The territory of England shortened
slightly, in personal revenge.

One time, she renamed an insignificant river
in Bangladesh after her lover. She felt pity
for the cartographer that he was more furious
about the affair than about her intervention
in the world order. She knew that romances
were ephemeral, while naming things
was changing them forever.

Katrina Dybzynska poet, shortlisted for Red Line Poetry Prize 2019. Author of „Dzień, w którym decydujesz się wyjechać” (The Day When You Decide To Leave), Grand Prix of Rozewicz Open Contest 2017. Laureate of national competitions in Poland. She has been publishing short stories, concept book, science fiction, reportage, and poetry, but feels most attracted to genre hybrids. Polish Non-Fiction Institute graduate. Activist. Currently a member of Extinction Rebellion Ireland.

‘Correnti’ by Viviana Fiorentino

Ora è questo un manto di alghe e sale
sotto il vento atlantico
o è corrente marina del fondo
della mia vita e della tua vita
ora è sogno o perla luccicante.

‘Currents’ (English trans. by Maria McManus)

This is a shawl of salt and seaweed
against the Atlantic wind
the ocean currents on the sea bed
of my life, your life
a dream, a burnished pearl.

Correnti /Currents © Viviana Fiorentino, english trans by Maria McManus

Viviana Fiorentino was born in Italy. After obtaining a PhD, she travelled across Europe, from Switzerland to Germany, England and finally to Belfast where she teaches Italian Literature. Since 2018 she has taken part to literature festivals in Italy and in Ireland. She was involved in the poetry project ‘LabeLLit’. She has been awarded or mentioned in various Italian poetry prizes (i.e. Arcipelago Itaca Edizioni & Bologna in Lettere Dislivelli). Her poems appear on Litblogs, international magazines (Brumaria, Works #9’, 2018) and in the Arcipelago Itaca Anthology of Italian contemporary poets. In 2019 she published her poetry collection In giardino (‘In the garden’) for Controluna Press and her first novel Tra mostri ci si ama (lit. trasl. ‘Monsters love each other’) for Transeuropa Press.

Maria McManus lives in Belfast. She is the author of Available Light (Arlen House, 2018), We are Bone (2013), The Cello Suites (2009) and Reading the Dog (2006) (Lagan Press), she has collaborated extensively with others to put literature into public spaces. She is the artistic director and curator of Poetry Jukebox and an active organiser and founder member of Fired! Irish Poets.

‘Genetics’ by Roberta Beary

Your eyes are big and round like your father’s

but while his are the color of the Irish Sea

yours are the color of the muddy fields

on my father’s land

fit only for the peasants who worked them.

abortion day
a shadow flutters
the fish tank

Publication credit: Rattle #47, Spring 2015 (ed. Timothy Green)

Roberta Beary identifies as gender-expansive and writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. She is the author of Deflection (Accents, 2015), nothing left to say (King’s Road Press, 2009) and The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007, 5th ed. 2017) which was a finalist in the Poetry Society of America annual book awards. Beary is the editor of the haiku anthologies Wishbone Moon (Jacar Press, 2018), fresh paint (Red Moon Press, 2014), 7 (Jacar Press, 2013), dandelion clocks (HSA, 2008) and fish in love (HSA, 2006). Her work appears in Rattle, KYSO Flash, Cultural Weekly, 100 Word Story, and Haiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). Beary’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and multiple Pushcart Prizes. She lives in County Mayo, Ireland where she edits haibun for the journal Modern Haiku.

‘Dying Lover’ by Anora Mansour

Trace my lips
In low whispers
As I once wept psalms
over my dying lover.

Threaten that man
You will murder for me –
For my heart
is a cadence of silence.

I can only love you
if you creep through this life
dangling dangerously
as a ravenous red kite.

When we both
become one lonesome night.
And rub up to love up as a fight.

Oh, how I might love you,
bitter citron basket on my lap
Slumberly trusting me as a child.
I would open my thighs to you – a snap trap.

Perhaps then you could open the universe for me.

