“Devotion” and other poems by Lani O’Hanlon

January 5th, 2019

MY MOTHER’S LOVER

The occupational therapist who came to visit
left an invalid toilet seat with handles
in the bathroom and a gadget with a claw hand
to pick up things from the floor.

My mother demonstrated how they worked,
rehearsing to be an old lady
hobbling on arthritic feet.

Until Stein arrived,
the sailor she’d had an affair with
thirty years before.

‘You have no idea how angry your father was.’
‘I do. I was in the next bedroom.’

And so the Dutch man came, with flowers
and still wearing her Claddagh ring.
He had blue eyes and a dog called Bonny.

The invalid toilet seat vanished.
She made my sister go shopping for new underwear.

First published in The Moth Issue 19 Winter 2014/2015 Ed, Rebecca O’ Connor

BACK UP QUICK, THEY’RE HIPPIES

That was the year we drove
into the commune in Cornwall.
‘Jesus Jim’ mam said,
‘back-up quick, they’re hippies.’

Through the car window,
tents, row after row, flaps open,
long haired men and women
curled around each other like babies

and the babies themselves
wandered naked across the grass.

I reached for the handle, ready, almost,
to open the door, drop out and away
from my sister’s aggressive thighs,
Daddy’s slapping hands.

Back home in the Dandelion market
I unlearnt the steps my mother taught,
bought a headband, an afghan coat,
a fringed skirt –leather skin.

Barefoot, on common grass, I lay down with kin.

Published in POETRY March 2018, Ed, Don Share

DEVOTION
		

Birds on a prayer tree
descend to the feeder
you have filled

the same way
you put daffodils
in our rooms. 

Comfort
when we gather
each morning.

Moments in meditation
before we open our eyes,
speak
 
offer dreams
like gold
from silted rivers. 

Then we part
each one
to a separate

 room
 pen
 story

until the evening
when we return
like strands 

of a plait,
across, under, over,
blonde, black, brown.

In your house below
Sliabh na mBan
we three

in retreat,
worship returned
to the creative act.

A SHOW ON THE ROAD

On my way to the little theatre
in Carrick-on-Suir,
the Comeraghs stage left,
a hot air balloon glides in, stage right.

Five year old me in the back seat, sulking.
I re-assure; ‘This is different, it’s a poem,
you won’t have to dance or sing.
It will be dignified, a small audience.’

But she jitters about, wants a drink, wants to pee.

I drive towards the balloon,
my dead mother in the passenger seat.
‘Don’t forget lipstick’ she says ‘and those clothes,
those flat boots, have I taught you nothing?’

She takes another swig of coffee laced with vodka.

On we go and the balloon rises, arcs slowly stage left.
My mother shrieks ‘Did you bring the poem?’
The car becomes a bumper car, veers
towards other drivers, throwing their eyes heavenward.

The child opens the black book, holds up the poem.
My mother sings; ‘There’s no business like show business….’
then straight into ‘Give my regards to Broadway.’
The child sings along ‘Give my cigars to Broadway.’

I put on my sunglasses and take them off again.
‘Fix your hair,’ my mother advises,
voice beginning to slur.
The lurex top shows off her freckled cleavage.

I check out my hair in the mirror.
Why can’t it sit down or tousle nicely?
‘BE QUIET.’ I shout.
The child and my mother disappear.

I drive on. The balloon. The little theatre.

from The Little Theatre poetry chapbook funded by Artlinks

EATING THE SALMON

How carelessly I cooked it
and we ate without noticing
in the same way that Fionn
put his thumb in his mouth,
we sucked, chewed, swallowed
coral flesh, light as honey
the sea still in her.

Called forth by the wisdom in the other

our tongues,
our female tongues
silver splashed and orange
corralled each slice
of light, of dark,
spewed it up, transformed.

First broadcast on RTE’s Sunday Miscellany, Producer, Sarah Binchy

Devotion and other poems are © Lani O’Hanlon

From a theatrical family, Lani O’ Hanlon is an experienced group facilitator, dance and movement artist/therapist, author of Dancing the Rainbow, Holistic Well-Being through Movement (Mercier Press 2007) She has an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, studied fiction with The Stinging Fly and received a travel and training award in 2017 from the National Arts Council to complete a first novel set in Ireland and Greece.

