Category: new poetry

‘Fugue’ and other poems by Chelsea Dingman

November 7th, 2017

British Columbia Pastoral

September: almost snow.
White sheets across
the sky, the fields. How strange

the frost, feral over desert
hills. Sage brush
caught in the cattle’s

teeth. The river cuts
a swath where I am
trying to tell you about grass

that presses up through
the ground without urging.
About merciless suns

taking our eyes. You shield
your mouth as I speak.
The wars I won’t admit

like dying daisies, their corpses
linting the grass. In summer,
we swam in the Thompson

River. In feral heat. Baptized
new again. The kites
of our bodies cutting

a swath through green
water. But as water rises
in spring, it will take you

with it. With thawed glaciers
& snow. With bones
we can’t make smaller

once grown. Dead trees
claw at rocks on the river-
bottom, swollen belly

of a child rising up
like a balloon
in the April sun.

(Originally published in Sugar House Review)

Accident Report: After the Baby Dies at Birth

First, I asked for
mercy, when mercy
was a small sliver
of light. My bones
softened by the body
leaving them. You asked
questions, green
tea in hand. Some
lemon. A cleanse
of sorts, as I refused
your prayers. The sky,
faithless, darkening
again. You wanted
to know what’s next,
when we would try
again, what every doctor
had to say. I was
an empty stall
in a gas station
bathroom. I said, never.
But now I say
now, let’s try now,
before I lose
my nerve. But you
don’t want to touch me
yet. You eye my body
like a broken trough
looking for any sign
of seepage. I drink
from the mug. You move
away, the way the wounded
animal moves before
it tucks tail & runs. Every
good-bye is unnecessary
after holding something
as it dies. I want to feel full
again, I say. The door, open
as a mouth. You raise
your hand over my body
& ask, where does it
hurt? But I can’t say,
everywhere. I can’t
say, it hurts everywhere
I’m touched. I can’t
say, touch me every
-where. Please.

(Originally published in Bennington Review)

Fugue

“When Plath’s journals, with their claims of abuse, began to be published, many critics pointed out these claims as not only false but also proof that Plath was paranoid, crazy.”
-Emily Van Duyne

There is a river, & in its mouth, the Holocaust
night I gave birth to a broken mirror,

the shard that stuck in a man’s neck.
He pulled it out & that was the beginning

of blood. The nightmares. Being chased
through a small ghost

town, windows shut & boarded, only shadows
to command: break or break me.

I had a god, once. Somewhere, I think
I’ll know how to be full & limber

& not the husk that held the crowning
dark. Not the woman, unbelieved.

He hit me. The night the baby died,
I was tired of the blank stars dying quietly

years from here. I should’ve braced myself—
his fists like arrowheads. The glass

river, leaking bodies. I’ll fucking kill you.
Even now, I close my eyes & hear water.

There is no baby. There never was.

forthcoming in Pleiades

Travelling Through Tennessee in January

Again, I drive through dead forests
longing to flower. I think of nothing.
Not you. Not our children with their mouths
hanging half-open like shutters
over the windows, the summer
Rita followed Katrina into the Gulf
& taught us what women are capable of.
Frost on the ground, the morning after
Rita left, when it had been ninety degrees
a day before. The remains of the poor
creatures that couldn’t withstand the cold,
curled on white-tipped grasses. Fields
& hills pass outside the car’s windows, late
afternoon. Houses riven from each other
by land. Not water. Not here, north
of where I left you. The fields, lit from inside
as the sun slides behind hills. I try to remember
your voice. Low, like dusk. It didn’t mean anything,
you said. But I know that you can’t feel
anything & I can’t feel anything
less. At the interchange of I-75 North
& I-24, I drive further into the night
from where I left you. From
where you were standing
when a voice on the radio cautioned us
against a new woman blazing
in from the east, a bloody heart
tucked between her teeth.

Originally published in Arcadia

Hunger [or the last of the daughter-hymns] 

(n) a feeling of discomfort or weakness caused by lack of food, 
coupled with the desire to eat—


as I talk to wind winnowing my ribs into wind
   chimes. I swallow small coins from the counters,
wanting change my body can keep. I stand

   on the street corner in the rain & coax water
into my mouth like a woman who doesn’t know
   the fullness of the sea. My mother worked

three jobs to feed our family. Now, I horde
   toilet paper & paper towels in spare closets
with cans of soup & creamed corn. The wind

   hollows the oaks. Their bones don’t know
what it is to break, but I am a hollow
  instrument, a sacred text. Daughter [less].


(v) have a strong desire or craving for

a body inside my body—
a child, a man. 

Fields, full. The sun,
aflame. Fear like a shot

-gun, an aborted flight
plan, people jumping

from buildings. But 
my daughter, I draw back

down. The one I lost. 
The ones I have left

to lose. Like snow—
the bodies that are ours

for a season. For less.


(v) to feel or suffer through lack of food


        the weak sunrise

in my daughter’s new

      silence. My skin, a loose 

sheet. Her clavicle, hip

        -bone, head. My cervix, 

thinned. Her body, an offering. A prayer

I whisper as I tear

			new maps in a lucid dream

where I live alone

	& she folds herself into a crane

			to hang from the ceiling

of someone else’s womb. 