BY ANORA MANSOUR
© 2020

Anora Mansour is a graduate of the University of Oxford. She lives between Oxford and Dublin. She has been published in a collection of Jazz Poems, various online sites, and has her own published collection of poetry and blog. She is African-American and Irish.

‘Clutch’ by JLM Morton

for h.l.

in the nest of my fist, a fledgling
scooped up from the lane

her soft unfinished beak
her shining eye
a buoy ringing in the green cathedral of trees

a single yellow feather wisps across my knuckle
there is a twitch of elephant digits

and I think about keeping her

raising her as my own
feeding her worms

but I let her go

chirring for the ones I could not save.

JLM Morton lives in Gloucestershire, England, snatching as much time as she can to write between caring for a young family, renovating a house and staring up the barrel of a demanding day job. Her first set of poems was recently published by Yew Tree Press for the Stroud Poets Series and she is currently working on a collection.

Website URL: jlmmorton.com

from ‘Grieving with the Animals’ by Polly Roberts

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)

‘Beochaoineadh Máthar Maoise’ by Ellen Nic Thomás

A dhílleachta linbh gan ainm, gan athair,
Do chraiceann ar aondath le humha an nathair,
A lúbann timpeall do thaobhán uiríseal,
Mar bhata ceannródaí is sníomhanna sisil.

Is trua liom ciseán do dhóchas a fhíochán,
Do dhán a chaitheamh i bpoll an duibheagáin,
D’eiseadh a chruthú ar bhunús baill séire,
‘Nois tá tú chomh cotúil leis an gCailleach Bhéarra.

A iníon, a mhiceo, a ógfhlaith bocht,
A leanbh truaillithe, maith dom mo locht,
Imigh anois leat, ná bí do mo chrá,
Le smaointe ciúinchiontacha ó mhaidin go lá.

Ellen Nic Thomás is a bilingual poet from Dublin. She graduated from Trinity College with a BA in English and Irish. Her work has been published by headstuff.org, Tales From the Forest and The Attic.
```
'On watching a lemon sail the sea' by Maggie Harris

1
and I’m singing ‘You are my sunshine’ thinking 
of my childhood across the sea of incubation
go Honey go
you self-contained cargo ship you
with your sealed citrus juices and pitted panacea of seeds
braving the collision of tankers and illicit submarines

                 they called me scurvy.       the lemonade
                 my mother made was iced and sprinkled with
                                           Demerara
 (of course) 

and I’m wondering, did they grow you there, o lemon     mine            
you
for your juices
a lemon plantation, not to be confused with
a plantain plantation even a banana just don’t mention sugar
stack you in the gloom like hereto mentioned bananas
green and curtailed in their growing  or even
those force-ripe mangoes with girls’ names
nobody knows here and who leave their sweetness behind
bare-assed on the beaches
come
to the marketplace
comatose.

I do not remember lemons, but limes.

        
       M
    I         E
L                S.

Piled high in their abundance. Limes.
Acid green pyramids on market pavements
holding their secrets beneath their reptilian skins.

And there is my aunt, her arms thin as bamboo
gathering the fallen from the yard, sweeping
their dried leaves into the remembrance of herself
whilst the black maid slips slivers of lemon into a split
-bellied fish whose eyes glaze up at the sun.

‘Gauguin, you can come in now; remember Martinique ...?
hue the native in all her harnessed beauty
the slack –jawed fish, browning blood
the textured landscape in shades of  pawpaw and indigo.’
          
But, liming is what my lemon is doing now, 
(in the West Indian sense), hey ho
over the waves at Aberporth, there he blows.


2
I set you free  
to take to the sea again 
on a high tide, with breakers rushing the beach
like warriors.
They pummel the sand, scythe
a four foot chasm into the mouth
of a lonely river
beat the rocks’ submerged heads
batter the cliffs again 
                                        and again
                                                     and again.
The sea, beyond its charge, was waiting -
a winter morning sea, a Twelfth Night sea
tumultuous and moody

                                       waiting.

A strange gift, you
a large, perfect lemon
fresh and sharp as the sun-bright
wind-cut winter’s day. But I
unsure of your heritage
refused you. 


3
Dear Voyager,
I cupped you
in my palm
desire urging my possession 
how easy it would be – a lemon drizzle cake
a Martini iced, an accompaniment
to plaice or sole – and here I am playing with words
the resonance of belonging, of immortality –
but the devil played tricks with my mind
an injection of poison perhaps, a needle prick
into your  pristine, nobbled skin – but we are running ahead here
thinking of cargo – you may simply have fallen from a Tesco
carrier bag whose owner, fearing a lonesome home-coming
went walking on these very sands contemplating - life.

But there you were anyway, settled on the sand like a crab
then comfortable in the palm of my hand.
                                                      

4
Finders are not necessarily keepers. Some
will do well to remember that. Vixens
circling misunderstood husbands in bars. Frag
ments from the fallen.
Oh but, how strong is the desire
to hold close, keep tight
smother your darling, your little nut-baby
in soft gloves, hard love, the kind that makes
you want to bite, bite! Rip flesh and bone. Swallow.
                     I could have accepted
your sacrifice
that gift of yourself, thank the universe
for its benevolence.
But the universe is not benevolent.
Stars are exploding missiles in a panther-black night.
Saturn doesn’t give two fucks. It’s chaos
out there.
But I guess you didn’t have time
for star-gazing in your ocean-going lumbering
over the hey-ho waves. And if I had sunk my vampiric teeth
into the you of you, you would be no more 
than a bitter taste, a withering lump of citrus
on my kitchen table. Far better to remember you
the obsidian walnut weight of you
and these questions you have gifted me
and that last sight of you 
rolling away on the tide.
```
Maggie Harris is a Guyanese writer living in the UK. She has twice won The Guyana Prize for Literature and was Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story prize 2014, with ‘Sending for Chantal’.
She has worked for Kent Arts and Libraries, Kent University and Southampton University as International Teaching Fellow.