Her first poetry chapbook, The Little Theatre was funded by Artlinks and she has been awarded literary mentoring and bursaries from Waterford City and County Arts Office. Her writing has been published; in POETRY, Poetry Ireland Review, Mslexia, The Irish Times, Southword, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Skylight Poets, Solas Nua, the Anthologies; Small Lives (Poddle) Halleluiah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe) and is regularly broadcast on national radio – RTE’s Sunday Miscellany – her fiction has been shortlisted or won award including The Hennessey New Irish Writing, The William Allingham Award and Over the Edge. Her poetry has won, been highly commended and/or shortlisted for FISH, Mslexia, DiBiase, Poetry on the Lake, Dromineer, Brewery Lane and the Bridport Poetry Prize.

“When The Queen Falls In love” and other poems by Ingrid Casey

January 3rd, 2019

Jazz in a Northern City

Amidst turmoil, paindragon carried me
for nights, to see the Goth. She was in
Macbeth with the artist,
the room was filling with books, miniature

figures, heated exchanges, we rolled downhill,
to the galleries. I filled her ears
with chocolate, she was beaming. Her black Halloween
curls twined around doorways, illustrated our friendship.
There are silences,
empathy in the space,
in the difference squared

between floor and ceiling.
On this day there was Sun Ra, at perfect pitches, head
phones suspended in a whole constellation.

The child inside could reach a star, listen. It was
dark,
melodious,
soothing, and definitely
love.

The Boxer Reads To Me

Sit here, I dare you, again for
Sakhalin, salon moments, pore

over the Poet, crease of hip cut
before me like diamonds, spine

coilsprung to recite. Talk to me
about la Motta, the animal, warm

bright rocks on me the primal the
literary ones, you are coal walls

lit up, it’s dark, I’m awake with you.

A Sonnet with an added Couplet

My notebooks are like lovers; uncostly, fake, easy
to come by. Harder to convey to, whispering
ideas that come to me while bathing, where water
runs off breasts, past rogue coins greened by children,

pooling into obsidian plughole. I stub my toe there, think
about the scars I wanted to show on the day we met. Look,
wrapping my eyes around your teeth, this water is
spooling down ear lobes ready to catch

your breath. See the ways my skin can fail, yet
hold me. I have been waiting for love these three
cheap years, I let my blood with the moons and now

I plush, pluck, knead my rolls, places and musculature.
Can you hear soft thighs speak, can you hear pink of lip
dun of freckle can you see the letters, the words rushing

like water I am clean, I am clean.
Touch me, touch me I am clean.

Natural Born Producer

You cannot shame the winter politico
he cares not for Loach or tins of beans

or snow or hair falling out in clumps he
is heart, darkened. Instead let us shine

light onto ourselves, let us gather the anger
and the power and hold it up to him in

ritual in film in online petition this is where
we live now let us amass our

faith in change it will take long days of
patience and labour and phonecalls and

meetings and requests and locations and
stunning favours, it will take several

stumbles and cries but hold this bird this
frail thing it is singing look, the buds are

already rolled ready, be obstinate and grumpy
as a season, predictable and miraculous enough

to effect to effect to effect drop like hail, sting,
sing and unfurl soon, soon green will come back,

be autochthonous be brave always, look at the sky.

When the Queen falls in love

the air tastes like bronze. A slow procession
of soft wool ties, red, greet her along the tracks
under Arts et Métiers. Herein lies the entire history
of gold, dancing in her irises. Her mouth teems with flakes,
both Paleolithic caves and Celtic tiger-fish. Some talked about
Havilah and this is where the split occurs; not Eden, but a place
elevated, monetized. Chatham row on Saturdays and episcopal
ceilings seal greed to her mouth like minted sugar, heaven must
be material, engineered. Bodies nor art gifts, but more a form of
showing politics, moving, melodious sabrage release crescendo
diminuendo streams, liquid gold, gaseous arabesque at pianos.