Originally published in Sycamore Review

Near Narajiv Selo 

-Hunger, cold, and ethnic oppression forced Ukrainian and Jewish 
people to look for refuge in faraway lands
(1919-1939, when Eastern Galicia belonged to Poland)- Roman Zakhariy


A dark road. Stars like paper 
    lanterns. Long grasses unthread in thousands 

           of flickering fingers. Poppies’ 

mouths buttoned black, as wind 
      shrifts crimson 

petals from stems, from fields torn by tractor tires, from a barn 
       below the hill. My stomach, where I left things 
       unliving,
                 pierced by little more than night 

       air. Like shackled light, the moon is
       outlawed in the pines. I unholster 
the sky: 
        at dawn, cattle cry in the clearing 

as I dig up 
      rutabaga, cabbage to wrap the rice. Water claws through 
      dirt. Claw hammers

for hands, I carve our breaths
into trees. Our breaths, like silver buildings. As I slowly empty
            the earth, sky

          buries night. Night 
  that smells of gunpowder and grease. Night 
         that leaves nothing 
more 
         than a handful of stars, twined 
    in the pines’ 
rime. Nothing more
			than a river
		where no one has drowned.
Originally published in Southern Humanities Review

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). In 2016-17, she also won The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ninth Letter, The Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Cincinnati Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Visit her website.

‘Grazing’ and other poems by Deirdre Daly

October 23rd, 2017

Indian Summer

All neon invitations are ignored. No souls
pass the threshold to buy a happy ring
or waste an afternoon at shrill slot machines.
We are left to ponder the question
of our time – Why go Bald?
A shop window implores me to buy
a white latex nurse’s uniform and cap.
Never has a scrub dress looked so unsexy
and we all know stockings always fall down.
Each street sucks at the sourness
of the Liffey’s waters, but delights
are still found in its twinkle as it eddies
around wheelie bins and twisted bikes.

This is the last lie we tell ourselves
that Summer’s embrace still holds,
until winter cripples the leaves
of the blunted silver birches holding
guard along O’Connell Street.
No one will be smiling then.
A preacher steals no crowd on a wooden
fruit crate. Ginger hair matted by sweat,
Jesus spittle on his lips. Just one woman
stands. Hands held to the sky praise
the guts of this guy for letting the world
and God know he has two last believers.

Dead Cleary’s clock still runs. A church
hidden on a side street hits play
on the Angelus. Some light candles
and pray. Some lay down their shovels,
pitchforks and pens. Some contemplate
laying down their arms, then don’t.
Some genuflect at the feet
of their mistresses. Some devote
their loins to their wife. Some wait
by blacked-out windows
for lovers to arrive, who never do.
But somewhere in the world hips rise
to greet mouths and entrap tongues.

Indian Summer was first published in Banshee. Editors, Laura Cassidy, Claire Hennessy and Eimear Ryan

Marionette

lithe
and taut
until you reached up
to that fine ivory neck
unzipped yourself along
the length of your spine
turning cotton wool innards
inside out
ripping seams
cutting threads
cleaving wires slack
tossing your copper
horse hair wig
to the floor

I wanted no answers
from your stuck red gash
of a mouth scored
into alabaster clay
with a slight tilt of my hand
and the dull twist of a wrist
you whittled the vowels
of my name down
head bobbing
limbs jerking
a record jumping

now no one notices
when you move
without me

Marionette was first published in minnesota review. Editor, Janell Watson

Dog Walk

Dog, you act as though this is your first time in the world.
But it’s not. Leash bound and squirming, your black nose
cleaves the air. Left to right, then snuffle, as one would douse
for water in the desert. We are hunters, Dog.
Tracking tabby cats and chicken bones,
stop to appraise only the ripest of turds.

You divine the thread of each step that passed here.
The air carries the past to you, sandwiches
dropped at lunch, piss stains from Friday night.
Hey Dog, those skunked faced youths shuffling
and kicking cans against the bookie’s window,
mind them. Side-eye, you are more suspicious
of them than I. No worry, Dog. Humans too, are wary
of young fellas in baggy tracksuits, peaks pulled low.

Watch out Dog, the border terrier is running circles
in his yard, digging trenches with his paws
in advance of his battle with us at the rusting gate.
He’s so angry with the world, Dog, but aren’t we all?

An old man proclaims, Bet she wins big at the races,
even though you’re just a leggy hound with
a thick, bull head. His thick, hairy hands
maul your haunches. That’s no way to treat a lady.
Heckles surge and you jump to snap
the cap from his head. He retreats.
Shake it off, Dog. Good girl.

Protesters line the traffic island
waving placards. The dip of a tail.
You drag me past.
You have no interest in politics.
But stop. Someone tossed a watermelon
into the road, innards erupting pink flesh
and black seeds too festive for winter.
You’ve never seen anything as glorious before.
Savour its flesh with a considered lick.

To the church, Dog.
There’s good grass there.
Sniff, squat, shit.

Packs of schoolgirls are out and roaming.
Cower. The creep of tail between your legs.
They are damp wool uniforms
and the swish of skirts, the smack
of grey chewing gum and squeals.
You hate their pitch,
the sway of their excitement.
As do I, Dog. Clever Dog.