Maggie Harris Site URL: http://www.maggieharris.co.uk
International Women’s Day, RASCAL and AV Links
- International Women’s Day 2020 Site URL: https://www.internationalwomensday.com/
- RASCAL Archive URL:http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon
- “A Figure of Speech” by JLM Morton (AV)
- An Index of Women Poets
- Contemporary Irish Women Poets

“Reincarnation of tired beings” and other poems by Katrina Dybzynska

February 8th, 2020

Secrets of a cartographer’s wife

The cartographer’s wife never told him
about her contributions to his maps.
A few tiny islands hidden in the middle
of an archipelago in the name of symmetry.
Some borderline moved to resemble
a face shape. The territory of England shortened
slightly, in personal revenge.

One time, she renamed an insignificant river
in Bangladesh after her lover. She felt pity
for the cartographer that he was more furious
about the affair than about her intervention
in the world order. She knew that romances
were ephemeral, while naming things
was changing them forever.

Reincarnation of tired beings

In my next life I want to become a German
couple in their retirement, in a fitted camper.
Him, steering confidently through the round
-abouts and telling the same jokes for the last 30 years.

Her, reading paper maps and navigating
the playlist, suggesting a small parallel road
as they will believe themselves adventurous,
trying local dishes, carrying beer from home.

I used to think that I aimed to be a hacker,
but in fact, I strove to be a virus –
a threat beyond miscommunication,
ever-transforming, so closest to survival.

Or, I would settle on the life of a solar panel,
reduced to basic energies, dutifully
absorbing light, left in the middle
of the desert, shining hope for the future.

Development

Our child would have uneven
teeth and a birthmark on the right
hip. The rest would be a fight
for domination: eyes that change

color, like mine, when I am happy,
or yours so black that it is impossible
to distinguish them from pupils?
Yours curly or mine straight?

Maybe, it would love spicy food
after me, or have a pepper-allergy
like its father. I wonder if it could
still choose its food.

Would it inherit your pure as seagull’s
laughter or the one with a hidden question
mark like mine? Would there still
be seagulls for reference? Most importantly:
would it have lots of reasons to laugh?

Hopefully, it would get skin
after you as it is more resistant
to heat. But you disagree as my skin
color is more resistant to humans.