When the queen realises that God is a woman, she is listening to Ariana Grande
and recalling maple tapping on Wisconsin trees as a child, time travelling
with words, books. Penduculate under the sloop and weft of branches, time
bends to desire; it is not a forest, but fields of gold in Tipperary, or years later,
buying quail’s eggs to appease a visiting Russian child. Or Rome, swimming
under orange groves on hills, kissing saxophony from where two oceans meet
with canticles, or again in amber and castles on the crusts of pastries that are the
Crimea-to-Baltic, the route of the palette, the platelets roving.

Even while at war, the queen drinks affogato, bestows pineapples. And this
is breaking the rules, Eden via fat rolls, ovaries. There is nothing linear
about one caesura, one volta.
The queen is oíbnius, gladness. Shibboleths tumble, roll off the queen’s roof.
She puts on Maria Callas, to greet storms; feels just like a chalice, a brooch.
Walking to grocery shops, she is struck down by a sky-falling object.

It’s a torque, straight from Kildare street, wheeling its iridescent way onto her clavicle.
It feels like the invention of blue; the coffeegoers and GAA parents are filled with
wonder. She is a four-month-old fetus, festooned, she is her own cellular life, in the
womb of her grandmother, she is the function and role of plasma, the largest
component of all the blood, the currency in, on, around, over, under the earth.

When The Queen Falls In love and other poems are © Ingrid Casey

Ingrid Casey is a poet, parent, artist and activist. She has been writing poetry since 2015, and some prose, with publications in literary journals from Brooklyn to Kentucky, Dublin to Cardiff. She is a John Hewitt bursary recipient, amongst other accolades. Her debut collection, Mandible (the Onslaught Press, 2018) has been described by poet Jessica Traynor as a ‘vital addition to Irish poetry.’

This year she also produced a ground-breaking short documentary on families living in homeless accommodation: http://throughthecracks.ie/

Merry Christmas 2018 Dear Poethead Readers ♥

December 18th, 2018

Poetry publishing will resume in January 2019. I will be reading and responding to your submissions in the intervening period. Thank you for your emails, your queries, your support and responses over this year of 2018. As always, the site remains open and accessible. Please visit An Index Of Women Poets and Contemporary Irish Women Poets during the season.

My thanks to Salma Caller, whose wonderful artistic response to my 2018 publications graces this message, her work can be found throughout Poethead. Thanks to the many poets who submitted during 2018. Your tremendous work was an utter joy to read. Thank you for your patience in waiting for publication. I am delighted to have welcomed first-time poets, poet-translators, and work from experienced poets through this past year.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the season. The image accompanying this short post reminds me that in January, the first flowers begin appearing, something wonderful to look forward to. (Image details)

Chris Murray December 2018

Contemporary Irish Women Poets

An Index Of Women Poets

Recent features on Poethead

“Thrushes In The Rowan Tree” and other poems by Maureen Boyle

“English Breakfast Love Song” and other poems by Rhiannon Grant

‘sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead’ and other poems by Alicia Byrne Keane

‘Eamon Ceannt Park’ by C. Murray

Poems from ‘Available Light’ by Maria McManus

“Hair” and other poems by Kasey Shelley

How to Hide Unhappiness / Cum Ascundem Nefericirea by Ștefan Manasia translated by Clara Burghelea

“A Gradual Eden” and other poems by Audrey Molloy

“mia council casa es tu council casa” and other poems by Ali Whitelock

“Flaxen Sheaf” and other poems by Laura Scanlon

Fragmenting…defragmenting… by Breda Wall Ryan

“Muiris” and other poems by Victoria Cosgrove

“Thrushes In The Rowan Tree” and other poems by Maureen Boyle

December 15th, 2018

Christmas Box

There is honey and chocolate on our doorstep
since Christmas—sweet box and coral flower—
one on either side. The heuchera with ruffled
cocoa-coloured leaves hunkers in the corner but
the sarcococca or sweet box is where we step
inside by design so that on nights as dark as winter
and full of storm we brush the bluff, squat, shrub
and boots and coat trail the scent of summer
into the hall. Its flowers are what are left of flowers,
petals blown away—spindly threads ghostly in the leaves,
the odd early blood-berry that follows.
Its genus confusa is right—from so frail a bloom
a scent so big, as if the bees have nested in it
and are eager for their flight.