Dog Walk was published in Room Magazine. Editor, Chelene Knight

Une Nature Morte

Dawn washes down over police tape flittering
against the empty street. The idea of a stampede,
the pounding feet, screaming bullets, speeding cars
that left behind a crying wife seems obscene now.
But war too, has its quiet times.
By the gates of Ballybough House a photographer waits,
but the blood is dry, shrapnel pocketed into plastic bags.
Here flats blackened by the lick of flames flank balconies
hung with baby clothes and pink skirts. A man stands
and stares like a dog pinned in a corner. Life razored
his eyes into flint. By the Tolka’s crawling water,
two young boys waste time in a playground clad by iron bars.
Without a ball they kick a half loaf of bread as seagulls
circle overhead. One cocks a finger tense at the other.
Pulls his thumb trigger. His friend dies writhing
until resurrection or time for tea. A winter sunset
low over the hedges, will temper the sight of limp, white trainers
tied, thrown and looped around power lines in rose gold light.
Look up. The skies look less like war and more like art.

Une Nature Morte was published in A Level Crossing. Editor, Pat Boran

Execution

The jut of the pier is the end, the drop
of colour into grey. Through salt crusted
squints we search for the tug
on a line to interrupt dull, flat cloud.
Your flapping silver hooked
from the steel capped waves,
broken from the fight.
Consider your death, but really,
I know of only three ways to kill a fish.

A toe of a boot against your curling body
and lashing spine. A knife housed in leather
cooked hard by salt water, its blade
blackened by whetstone. An easy slice
down below gasping, sanguine gills.
A world ebbs.
Your last glance will be rich with
the redness of spilling innards
painting concrete.

Man fixes the world
through the sharpness
of planes colliding. The soft thud
of your skull on an edge. A smart
smack muted by squalling wind.
This is no grand exit.
Without the blast of a death blow,
curt against the ear,
you are no life to mourn,
just a slow twitch beside the bucket.

The barb hanging
from your lip unhooked by slimy fingers.
Your mirrored scales in the cracks
of my palms. As one would lay an infant
to sleep, I place you gently in water.

Wait for the longest time,
the struggle for breath begins.
Mute confusion as you face
the sky for the first time.
I gaze at you in your plastic coffin.
My world inverted
in the arc of your dying eye.

Execution was published in Magma. Editors, David Floyd and Lucy Howard-Taylor

Grazing

This is our angelus, though our timing is off.
Pausing over a meal of charred meat,
and verdigris leaves. A lush cream sauce
coats the tongue with rich, ivory fur.
Curdled blood spilling to the rim
of two ceramic plates coats an argyle glaze
in hues of rusty pink, culinary aesthetics
deadened by the cheap pine of the table.
Between the click and a pause of each second
marked by the clock, we measure
the shape of our world. It is a slow respite
and we are waiting. Later I will plunge
my hands into water churning glossy with fat,
the globules creeping up the sides of the sink,
onto my flesh, refusing to disappear with the dishwater.

Grazing and other poems are © Deirdre Daly

Deirdre Daly is a writer living in Dublin, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Banshee, The Penny Dreadful and The Irish Times amongst others. She was nominated for a Hennessy New Irish Writing award and received a special commendation in the Patrick Kavanagh poetry award in 2017.

The Gladstone Readings Anthology

October 1st, 2017

The Gladstone Readings Anthology (Famous Seamus, UK, 2017) is an anthology of contemporary writing, though predominantly poetry, and which was compiled and edited by the poet, editor and translator Peter O’ Neill. This is O’ Neill’s second stab at editing an anthology, the first was published in conjunction with the French poet and editor Walter Ruhlmann and was published by Walter for mgv2>publishing ( France, 2015 ) And Agamemnon Dead, an anthology of twenty first century Irish poetry.

Some of the same names appear in The Gladstone Readings Anthology that appear in And Agamemnon Dead. Michael J. Whelan, Christine Murray, Rosita Sweetman, Arthur Broomfield, John Saunders and Bob Shakeshaft, so there is a correspondence between both works which is immediately identifiable in the contents section.

Thematically there are similarities between both works too. Violence, as indicated in the Yeat’s quote of the first book, is once again a recurring theme uniting this latest anthology, with a short story by Helena Mulkerns, taken from her debut collection Ferenji ( Doire Press, 2017 ) complementing Whelan’s visceral poems written many years after his experience touring the Lebanon and Kosovo as a Peacekeeper for the UN.

Indeed O’ Neill, in an article published by The Irish Times ( May 12th 2015 ) was at pains to point out, after the publication of And Agamemnon Dead , that violence was the unifying element which connected all the pieces, but violence as understood in its most global way!

For example the violence of Brendan McCormack’s Dublin poems, contained in The Gladstone Readings Anthology, are central to the anthology, with their anger and rage against the complacency of middle-class Ireland’s double standards, vis a vis religious indoctrination and embrace of hyper-consumerism. McCormack’s formal constructs, devoid at times of any punctuation, a physical manifestation on the very type face of his complete disdain for orthodoxy of any kind, such is his mistrust of authority; Caravaggio being a kind of avatar for the poet, a subject which he treats with real greatness, and worthy of the 17th century baroque master.

