The Robin
G.R.C.C. (Galway Rape Crisis Centre)
affairs of the unsettled
making do (collected haikus) your heart beats so loud Relapseyou are walking the twenty-five minutes home with a push forward, push forward to your step, and you are furious but you don’t know why, and your lips are chapped but slippery with spit, and it’s there in your hand, in a plastic bag with handles sweaty and digging into your palm, and god above do you wish it weren’t. because you’re going home to an empty house and just on the end of your phone there’s a girlfriend and a best friend and someone who’s somewhere in between, but they can’t see you now, and he is thirty metres away but you cannot do that to him, not now. on the bottle is some kind of fucking bird or dragon, and you stare at it and wonder what it’s got against you to make you this way, and you pour it into a cartoon mug, full and slopping over the top, and you swig, and it rattles against your teeth, and you’re close to tears, and you know why. and now you’re swimming in this haze, and that buzzing bites into your ears, and things are not normal but it feels okay somehow, it’s all in real time and it’s a relief, it’s a relief, it’s a relief. it’s two hours later and you are screaming, screaming, ripping out your throat at nothing, you are ringing his doorbell and he sees, sees it’s you and does not answer, and you are lying outside prostrate on the ground waiting for him to be there because there is no one else left in this town for you. now you are seeping, sinking deep into the screen, a friend helps but it doesn’t help and you’ve called four times but he is nothing but a voicemail and you don’t know where he’s gone, where inside himself or inside another, and it pushes you towards the edge. calmer, calmer now, you sip from your bottle, the drink all gone, you turn wine into water and you pray that he will forgive you for tonight’s fuck-up—do not judge me for what i have been, good god, but sharpen your knife and cut me free. two thirty and here it is, you communicate with the angels, you offer yourself up to her and she accepts with grace, rocking you into your gentle sleep and sending you off with bullrush dreams, and you are free. you wake, and each side of your body wakes too with a jolt of pain, and you regret it all, how you fucked up yesterday’s casual calm to try and satiate the roaring in your ears, you are lying there, wishing you could forget it all and sleep forever, but it’s morning now, and you have to get up. affairs of the unsettled and other poems are © Olly Lenihan. |
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Olly Lenihan is a twenty-year-old poet who is originally from Dingle in the south-west of Ireland. Their writing career began during a disastrous attempt at living in Galway, and they’ve been penning angst ever since. Their poetry encapsulates the dreadful clichéd romanticism of being in love in one’s early twenties, along with themes of mental illness, sexuality and loss. They are currently in their first year of IT Sligo’s Writing and Literature course, and are also working on their first novel.
Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of poetry collections Kohl, Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her latest work, Ghazal Cosmopolitan has been praised by poet Marilyn Hacker as “a marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir.” Winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and multiple Pushcart nominations. Zeest Hashmi’s poetry has been translated into Spanish and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in Prairie Schooner, World Literature Today, Mudlark, Vallum, POEM, The Adirondack Review, Spillway, Wasafiri, Asymptote and McSweeney’s latest anthology In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth. She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander women poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.
Lisa Ardill is a twenty-something-year-old woman with a passion for feminism, human rights, neuroscience, literature and film (roughly in that order!). She writes poems and prose to entertain herself, cheer herself up on gloomy days, and keep the spark for creative writing in my brain alight.
Alicia Byrne Keane is a spoken word artist and poet from Dublin, Ireland. She has performed at festivals such as Body & Soul, Electric Picnic, Castlepalooza and F Festival. Her poetry has been published in magazines such as Bare Hands, Headstuff, and Impossible Archetype, among others. She is a long-time performer at poetry events around Dublin such as Lemme Talk and Come Rhyme With Me, and was more recently involved in the Science Gallery’s INTIMACY exhibition. She is currently a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin researching translated literature and placelessness, more specifically in the case of authors who self-translate. Her work explores the absurdity that arises from losses in translation, even when interacting in one’s native language. She is interested in the effect of unexpected sincerity afforded by short, snapshot-like poems.
Rhiannon Grant lives, writes, and teaches in Birmingham, UK. Her writing engages with questions about religion, philosophy, how we understand the world, and how we communicate with one another. Most of her published work so far has been in academic journals, but she has a book on Quaker theology forthcoming and some poems recently appeared in the magazine A New Ulster.
Wasekera C. Banda is a twenty-three-year-old Psychology student at City College in Dublin, Originally from Malawi, she has lived in Ireland for three years and was the 2016 winner of the Irish Times Africa Day Writing Competition. Wasekera enjoys writing and reading poetry, she is inspired by the late Maya Angelou.
E.D. Hickey is twenty-four and living and studying law in Dublin. She most recently spent half a year in Vienna, Austria working for the United Nations and graduated from UCD Law with Philosophy in 2017. While at university she recorded, edited and produced a feminist discussion-panel podcast called Pink Void (episodes available on Soundcloud) with two friends.
Fiona Smith won the poetry section of the 2012 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year competition. She was elected to read as an emerging poet at Cork Spring Poetry Festival 2013. She has had poetry published in Poetry Ireland Review Southword, Crannog, Hennessy New Irish Writing, The Galway Review, the Templar Poetry anthology Skein and Poetry Ireland Review (No.122).
Lisa Ardill is a twenty-something-year-old woman with a passion for feminism, human rights, neuroscience, literature and film (roughly in that order!). She writes poems and prose to entertain herself, cheer herself up on gloomy days, and keep the spark for creative writing in my brain alight.
Chris Murray 