Thrushes In The Rowan Tree

The very day the rowanberries ripen, thrushes fly in,
stately and speckled, as if summoned there.
They turn the tree to illustration, an autumn square
in an illuminated script, or a sultan’s tree of singing birds.
Acrobats in motley, they swing, making lithe lines
of branches, stretching—somersaulting out to reach
the berries—each red drop held in the beak before
it falls to add to the marble bags of their bellies.

And, just as quickly, by timing only they can tell,
they leave at once to their own applause
to come again and work their stripping circus act
one level at a time, methodical, exact,
until the tree is bare and they have left
another square: a silhouette of winter.

Put Out The Light

i.m. Robert McCrea, 1907-1990

The entrails of a salmon flower in the sink
in the picture I have of you
teaching me to gut fish.

You have lifted it from the river
at the foot of our house,
the Mourne filled with Sperrin water

and now its insides stream
like river weed running in the current—
something of the river brought home.

You handle it tenderly, call it she,
a hen, and are saddened when you find the roe
that will not have a chance to spawn.

Another time, the weather in the window different,
you show me how to clean out a hen bird,
a turkey, that will hang in the cold till Christmas.

The lesson is serious, you say. You must take out the lights
the lungs that hide in the dark of the turkey’s vaulted belly.
Put out the light and then put out the light

On ordinary days, you mush up Mother’s Pride
to feed the Rhode Island Reds, the smell of wet bread
filling the scullery for hens that scare my mother.

Those days, you had finished with the Mill
and the blizzard of the scrutching room that gave you
Monday fever. How cruel that the weekend seemed to
mend you, only to begin again.

Proust’s father gave it another name, byssinosis
from the fine linen you were dying to produce
but would never wear.

At weekends, you would make a rosary of the village lanes
up High Seein, spitting into hedges with the other men,
knowing the name of every plant it landed on.

The Visit Of The Wren

Annaghmakerrig, October 2011

On a dripping day that never really wakens
when the sun is weak behind the line of Gothic firs,
flaring through the clouds sometimes like the flames
from a distant winter war, my head is in Fallada’s Berlin
and there are lights needed for reading in the afternoon,
the old glass of my window becomes a focus for the birds.

There are blackbirds landing in a lichened birch—
the branch giving under them to hand them
delicately to a lower ledge like a dancer
passing on a lift, then coming down to the ground
to scuffle, tail up, in the gravel and the wet leaves.

Suddenly from a lamppost a spray of little passerines
flow like a wave from tree to tree—from the ash
with its ghostly white berries and the spindly birch—
wenny and mouldy with lichen. A giant Irish jay
prances on the lawn—too big and colourful to be real—
like one of Hoffman’s mechanical toys he’ll make a lesson
from.

I have been a happy hermit here
and when the wren visits the windowsill, a great tit
hangs on the stone and stares in; a chaffinch,
lemon-grey and then the rosey male dip their heads
into the coppery gutters that splutter with rain.
The old house is lit from the outside in.

Thrushes In The Rowan Tree and other poems are © Maureen Boyle

Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied English and History in Trinity in Dublin and did postgraduate work in UEA and UU. In 2005 she was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007; the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year and in 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. She has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the form of Individual Arts, Aces and Travel Awards. In 2008 she was commissioned to write a poem on the Crown Bar in Belfast for a BBC documentary and some of her work has been translated into German. In 2017 she was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Anne More, the wife of John Donne. In November 2018 her poem, The Nunwell Letter, was runner-up in the Coast-to-Coast Single Poet Competition for a stitched limited edition, by artist Maria Izakova-Bennett in Liverpool. In January 2019 a long poem on Strabane will be broadcast on Radio 4 in Conversations on a Bench. Her debut collection, The Work of a Winter was published by Arlen House Press, Dublin and has just come out as a second edition. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and teaches English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast.

“English Breakfast Love Song” and other poems by Rhiannon Grant

December 7th, 2018

English Breakfast Love Song

I am longing to pour out
my soul to you in words
which show my creativity
and let off my head of steam
but my soul is not so liquid
it comes out in funny lumps
uneven like old-fashioned sugar
ready to make sure your tea
is always too sweet and
never sweet enough.