You think that it would see connections
and that we would teach it to protect
nature. Before I leave, I respond
that by then there might not be much left
to protect.

Love Emergence

How do you know that you are in love?
My little sister asked our grandmother,
because she remembers to respects elders
even if their idea of a “date” is to watch
the same soap opera for the past 30 years,
still arguing about that 6754th episode
where Ridge nearly cheats on Brooke.
– If you have grandkids with him, probably
it is love, grandma replied, which I did not find
particularly helpful for a 17 y.o.

How do you know that you are in love?
My sister demanded from our mother
because l had taught her to always look for a second
opinion. I also told her to choose her experts
carefully and our mother, three divorces
and each child with a different father,
might not be the perfect pick for the subject.
– Does he make you laugh, my mum asked.
Because that is the only way to go through
hardships. Yet, I do not believe in the existence of
the Joke that would save my parents’ marriage.

How do you know that you are in love?
My sister, that I never called half-sister
as there is nothing half, nor genetic.
About love came to me finally. She is clever
saving the best for last. And all I was able to advise her
was to talk to him about climate break-down.
If he makes you feel safe even when he says he is scared,
Not in the “everything will be alright” meaningless way,
but in seeing more connections than one heart
could ever love, if he makes you feel at home,
even when the home is on fire,
this must be it.

The tipping point

Two human pregnancies, or one of an elephant,
white rhino, orca or a killer whale.

The time that takes for bamboo to grow 498 meters,
or for your hair to be 22.5 centimeters longer.

The period needed to write The Jungle Book,
or to cross the Sahara by camel, and return.

If it was a baby, by then it would learn to refer to itself
by name, echo what people say, and – what is comforting –
understand 10 times more than it can put into words.

18 months.
Can we transform the whole world of interwoven links
in a time it takes to decompose a cigarette?

Katrina Dybzynska poet, shortlisted for Red Line Poetry Prize 2019. Author of „Dzień, w którym decydujesz się wyjechać” (The Day When You Decide To Leave), Grand Prix of Rozewicz Open Contest 2017. Laureate of national competitions in Poland. She has been publishing short stories, concept book, science fiction, reportage, and poetry, but feels most attracted to genre hybrids. Polish Non-Fiction Institute graduate. Activist. Currently a member of Extinction Rebellion Ireland.

“Reasons” by Anora Mansour

January 30th, 2020

Reasons 

Here silver fingered strings  
trembling with two Russian rings.
Recalling it all.

The reasons why we reared
   yardbirds long disappeared
   yet a cotton crop always reappears.

If sleep is a dotted dress
 then we wear this zero life.
And we are also a false bird’s chirp.
 
And never more deadly when 
we are chanting in time
 To that choral venomous rhyme. 

With those we gazed through gauze on the pew
 Those we once believed loved us too
incarnated us with gathered snowdrops anew.


BY ANORA MANSOUR
Copyright 2020

Dying Lover

Trace my lips
In low whispers
As I once wept psalms
over my dying lover.

Threaten that man
You will murder for me –
For my heart
is a cadence of silence.

I can only love you
if you creep through this life
dangling dangerously
as a ravenous red kite.

When we both
become one lonesome night.
And rub up to love up as a fight.

Oh, how I might love you,
bitter citron basket on my lap
Slumberly trusting me as a child.
I would open my thighs to you – a snap trap.

Perhaps then you could open the universe for me.

BY ANORA MANSOUR
Copyright 2020

Anora Mansour is a graduate of the University of Oxford. She lives between Oxford and Dublin. She has been published in a collection of Jazz Poems, various online sites, and has her own published collection of poetry and blog. She is African-American and Irish.

“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).

“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

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.

“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

“A Life Unanswered” and other poems by Susan Kelly

November 10th, 2019

The Bittersweet

Her passion was historical biscuit tins
or so he’d tell visitors
who marvelled at the growing stacks of embossed lids
that glinting with landscapes, landmarks
locations she hadn’t seen,
he thought it best if the world came to her.
He liked her to display these gifts he brought back
from places he visited with work,
that was what he called her.