Indeed Brendan McCormack, placed in the centre of the collection, preceded by work from John W. Sexton and the formidable Daniel Wade, could be seen to represent a school of current poetic exploration particular to this island, and which Whelan’s and Murray’s writing also echo; that of a return to modernism, with its insistence on formal exploration, historical accuracy and embrace of linguistic invention. As if to underscore the tension created by the above mentioned apocalyptic trio, Sexton evoking a demonic stiletto wearing Muse, My Love Came Riding, while Wade’s long poem on Savonarola, uncomfortably making parallels to Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland excess, and McCormack’s own inner-city howlings ( a city he has long since abandoned, living in exile as he does from the nation’s capital, in favour of the wild countryside of West Cork) are then carefully contrasted by the quieter introspective tones, of the American poet David Rigsbee whose poems masterfully explore the deeply personal with the public; in which such all too familiar topics such as homelessness A Certain Person, racism ’68, and Art Falsetto are so magnificently treated.

John Saunders and Enda Coyle Greene then take up the baton, both similar to their American counterpart in that both, in their work, attempt to in both formal and informal register, explore, using rhyme, rhythm and alliteration, the conceit and metaphor of Living!

The Gladstone Readings Anthology at Amazon

‘All The Worlds Between’; a collaborative poetry project between India and Ireland

September 16th, 2017

All the Worlds Between is a collaborative poetry project bringing together poets from India, Ireland and in between. Their writing partnerships resulted in four strands—poems as conversations, poems at angles to one another, poems which speak out of turn to other poems in the group and, not surprisingly, stories of friendship.

The poets looked at questions of home, belonging, identity, exclusion and homogenisation. From conversations about shoes and what they evoke to exchanges about parents, poems responding to the transgender experience, to inward angled poems and even chain poems created stanza by stanza over email and WhatsApp, through all of these the poets found themselves eavesdropping on the collective consciousness, ears to the ground listening for the beat of life.

Contributing poets

Adil Jussawalla, Aditi Rao, Áine Ní Ghlinn, Alvy Carragher, Anne Tannam, Arundhathi Subramaniam, BeRn, Christine Murray, Claus Ankersen, Daniel Ryan, Fióna Bolger, Maurice Devitt, Menka Shivdasani, Nandini Sahu, Nita Mishra, Ӧzgecan Kesici, Rizio Yahannan Raj, Sampurna Chattarji, Shobhana Kumar, K. Srilata, Sue Butler, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, R. Vatsala.

Edited by Srilata Krishan and Fióna Bolger

Published by Yoda Press www.yodapress.co.in

Read more at Ó Bhéal

All the Worlds Between is a collaborative poetry project bringing together poets from India, Ireland and in between. Their writing partnerships resulted in four strands — poems as conversations, poems at angles to one another, poems which speak out of turn to other poems in the group and, not surprisingly, stories of friendship.

The poets looked at questions of home, belonging, identity, exclusion and homogenisation. From conversations about shoes and what they evoke to exchanges about parents, poems responding to the transgender experience, to inward angled poems and even chain poems created stanza by stanza over email and WhatsApp, through all of these the poets found themselves eavesdropping on a collective consciousness, ears to the ground listening for the beat of life. (read more here)

‘Wild Fennel’ and other poems by Tess Barry

September 4th, 2017

Raspberries

I started out in western Pennsylvania hills
with wild raspberry and blackberry bushes
and my mother’s apple field.
Bread and ripe fruit and fresh milk.
My mother cleaned the carpet right off the floor.
My father was a Troy Hill boy who played piano
and smoked Pall Malls and drank whiskey.
He won my mother in a dance contest.
Who wouldn’t learn to jitterbug for a prize like her?
They took a train to Cape Cod for a honeymoon
and bought hats for their mothers.
They sailed all the way from the Cape to ten children.

My whole life has been ripe with wild fruit.
All the men I’ve loved had left feet. I was innocent
until I got myself a good pair of rain boots.
There is no point in wondering what I’ll come to.
With my first words I wrote my own path
straight to New York: all night accents, brick stoops.
I left there like a mad dog running free
like our Dusty who got himself killed down the street,
chasing the neighborhood boys. He ran smack into a fender.
We buried him up in the woods after a proper funeral.
No amount of experience can shake
the ripeness out of me, or my mother, or my father
who didn’t just win a bride
with his right feet and big shoes.
He won a green thumb.

Near the Ocean’s Edge

The bus that took my mother to Atlantic City in 1945 was a Greyhound.
She was fourteen, leaving home for the first time
to visit Adeline and John Higgins, who used to live next door.
They were childless and good to her.

She traveled alone, a tiny solitary thing.
A drunken sailor sat down next to her and stared then asked
Can I suck a hickey on your neck?
She had no idea what he meant, moved seats and sat alone.

Seeing the ocean for the first time she wept.
She couldn’t swim but walked the shore for hours.
Near the ocean’s edge she first saw seahorses, a herd of them floating.
They were beautiful and stationary, too magical to be living—

she thought them shells. Packed her suitcase full of them,
laid them gently between her worn cotton dresses
and underthings. Arriving home she opened her case
to show her treasures to a friend and they’d rotted.