Unengaged Concepts

Your thin God –
onmithis, omnithat—
is nothing beside
the wildness
of Goddess.

Love and suffering
may have reasons
but are not rational.

You say we can know
about ‘chastity’
without living it.

Really?

Outside a seminar
in a thick press of people
could you look the right way
maintain your dress just so
be chaste in soul
in ways you cannot describe?

You can use the word
‘God’ in a sentence.

So far, so good.

Do not presume to know
what my God is like:
how flowers dance for Her
how Thou is there in silence
how His sentences would make
no sense to you.

Goddess might not even be that
after all.

Explorations

yearning
to fly, to grow
boldly into darkness
to freedom

journeys begin
with a single seed
but flights
fight trees

kingfisher distains
the city and the plane.

in freedom
and darkness
can we fly?

This Year

we have rebuilt
in our gathering
an anywhere temple

we spill ourselves
practising our faith
with a smile

giving small acts
(and large) in service
a ready sacrifice

we have come up
to see our faces
through God’s eyes

Career Counselling

Cheer up, you said.
There’ll be something, you said.

Not much, I said.
I am looking, I said.

Have hope, you said.
There are good jobs, you said.

Oh yeah? I said
Not for me, I said.

Oh yes, you said.
One is for you, you said.

I’ve tried, I said.
There’s tills and shelves and desks and files and typing and smiling and boredom and dying.
It’s fine, I said.
I haven’t a choice, I said.

You sighed, I said.

Nothing, you said.

Illusion

I remember you
untouched.

In all the weeks
we were together
one kiss, a hug or two,
no more.

Then I broke
too loud too honest
too clear too pained
and you left
untouched.

English Breakfast Love Song and other poems are © Rhiannon Grant

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.

‘sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead’ and other poems by Alicia Byrne Keane

December 1st, 2018

sassy ghost

sometimes I’m startled by how
perfectly my boots land when I take them off
in poses too outrageous to plan
like a dandy has strode into the room
and is posturing,
invisible,
in my boots

i can’t draw shoes it makes me restless
  (the art room of my school
with its swelling cabin roof
like an overturned ship,
  the teacher played the bon iver album
with skinny love on it on repeat all the time
  the song makes me sleepy and cold)

i can’t draw shoes, when i try they look like puddles or ghosts
everything about them less certain on inspection
the soles worn in places so the line will look uneven on the page

(the fear that no-one would know
you were accurately capturing the wobbly bits)

When we came out that morning everything was covered in ice

We talked about so much stuff that I can’t remember
Any of it really, just that I was nervous in a good way

And that we slept surrounded by paintings
You’d done on the backs of cornflake packets

sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead

sunday darts away from me
into a corner, becomes
an imagined dampness

like when you can’t tell whether
clothes on the line are still wet
or just really cold

I was meant to ring you tonight,
but I’m sitting in various places.

A guy says


people at the platform are wearing
green woolly hats in a great number
and it still takes me a while 
to cop that there’s a match on


	the conversation behind me: a guy says Ssssssssupermacs 
	because he’s waiting for his friend to finish their sentence
	some people talk slower when they’re trying to interrupt you

	
THE TRAIN HAS NO MIND, 
another guy says jarringly


(I think: eradicate all ringtones that sound like
variations on the old-fashioned telephone bell)

	
	the train has no mind. 
	the display has said 2 minutes for 10 minutes
	so I step beyond the line and crane my neck
				don’t jump! a guy says
				as a joke,


I look 
at the space behind him.

sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead and other poems are © Alicia Byrne Keane

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.

‘Eamon Ceannt Park’ by C. Murray

November 30th, 2018

Poethead by Chris Murray

Eamon Ceannt Park; a cycle

Ingress.

Her boot leathers are wet, grass-greened.

Things have gone aground at the grove,
only the fairy-ring stands in her circle
of spectral gowns—

her parasols all caught up in a breeze of light.

Wood clattery heels sound
against the stones at the gate,
against a cluster of coppered leaves;

their outsoundings, a filigree.

II.

Inscription.

The park is scattered as after a storm.
The destruction is knave-wrought
A crescent moon is inscribed into the soil
by the small grove,
a willow weeps by its exit,

and the sky is close as goose down.

