• “Safer Distances” and other poems by Jennifer Horgan

    If you were able you’d go upstairs with me. Dream your hips poised mum jug-like dipped towards the sun. In some afternoon’s shuttered light we’re choosing fabrics to be hung. Your style, your certainty, tugs the rope of a French church bell. You’re young again, words held on winding steps in France. In this dream…

  • “Trees Walking” and other poems by Joan Mazza

    Blue Moon So bright tonight, woods glow, as if some rare magic is near, orchestra building to a swell, crescendo followed by abrupt silence, pierced by an animal’s anguished squeal, sound that sends my heart thumping though my dog doesn’t bark. Imagination with a dash of desperation for a happening, some quickening. Stultifying summer heat,…

  • “Shock Absorber” and other poems by Anne Donnellan

    Snare I am tired of you being you tired of the slit-eye side scan tired of the frivolous flip of your bone, tired of your toy dog dead head bob. If I dare to step on your shadow you gobble my frame with vacant glare torch my aura with ethanol as I utter a word…

  • ‘The Writing Desk’ and other poems by Sinéad McClure

    ‘The Writing Desk’ and other poems by Sinéad McClure

    Subsidence I’m of the age now That’s how my GP put it as he half muttered something about female hormones leaving my body I imagined them packing their bags happily, looking forward to exploring better terrain, cooler plains. They don’t leave quietly there is a deep boom sounding in me loud enough to raise heckles…

  • Recent Additions to The Fired! Archive at RASCAL (QUB)

    The RASCAL database at Queen’s University, Belfast, has hosted Fired! Irish Poets since early February 2019.  Fired! Irish Poets  was established in the summer of 2017 to address issues of marginalisation and the neglect of Irish women poets in both the contemporary and historical Irish poetry canon. Recent additions to the database include Eavan Boland…

  • “I Have to Believe that the Body Aspires to a Soul” and other poems by Ann Pedone

      I Have to Believe that the Body Aspires to a Soul I tell you/there was something about that woman/her face/undiluted/ lips open/as if she were waiting/for the sky to come/down on her. There was something about it that/I needed to know/something that/I wanted to remember/something/it was the light/that mattered/this woman/gathered/the light/ held it in-side…

  • ‘After Rembrandt’s Women’ by Iseult Healy

      Delicious She was no Eve this apple of a woman whose red dress surrounded the flowing flesh of twin hillocks, hung over the ridge of her cheeks to flow down to stocking tops Hot and juicy, easy-peel woman They ate at their pleasure wiped her juice from their jaws munched to the skeletal core…

  • A Celebration of Irish women poets on Bloomsday 2020

    A Celebration of Irish women poets on Bloomsday 2020

    ‘Words Like Stars’ by Roisin Ní Neachtain How they flow unformed Then fix themselves like the stars Shivering and held up Worshipped And I And they Staggering and squawking Sweating and squabbling Night and day Wobbling words Singing Dust Dust Dust Corrosive mantles Wrought to a stain Stain us Stain the water to the earth…

  • “Children of Agent Orange” and other poems by Asma Zulfiqar

    Mythical Night Oh Night, Oh Calm and Mythical Night, Have you not seen the moon? How bright! ‘Tis not the sun but the twilight, To the earth holding tight. How soothing! Cool and warm in winter’s night, Calling it the noon, ‘‘tis all right’’ See the stars twinkling at height, A moth gently flying around…

  • ‘If I Weren’t Afraid’ and other poems by Ella Bowler

    I Don’t Talk, I Let You Talk All The Time You sit opposite me, on a broken stool, smiling with your teeth. Rain drips from the ceiling, seeps into table cracks, running onto jeans. You speak in trauma, in childhood, in breathy laughs, in old love. I show my teeth. You take up more space…