The stench so strong it dizzies her still.

My Father’s Remains

The moment he died,
my father’s remains
grew small in size, shaped
by our hands and fingers.

The faint and lingering scent
of tobacco rose from
our paging his hymnals
and pawing his coats.

His wallet was frayed,
its outer-edges rawhide again
from years of his palming.
It held very little cash.

We opened that wallet
and found a fold-out tent,
stitched together in plastic
rows of worn faces.

It unfurled easily and we
fell down in steps. It held
all ten of us and our mother.
We found the wallet

in his small sock drawer,
the socks all uniform, all
black. I took them all and he
was laid to rest in borrowed.

Wild Fennel

render me yellow
a little while longer
bedside coast through sea window
render me open
scent my bedclothes with pollen
in cupped water linger
dusting May with your flavor
render me axis
stolen stalk of Prometheus
wand of forethought
weed-stem of longing
perennial center
render me umbel

After Singing Midnight Mass

The rest have gone ahead.
Old enough now
to walk the distance alone.

In these short hours
snow has fallen, just
a dusting marks the streets.

Cold air breathes all around.
Here now.
Wreathed doors beckon. Turning

the corner to North Avenue
the moon follows,
white against the clear blue night.

Up and down the sleeping mile
choir voices
echo still, the loft’s round staircase,

filled with joyful noise, silent now.
Our conductor’s wand
waving, his final smile

humming on. Already Christmas
morning. The paved road
ends, rough surface comes.

Ground known so well.
Almost there now.
Quiet woods to one side,

the tree trimmed before church
glows in the window.
Skating down the stone steps, one

by one. Gliding on. Hands
gloved, still warm.
Sound and light within.

Deciduous

I am the seed that roots and spreads,
I am the underbough unbearing.
I am the meristem, the forest in refuge,
the division in moss and the division in fern.
I am the absence of sound in deep rise,
in snow-buried mound, in matter-of-fact serration,
the feeling of stillness, that widens
and widens, then rustles and spills
from forked tongue to tadpole-spitting stream.
I am boundlessness of now, when it
is good to bear nothing but the weight
of its great vastness, while winters
pass from absence to deafening gathering
to absence again, many re-births
and sprawling coverings, till the falling ahead
becomes the falling behind, and half
the short seasons of the day are sameness.
Widening pools cast my perpetual echo,
I am bark of skin dividing out,
I am winged vertebrate weaving,
I am cambium, the forest in refuge,
the division in fern the place
of meristem division.

Tess Barry was shortlisted for the 2015 Manchester Poetry Prize (UK). Twice a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Magazine’s (UK) Poetry Award, she also was shortlisted for the 2014 Bridport Poetry Prize (UK). Most recently, her poems appeared in or are forthcoming in And Other Poems (UK), The Compass Magazine (UK), Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), Mslexia (UK), Mudfish, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly (Ireland), and The Woven Tale Press Literary and Fine Arts Magazine. Barry is a Fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and teaches literature and creative writing at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. Website: Tess Barry

Wild Fennel and other poems are © Tess Barry

Publication Details

Wild Fennel, My Father’s Remains, Raspberries, Near the Ocean’s Edge, and After Singing Midnight Mass were shortlisted for the 2015 Manchester Poetry Prize and previously published on the Manchester Writing School’s website as part of the press release announcing the shortlisted poets.

Deciduous was a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and published in North American Review’s Spring 2014 issue.

‘I Saw Beckett The Other Day’ and other poems by Órfhlaith Foyle

August 31st, 2017

Photograph of Her Brother’s Skull

They give you to me,
a numbered skull from a high shelf
and in my hand you are
a strange brute thing – a thing I hardly see
-my brother.

The clean smooth bone of you
– the whole of you no longer with me.
In this room of discovered skulls,
I have lost my memories
And the photographer fixes your dead stare
for his lens.

In this room of skulls,
Your face is lost,
my brother,
and I grips hard to what is left.

After Sunday Mass in Malawi

After Sunday Mass they whispered:
‘he was a poet, perhaps.
A dissident, yes.’
He ignored the spies in his classroom.’
Then someone else also remembered:
‘Of course, this is not our country.
We are Whites, you see

I Saw Beckett the Other Day

I saw Beckett the other day
in the doorway of that café
where you took his photograph.

You know the one…
when he looked up at the lens
and realised how he could
haunt us all.

‘Hey Beckett,’ I said
Rejoicing in my discovery of him;
his hand on the door, his eyes
skimming over the interior image
of cigarette smoke and coffee.

I stood beside him. He rubbed his face so
he might recognise me. I smiled and
said even I didn’t know what was
happening these days.
Even I could not stop the end.

He nodded, coughed and looked sly; his teeth were
yellow over the pink rim of his lips.
He mentioned the photograph. He said his face
had collected worms under the skin as if ready for
death and he smiled to show them dance
spasmatic with age-spots and veins.