Geese screel and beat overhead,
someone has sprayed yellow paint on his memorial stone.

III.

There is a man in the stone.

The dew is playing fire at her feet,
wetting her legs.

A legion of rooks guard his stone.

IV.

Stasis.

The route through the groves is…

View original post 256 more words

Poems from ‘Available Light’ by Maria McManus

November 25th, 2018

from ‘Émigrés’

What is going on in your heart?

Prisoners of war live here

Throw off your gaudy vestments,
spring’s best and brightest fig
and let me see you naked
and then, more naked still —

Put your heart
in my hearts cavity.
Slip it in.

Bring your worry beads if needs be.
It’s not too late
to shred all documents
of denunciation.

.
5.

Now we must
hunt by ear and
put our trust

in gossiping swallows,
the hooded crows, the herring gulls,

the wryneck’s potent drum.

Between silences
take notice
of the imago
of your stolen self.

Sold back
but at what price?

10.

Collect wishbones,
place them in charnel houses,
quarter the ground
to make sure and certain
none are missing –
these things bring a plan to grief.

11.

The song-birds are drowning,
the sea is now a cemetery.
The song-birds are drowning,
the sea is now a cemetery

Life’s comforts
are honeycombed
and treacherous,

and moths
appear to drink your tears
while you are sleeping

from ‘The House That Stood For Happiness’

This nest offers its mouth
to the sky. Blades of grass
imprinting against the limits,
fresh as linen. The house
that stood for happiness was lost–
but the heart beats on
for that which curves
and holds,

returning its call,
its sound.

Where there is light,
I want this place –
between heaven and earth,
a high place for dreaming,
a marriage of moss and down
cupped just out of reach,
given form from my breast,
pressed out with my body,
a dress to fit, breathed into.

I made good
these un-helpable
palpitations—I put them to work,
searching out the place that knows
the choreography of forest-love,
where the world and its hostilities
are muffled, suffocating, far away –
beyond the trees’ cordoning
I have found a place
to sing.

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 artistic director and curator of Poetry Jukebox and an active organiser and founder member of Fired! Irish Poets.

“Hair” and other poems by Kasey Shelley

November 17th, 2018

My Name Is

Kasey

Bailer
Kascerd
Kasmeister
Macy
Bae

Casey
Katie
Tracey
Lisa
Chelsea
Shelley

Bitch
Slut
Cunt
Whore
Prick tease
Damp yoke

Kasim
Kas
Princess
Hon
Love

Hard Work

When the boy texts you to cancel your date, saying you’re hard work, say “OK”. Say “Thank you”. This will confuse him, obviously. He will be expected to respond with “How?!” “Why?!”, starting an argument, thus proving, you are hard work.

When he writes back “what for?” you do not respond. When he texts you the next day saying “ah hun, babe” you still do not respond. He has already given up on something that did not have the chance to begin.

Besides, you like men. Men who know what they want and go for it. Men who do not masquerade their own insecurities in yours.

So you’re hard work because your walls are higher now than they were at what, sixteen? Well, he should now be taller than he was at sixteen. When you threw over a rope and he still refuses to climb. He is not worth it, not worth your time.

You are not hard work. You are hardworking. You survive every day in this world. Through work, home, love, loss. Through your own mind.

“You are hard work” Four words that will spur you on and give you more energy than Honey Boo Boo’s go-go juice. So write the poem. Sing the song. Get the fucking promotion. Work hard and become a better you. For you.

One day someone will come to the wall. And before you even offer to throw the rope they will be scaling. Scaling brick by brick to get to know you better. Because you are worth that.

So when the boy says you are hard work, say “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Impossible

All over the world,
Women chase the impossible
Burning their skin with UV bulbs or bleach
Trying to become the “right” shade

Ignorant to the damage
Or just screwed up priorities
It is not their fault,
They were taught this

They watch their bodies, its size
Step on scales and count calories
As six-year-old girls ask
“Mammy, am I fat?”