He’d produce a new one
the morning after his return
assuming her quietness over breakfast
had been due to the non-presentation of a tin,
she accepted them
but never the treats
that she bagged in black
where they grew crumbly and green
and sweated in the confines of their own wrappings.

No tins came for some months
work no longer needed him
so he dozed his days away in front of the box
until he breathed his last,
the remote control limp in his hand.
She scattered the tins around the living room
and took a hammer to the shiny lids
that remembered everywhere she had never been
until they didn’t shine anymore.

The Bittersweet – Poetry Ireland Review, editor Eavan Boland

Skinny Jeans

His quiff came undone in the night
to fall about an acned face
that contorts in an afternoon yawn.
He shifts his body about the bed
to untwist the studded belt
that pockmarked him as he slept,
the impressions red against his gothic skin.
The seams of his skinny jeans draw lines
up and down his tall boy legs,
revealed as he inches them off
with pink-heeled persistence
before they’re dumped on the floor
in a dark, denimous pile.
The day looks in on him
through not-quite-drawn curtains,
the gap, the width of an ice-lolly stick,
the day, bright as July.

Skinny Jeans – The Stony Thursday Book, editor Paddy Bushe

A Life Unanswered

Dust smothered hat boxes stacked, empty,
blue and white Switzers stripes dulled by years.
Flapper dressers and bridge club receipts idle in drawers
lined with the Letters page from a 1920’s Irish Times,
fragments of lily of the valley talcum powder tangible.

I have your eyes but I don’t see what you saw
history witnessed, decades endured,
did they roar, were they hungry, did they swing,
did scarcity wage a local war to leave you wanting,
did world events impact, always make contact?

Did you mind leaving Achill to settle in Westport,
urbanity on your new doorstep,
did faith and prayers of two Roman-collared sons
ease untimely widowhood?
Clacking rosary beads, murmuring novenas your mantra.

Was my mother an appreciated ally
righting the balance, nurturing anima
or did she steal your mantle as lady of the house,
did you mind or was your arched-eyebrow sternness
an act of survival in a male domain?

November evening your pen ran dry
and expired batteries silenced your radio
yet you needed no replacements,
you knew that night
that you would also go.

A Life Unanswered – Abridged, editor Maria Campbell

Lapsing

He files his thumb nail on a match box
softened by pockets,
the swatch almost worn by forty strikes.
A neighbour walks by,
he nods to the al fresco attendees
who religiously avoid a pew,
preferring to stand the hour.
A speaker nailed to the buttressed porch
bugles across the hedges
crackling its master’s voice.
It spouts prayers for the faithful
who respond en mass
in a monotone breathless recitation,
pausing on cue by rote.
He drops the smoothed box
and squashes it into the green
joins his hands and breathes deep
the flinted air.
He rests his head on the pebbledash
his weekly penance
meted out in pointy pastels.
A couple arrive too late to creak open the door,
they angle for wall space
budging him from his idling spot,
the flock thickens in the noonday sun.

Lasping – The Weary Blues, editor Emily Cullen

Room 41

Bath-freshness beckons
but she chooses to accept
the week-old grime
and the specks of kamikaze talc
that land on her lashes
as she powders her oily hair,
the ash-brown lank.

She doesn’t care,
there’ll be no neighbours calling
like the news-hungry vultures
they pretend not to be,
no postman delivering a daily chat,
nobody knows how committed she is
to being alone.

A large orange pill
wrestles its way down,
eased by tepid water
from a polystyrene cup
and condescending words
from a woman in white
who locks the door as she leaves.

Room 41 – Boyne Berries, editor Michael Farry

Susan Kelly is from Westport, Co Mayo. Her work has appeared in Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Crannóg, Revival, Abridged, The London Magazine, Boyne Berries, The Weary Blues, Burning Bush 2, wordlegs.com and was short-listed for the Writing Spirit Award 2010. She was a featured reader at Over the Edge in Galway 2011, shortlisted for the New Writer of the Year 2013 and longlisted for the 2014 WOW award.