Someone entered the café. Someone left.
Beckett touched the hair above my ear.
I stood on tip-toe so he could whisper down.
He said nothing. It was just a kiss
with the cold wind at our feet and the
smoke and egg friendly air
released in draughts between
the opening and closing of the café door;

Which he stepped through to find his table
and entered some other world,
under greasy lights
coupled with table shine and coffee cups,
and thoughts of death, where she stood
groomed for an entrance, were held back by
the odd moments of life
that still strung the useful breaths
Beckett used to blow his coffee cool.

‘I Saw Beckett The Other Day’ and other poems are © Órfhlaith Foyle

Órfhlaith Foyle’s first novel Belios was published by The Lilliput Press. Her first full poetry collection Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma (Arlen House) was short-listed for the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award in 2011. Arlen House published Foyle’s debut short fiction, Somewhere in Minnesota, in 2011; its title story first appeared in Faber and Faber’s New Irish Short Stories (2011), edited by Joseph O’Connor. Foyle’s second short fiction collection Clemency Browne Dreams of Gin (Arlen House 2014) was chosen as one the Irish Times books of the year. Her work has been published in The Dublin Review, The Wales Arts Review, The Manchester Review, and The Stinging Fly.

Órfhlaith Foyle was born in Africa to Irish parents and now lives in Galway, Ireland.

‘The First Rule’ and other poems by Susan Millar DuMars

August 9th, 2017

Reclamation

The blood has stopped
and with it the need
to suckle lesser creatures.
My breasts are pale, cool
proud
and mine.

The blood has stopped
and with it the need
to shield smaller souls
inside me.
My womb calm.
Not weeping.
And it’s my womb.

I’m learning the pleasure
of empty.
The weight of one.
Nothing on my back
but a breeze
getting colder.

The blood has stopped
and with it the need
to grow anything
but older.

The First Rule

Will I show you what to do
with a naked woman?

You can
lie on top of her
feel her yield
taste her salt
ride her undulations
know her to be ocean
almost drown

leave her
the wind again her breath
the tide again her muscles
the rocks again her bones.

This is a naked woman.
Rain fed
pulsing soft.

Respect, sailor,
is the first rule of the sea.

Baby Makes Me Watch

His features a pattern of cracks in a mirror.
My eyes give up my own reflection
to trace, retrace the hairline breaks.

I’m on my back and the door is a cloud.
I try but I can’t reach it.

Baby says I’m his shining comet
and I have all his faith.
Baby says I force him
to tell secrets he’d rather forget.
Baby makes me watch.
The door’s a cloud – I’m cold.
Baby makes sure I know
this is all my fault.

Baby, you have to let me go.

Baby makes me watch.

Night Woods

after Ted Hughes

My path was direct
through the bones of the murdered,
the maimed; I nest among remains.

Meditation, prayer are no use here.
All my questions go unanswered
except by the blip of blood-fear, the scream

of collared kill, carried above trees
by the hawk. And it laughs as it dives,
laughs, for the pleasure of swooping,

the pleasure of choosing,
the heat that escapes as it pierces the creature.
For the meat. This is its nature.

I, the hawk’s witness. This is my nature.

The First Rule & other poems are © Susan Millar DuMars

Susan Millar DuMars has published four poetry collections with Salmon Poetry, the most recent of which, Bone Fire, appeared in April, 2016. She also published a book of short stories, Lights in the Distance, with Doire Press in 2010. Her work has appeared in publications in the US and Europe and in several anthologies, including The Best of Irish Poetry 2010. She has read from her work in the US, Europe and Australia. Born in Philadelphia, Susan lives in Galway, Ireland, where she and her husband Kevin Higgins have coordinated the Over the Edge readings series since 2003. She is the editor of the 2013 anthology Over the Edge: The First Ten Years.

Ism Writers
Madame Matisse is shown her portrait, 1913 and other poems
Sunflower

‘Stormriver’ and other poems by Myra Vennard

July 6th, 2017

NIGHT TREE

Along the river bank
street lights are lighting

the darkening waters glow
the sun is low

the mountain crouches low
in shadow

light drops from light
dark creeps back to night …

my mind struggles with a paradox –
gleams from a self-source

and light
falling from a star

love is racked – there
is no owning in the soul

the void is an agitation
fixed habit of a consciousness

unwilling to go into the terror
of going into light of naked night

my tree reaches up winter bare
its star is not yet born.

GOING OUT

Sea fog curls
around the cliff face

the island has no contour
still – and I

I am weeping
amid a conflict

the wish for forgetfulness
yet fear of clinging sorrow

intangible dreams are real
a beatitude in the memory

at dawn – an echo
unfathomable – secret

I dream of the dead
as having no subjectivity

all are one – knowing
no aims nor necessities

their focus is on One
sublime infinity

if imperfect love must die
for perfect love to live

when he opens up his eye
will my eye have distance?

*
he waits outside my door
to share my cup

behind a mask in a theatre of stone
time is instilling essence.

BELOVED

I waken before dawn
to full moonlight

and ships anchored in the bay
my mind still on a street

where he turns away – I am
afraid of thoughts multiple

the street lamp in cavities –
in pools of dark …

I will go wistful
I will go where the river whispers

with trees through branches
to where a moon-ring still trembles

*

in tentative morning sunlight
after night-storm

waves – cold – fall
and run molten gold on sand …

do not think to dispel love
from a turbulent heart

love has heat
enough for distillation.