The perfect brows, lips, eyes, cheekbones
A flatter stomach but keep the boobs
Straighter nose, whiter teeth, hair only on your head
Don’t forget that thigh gap

Seasons and generations dictate
Insecurities and self-hatred

No matter the flaw there is a solution and price tag
They pay with money, tears and pain
Do not blame them
They were shown this

A guy tells her he likes natural girls
Like Kim Kardashian, Kim Kardashian
How will she ever feel beautiful
When even natural is distorted

Supermodels photoshopped beyond recognition
Striving to be beautiful
When even the sexiest women
In this world are not

Women comparing each other
With every percentage of their bodies
“Who wore it best?”
Dangerously competing with their own self

We tell the world’s daughters to be strong and confident
But we don’t allow their mothers to be

Different cultures of the world decipher
What is beautiful
But the universal response screams
“You are not”

Hair

The most common thing said about my hair
Is how brave I am
Well, it’s usually more like “Oh God I wouldn’t have the nerve to do that”
Don’t get me wrong I get lots of compliments
People stop me in bars or at gigs to tell me how cool it is
Because it is

But the general reception from women is how I was brave
for cutting off us girls only superpower
Psst – newsflash- I’m not fucking Samson
My powers are in my kindness to others, my strange sense of humour
and apparently, my ability to put words together and people call it poetry
Maybe, I can but that super duper special wax and sculpt my hair into a spear
and charge towards my enemy
Until then, it is just hair

In the two years that I have had my hair like this I have been asked twice if I am a boy
Once, was by a child whose mother looked mortified while I laughed
In fairness i had just done a 5K, hair scraped back in a man bun, sweat running down my face
The second was on a night out by a man
This was after he had already asked for my number
So the way i see it, he found me attractive either way
1-0 to Kasey

But I’m just so confused by this word brave
Do you know what’s brave?
Jumping off a cliff into the sea, swimming across to the next one and doing it again
Telling your crush you like them even though there is a 93% chance they’re gonna reject you
Reading a poem about your father hitting your mother, in front of your father and mother
Battling a terrifying disease of the body or the mind

Those are brave
This?
This was just a decision based on how badass Ruby Rose looked in Orange Is The New Black

The Girl Won’t Delete Your Texts

We kept the texts they sent us.
Declaring their love.

Showing off to our friends. Giggling.
Home alone we would read them back. Smiling.

The women before us kept the letters.
Keeping the physical proof for when the spoken words became nothing more than a memory.

Using them to torture ourselves.
To bring ourselves hope.

The power of your words.
The brutality of your indifference.

Kasey Shelley is writer and poet from Dublin. She has been writing poetry since September 2016 and performing regularly in the Irish spoken word scene since January 2017. She has been published in magazines such as Flare, Harness and in the anthology Selfies & Portraits. She is currently working on her debut poetry book.

How to Hide Unhappiness / Cum Ascundem Nefericirea by Ștefan Manasia translated by Clara Burghelea

November 7th, 2018

The Miracle

The red leaves
struggle in the glass-

angels whose name
I don’t know

I press them among the pages
of the dead poet’s book,

whose name I promise
to unlearn.

A little water
(glittering like vodka)

and their torture
seems attractive to me.

From the bus, I showed
Estera

the red tree
like the one in Kim-Ki-duk’s
Spring, Summer, Fall…Winter and Spring.

I was afraid the driver
might increase speed

and she will per sempre miss
the miracle.

*Published, Waxwing Literary Journal

MIRACOLUL

Frunzele rosii
Rezista in paharul de sticla-

Ingeri al caror nume
nu-l cunosc.

Le presar intre paginile cartii
Poetului mort,

De-al carui nume
Promit sa ma dezvat.

Putina apa
(sticleste ca vodca)

Si tortura lor imi pare
Atragatoare

Din autobuz i-am aratat
Esterei

Copacul rosu ca-n
Anotimpurile lui Kim-Ki-duk.

Mi-era teama
ca o sa accelereze soferul

iar ea va pierde per sempre
miracolul.

*Published, Waxwing Literary Journal

Haiku

My father sends off black
energy also
under the Moons
of another planet.

HAIKU

Tata emite energie
neagra si sub Lunile
altei planete.

The Yellow Armada

Swollen like lead bullets,
the forsythia buds
are about to burst.
Unhinged from their little parachutes,
the aliens have entered the town-
occupied it in one night.
Carlos Williams, Viorel Muresan
are no longer here,
no one will make it.