STORMRIVER

A week of black water
out at sea

a month of magic almost
gone to the air

the river keeps away – just
stones navigate

the flood – when poetry
cannot speak

it drowns in the mind
and swoons in the flow

*

rain has fallen – I walk
against the wind

against a rainbow flame
kissing an ocean – against

a straying sun picking
defining the town …

he has no home here
nor there beyond the island

he touches dusk
his breath is in shadow

his voice is full of tremor
I hear

his aching heartbeat
shake against the wind

*

he lights a candle
before he puts on the mask

he carries a burden on his back
he lays it on the altar

in the oratory
he puts on a robe

drawing back the curtain
he sleep-walks into my mind

he presses my head
until it hurts – the bread

is in his hands
his declaration my question

behind the mask
has he a changing face?

The supremacy of a pointing spire
does not close the distance

to a sky-god in the brain
nor appease a hurting spirit

abandoned to theatres of stone
and the dark cloisters of a consciousness.

*

this morning
there is a light over the sea

the island appears impervious
holding close

to dark contours – still
there is tension

in the small wood
crumbs of rock

fall
from brooding cliffs….

at dusk
across the cavern floor

dark – splintered
with glass – nails – wood

the huge door
creaks and groans

in winter wind’s moan
rocking black

the memory of accident
stirring midnight dreams

outside – the evening star
is silence – risen

*

words mean nothing
they are not what he is

they are a fetish
visible – separate – fettered …

music is his glance
from the mountain

it holds harmony
in the retina

unable to break free
from the moment – this

this is
all he will say

*

suddenly a white mist
steals the island

cliffs rise
their juts fade in sequence

I take words
out into space

further on
at a bend in the road

Malevola grips
my senses

there is a sickness
in my mind

even the sea is quiet
no gull cries

there is a terrible lack
of flowering

here his eye is dark
its glance will tell me nothing

*

I cannot make him
what I imagine

the wall is high
he is not – not here

in this mind
in this first death – this

long – long standing
train of consciousness

he sleeps
until I have never been.

SEPTEMBER

The dawn is cold
the road is empty

the lamp
is not yet extinguished

grass has light
grounded white dusk

not wintered – drowsed
taking colour

re-making colour
pushing back

shadows onto a white wall
something transposed

shifted – doubled
unedged – out

beyond
the lamp’s intensity …

*

a fuchsia morning warms the road
for the white moth

for the rabbit
watching my movement

creatures mistrust my step
even a breakfast of berries has its price …

the man behind me says he has peace
his eye is full of April

a low sun shows something double –
shadows – by a wall defined.

FALLING

Look up – treetops
are meeting in the morning sky

there is a terrible sad
beat in the sea

love has no mind
only this –

light will own the waters
it will rise

before the overhang
darkens the surface

light will bend down
under the bridge

taking the river-rush
running crystal

down – down
over rock and stone

to own the sea
and meet the incoming flux.

Stormriver and other poems are © Myra Vennard, thanks to Moyra Donaldson for sending them to Poethead.

Myra Vennard was born in Belfast and is now retired to Ballycastle, Co Antrim, where she has ancestral roots. Widowed in 1979, she worked in Belfast for several years as a secretary before returning to higher education in the 1990’s as a mature student, graduating at the University of Ulster with Honours BA in English and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature with a dissertation on the poetic vision of Samuel Beckett. As a postgraduate she attended the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, gaining a diploma in Ecumenics.

Myra Vennard’s two previous poetry books are Easter Saturday (2009) and Blind Angel (2013), both published by Lagan Press. In 2010 she won the Belfast Telegraph’s Woman of the Year in the Arts Award.

Four Poems by Rus Khomutoff

July 2nd, 2017

I wear you under my skin.
Your hydra cadence sweet spot
Sanity assassin of the nothing agency
With words as instruments of rapture
Mediation prompt

Constellation of intentions,
a gradient of realness in contaminated tones
Jilted designations and counterpoetics
Stabs of conscience off the easel
Absorbent minds…the dark enlightment’s lamentable tragedy
Certainty is now my watchword

Mystagoguery, a bleeding edge of obsolescence
A face of genius in full measure of the spectacular now
Catharsis daily-mother tongue of method and black squares
Words vetted out of nowhere
Deadbeat doth
The new cult of consensus

The famous devil of a perfect vanguard.
Fascinated by the river that is knowledge.
Circumstances that come in to stay-miles from our
mephitic place.
High and low extensions on the threshold of meaning-
sonic intimacies

Read a sample from Immaculate Days by Rus Khomutoff here.

My name is Rus Khomutoff and I am a neo surrealist poet in Brooklyn, NY. My poetry has appeared in Erbacce, Uut Poetry and Burning House Press.Last year I published an ebook called Immaculate Days. I am also on twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/@rusdaboss
Immaculate Days

“Pink is a Sister Sick” and other poems by Seanín Hughes

June 20th, 2017

Pink Is A Sister Sick

with sweetness. Bright;
blinds beautiful men, robs
them of their enamel, but

they never protest.

Fat lashes fan those
flushed cheeks, like

blood blushing milk,

bones so high and hollow
beneath. Pink licks the dark,
but refuses to wear it.
I went panning for
black diamonds in her hair
in our girlhood, and found

nothing but dirty pebbles

and rust for treasure; I
couldn’t love her. She’s
a predator with doll parts,
a perfect Pinocchio gone
rogue and hungry

for boyprey.

I’ve got a perverted
prayer that in time, she’ll
dissolve into herself;
melt at midday,
nothing more
than a

discarded boiled sweet.

Equilibrium

I’m strutting stratospheric,
embellished and splendid
in my NHS wedding dress.

My mother was here before me,
her father before her, his uncle
before that — lucky, lucky me

— our platinum gilted heirloom hops generations and genders,
our gene pool a puddle of madness

thickened with blood and tear-streaked shrieking saliva.
I’m in my unsilent season,

souped up and bursting,
far too sexy
to sedate. This is my circus

and I am the airborne acrobat
defying my earthly anchors
until they come for me,

saturnine.

Anthem

New York’s summer breath
climbs heavy through the window
and the restless worm wrestles
through apple rot.

Narcissus’ trumpets
wither in astonished atrophy,
recoiling into the earth
as the amnion ruptures,

a parting of seas in the
holiest of churches –

between
the wide open legs
of an obedient woman,

held to ransom by
blanched agony, lips
anaemic, lily white.

Skull shards shift tectonic
and give passage
to the crowning;

the searing stretch of emergence,
the ripping of the mantle,
the sting of the slap –

and it breathes.

The bed sheets are soiled
with immigrant blood
the colour of November poppies,

and writhing in it,
the jaundiced newborn skin
of an epoch in waiting:

a God complex
with baby sized fists
clutching nuclear warheads.

Going Dutch

I cut my teeth on you;
let enamel tear
through the warm pink tissue
of adolescence.

I bared my legs, but
bent them inward,
dressed them in angles
in case you found them
too soft, too fleshy.
You didn’t (they weren’t).

I kept my hair down
so subtle shadows fell
where cheekbones might be,
stolen symmetry, in case
you realised I wasn’t
pretty enough. You didn’t (I was).

We’d play pool –
I never won (I never cared) –
and eat chips on the way home;
you paid your way and
I paid mine, and I never needed
to wear my coat (I did), until

that one night when
you didn’t walk me home,
the night I fell asleep and
you cut your teeth on me,
the ones you lied through (you did),
and I paid in full.

I’d Be Queen of Myself (if I weren’t anti-monarchy)

She said
I seemed brighter and
I was that day,
that week,
but my brightness
had a lid on it
because I couldn’t let it
spill –
unless I was alone

and then

I could sing
and sing
and grin
at the windows
and the cutlery
and laugh at the shape
of the front door
all angular and rigid
and trapped by lines
– not like me –

I was bright that day,
that week,
in cahoots with the sun
(she told me so
and she’s a puppeteer) and I’m
dancing jigs
in the frozen aisle and
I’d be the Queen
of myself (if I wasn’t
anti-monarchy).

But I’ll settle
for this power,
this rising gift,
this momentary lapse
when the numbing fog
clears and life is
so vivid,
and it’s right
under my nose,
the promise of it,
and I forget

that it can’t last

– it won’t last –

until it slips
through the membrane
of my skin and I watch
it leave, I watch

the lights dim, I watch
the numbing fog
and the way it trundles
in again, bearing
the weight
of things
I
can’t
carry.

Nebulae & Salt at Dodging The Rain

Diphylleia

Daughter, please hold my hand. There is rain coming; look — a congregation of heavy promise
waits above our heads
to bathe us. It gives God
to our ordinary air. Aren’t you
beautiful? I have a gift for you. Please,
hold my hand; k ep me in your tender palm. Parts of me are fading — your name, your sister flowers.
Did have sons? Oh. Why must
I be dismantled
s slowly? I’m afraid. Please hold my hand. I’m s rry.
Aren’t you beautiful?
I have a gift for you; diphylleia — the rain makes a s-skeleton most gentle from its petals, translucent when touched by falling skies in Japan. See how its colours weep
— see that crown of clarity, the petals
in their party dress, clear as
Cind rella’s glass slipper. Ar n’t you
b autiful?
Pl ase, dau ter,
hold my hand. Parts of me fading. A ‘t you beautiful? There’ll b ain
for flow rs today. I named you
after a
fl wer, crowned you mine. Please
I m
be utif l.

hold my hand?

Seanín Hughes is an emerging poet and writer from Cookstown, Northern Ireland, where she lives with her partner and four children. Despite writing for most of her life, Seanín only began to share her work in late 2016 after penning a number of poems for her children. Prior to this, she hadn’t written in a number of years following the diagnosis of her daughter Aoife with a rare disease in 2010. Early 2017 brought a return to writing in Seanín’s spare time and since then, she has completed an ever-increasing volume of new poetry. Drawing from her varied life experiences, Seanín is attracted to challenging themes and seeks to explore issues including mental health, trauma, death, and the sense of feeling at odds with oneself and the world.