ARMADA GALBENĂ

Umflaţi ca alicele,
mugurii de forsythia
stau să pleznească.
Descotorosiţi de paraşutele micuţe,
alienii au intrat în oraş –
l-au colonizat într-o noapte.
William Carlos Williams, Viorel
Mureşan nu mai sînt pe aici,
nimeni n-are să scape.

About a Girl

She has no signal
but knows how to give signals.
When she holds you tight
by her little, ,
florally-tattooed hand
leading you through the club,
through the colonies of polyps. You’d

follow her, even if
there were a cage
under the butcher’s block
at the end of the hallway.
But she’s laughing now –

a strange Asian woman
at an acupuncture class. You

kiss her and she bites you
and butterflies millions of them,
subatomic, flap
their wings artery
to artery and ampoules
of Benzedrine,
thousands of them,
break on their wings.

And you ask yourself,
almost overflowing with happiness:

What does the childhood of an extraterrestrial look like?
On what part of the male anatomy
did the Stone Age queens nibble?
Who will distribute the clones
in the posthuman social pyramid?

PORTRET DE FATĂ

Ea n-are semnal
dar ştie să emită semnale.
Cînd te tîrăşte de mînă prin club
prin mulţimea de polipi
cu mînuţa ei fermă
tatuată floral. Ai

urma-o chiar dacă
în capătul holului
o să v-aştepte o cuşcă
şi-o masă de măcelărie.
Numai că ea rîde acum –

asiatică stranie
la lecţia de
acupunctură. O

săruţi şi te muşcă
şi milioane de fluturi
subatomici îţi
zboară de pe o arteră
pe alta, şi mii de fiole
de benzedrină li se
sfărîmă de aripi.
Iar tu te întrebi
aproape explodînd
de-atîta fericire:

Cum arăta copilăria unui extraterestru?
Ce parte din anatomia masculină ronţăiau
reginele din epoca de piatră?
Cine o să repartizeze clonele în
piramida socială postumană?

How to Hide Unhappiness

Forsythia or Hibiscus?
She asks, passing
Rows of sofas, executive
Chairs with arms, shower cabins,
four-person hot tubs,
energy efficient light bulbs
metal-halide lamps,
table lamps, screws.

Hibiscus, but make sure it isn’t purple,
He says, purple is kind of
common and vulgar.
The Chinese put the sour flour
in their tea
and fill themselves
with antioxidants
for the entire year.

Hibiscus, he says, pink or white.

*Published, Waxwing Literary Journal

CUM ASCUNDEM NEFERICIREA

Forsythia sau Hibiscus?
întreabă ea, cînd traversează
şirurile de canapele, fotolii
directoriale, cabine de duş,
căzi de patru persoane,
becuri economice,
lămpi metal halide,
veioze, şuruburi.

Hibiscus, dar să nu fie mov,
Răspunde el, mov e aşa
comun şi vulgar.
Chinezii pun floarea
acrişoară în ceai
şi se umplu
de antioxidanţi
să le ajungă tot anul.

Hibiscus, spune el, alb sau roz.

*Published, Waxwing Literary Journal

How to Hide Unhappiness / Cum Ascundem Nefericirea & other poems are © Ștefan Manasia, these translations are © Clara Burghelea

About Ștefan MANASIA

Ștefan MANASIA (born in 1977, Piteşti, Romania). He is a poet and journalist, editor of Tribuna cultural magazine. He founded Thoreau’s Nephew Reading Club in Cluj, 2008, alongside Szántai János and François Bréda, which became the largest Romanian-Hungarian literary community in Transilvania. He published 6 volumes of poetry and had his poems translated in Hungarian, French, German, Polish and Modern Hebrew. He is also the author of a collection of essays and literary chronicles published in 2016: Stabilizator de aromă/ The aroma stabilizer. His poetical credo is Man, this mystic bug.

About Clara Burghelea

Clara Burghelea is a recipient of the 2018 Robert Muroff Poetry Award. She is Editor at Large of Village of Crickets and got her MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University. Her poems and fiction have been published in Peacock Journal, Full of Crow Press, Quail Bell Magazine, Ambit Magazine, The Write Launch and elsewhere.