Tag: An Index Of Women Poets

“The Unfinished Poem” and other poems by Caroline Johnstone

January 18th, 2019

The Unfinished Poem

The house his mind once called its home
Has gaping roofs, and paint-cracked eaves,
Of forget-me-not blues
The frosted brittle skeletons of history and wit served now
As a porridge of forgetfulness, faint echoes haunt
Sweet gentle kisses of remembrance
Dementia’s wraiths roam shadowed emptied rooms,
Herald long laments for lonely roads where memories float
In space yet give no hope, no sense of place.
As Alice keeps on falling down the rabbit-holes of grief
The curtains close on last acts interrupted.
Observers weep at unfinished poems.

1771 – The American Wake

(published by The Galway Review)

My firstborn child declared his independence,
Said he would choose to live, not die, by drought that stalked us all,
Or drown by workhouse shame.

The death knell rang. America had called, cried freedom, hope.
He left our land, was pushed by fear, by poverty that gnawed his soul,
And pulled by hope, and images of greener lands than these.

While on the hill, the landlord nodded, raised the rents
And watched our young ones leave forever, while theirs stayed safe and full
Behind closed doors in yon big houses.

The winds of fear and loss drowned out the tears we cried at wakes,
Where we drank health and wealth to you, drank in your face;
No graves to visit; still, the keening echoes in my ears.

That final day; that darkest morning, as you had hope held high in rags,
We walked with friends who carried heavy sighs, as I would carry now
Two worlds on shoulders, and lead in my heart.

You walked the gangplank, bravely bridged the old and new,
Stood tall and waved, your long farewell that carried over waves,
And left me, as birds forsake their nest, on empty shores, bereft.

February East Winds

Salt and pepper snowflakes
On hair, eyes, lips,
Eurus delivers last-gasp drama.
Frosted fingers breathe
Heartless, fierce red dawns
That slice through jackets,
Blow harsh winds bringing
Cries of Arctic terns
Huddled together for warmth

Tea and Sympathy

He left her fearful, lonely.
Tea and sympathy
No sweetener to
Her furious grief.

Ghosts brushed past her;
Wrapped grey fog
Around her heart;
Buried it in thorns.

She wakened, wrote her pain
In journals, powerful poems;
First aid to a broken heart,
First chapter of her new life.

Afterwards
 
She 
Zipped		 her lips
With 	fine stitches;
The silent needle	 scarred.
 
She buried it 		deep
In the pocket 		of her handbag,
Stayed 		in her gilded cage
 
With a 		silent bird’s rage;
Her plumage 		a masterpiece
Masking 		her shame.

The Unfinished Poem and other poems are © Caroline Johnstone

Caroline Johnstone is originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Ayrshire. Since 2014, she has been telling stories through her poetry, writing mainly on philosophical, political and life experience themes. She has been published in The Galway Review, Positively Scottish, The Scottish Book Trust, Belfast Life, the Burningwood Literary Journal, HCE Review, in The Snapdragon Journal, The Dove Tales Anthology, The Bangor Literary Journal and the latest Federation of Writers (Scotland) anthology Landfall. She was also shortlisted for Tales in the Forest, the Imprint Festival, and by People Not Borders.

She’s taken part in The Big Renga, a month-long collaborative poem, and was interviewed by Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2 about this. She is a Scottish Poetry Library Ambassador, a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland), has been interviewed by children and parents in Dubai at a poetry workshop there, helps with the social media for the cross-community group Women Aloud NI, is part of the FreshAyr initiative and their poetry events, and she runs The Moving On Poetry Group weekly in Kilmarnock.

“The Girl in The Photograph” and other poems by Shreya Barua

January 12th, 2019

|The Girl in The Photograph|

I’ll take you by the hand
and show you what it’s like
to sit under neon signs
when the city goes to sleep
and you’ll have known
a little bit more
about what magic looks like
I’ll take you by the lips
and show you what it’s like
to taste the snowflakes
I caught on my tongue
and you might get to know
a lot bit more
about what dreams feel like
I’ll take you to places
you’ll forget to remember
I’ll show you things
your eyes won’t believe
until you start to wonder
if I am real;
if any of it is

So, I’ll let go of your hand
one final time
break away from your lips
one last time
wrap all the magic and dreams
around your little finger
and go back to being
the girl in the photograph

|Syria’s Daughter|

I am Syria’s daughter.
I will soon be just as forgotten as my name is.

And when they come for me
rummaging through heaps of concrete,
sifting through blood and bones
looking for bodies
to add to their death toll,
tell them I tried.
Tell them I tried to live.

Tell them
That I tried to breathe the poison that swirls across my country like a midsummer’s breeze
That I tried to match my heartbeat to the gunfires on the street so that I wouldn’t bite my lip
too hard out of fear
That I tried to sleep but my ears rang from the haunted screams that echoed all the way
from Damascus to Aleppo
That I tried to find a piece of land to bury my brother, his pale mouth still lined with blood
he’d been coughing for hours, but they had their guns ready for anything that moved
That I tried to shed tears when my father died in my arms but I couldn’t because my eyes
were as parched as my throat
That I tried.

Tell them I tried.
Tell them I tried to live while they slashed open my land till the cracks brimmed over
with the blood of my people.
Tell them they won.

I was Syria’s daughter.
Tell them that they can now have my mother.

|Victim’s Curse|

Last night
I found a girl murdered on the streets
and while her body grew cold
against the slush laden concrete
They wondered
if death had finally caught up,
having been beckoned time and again
by the dozen healed slits across her wrist
They checked
for signs of struggle
leaving room for doubt
that if she didn’t fight back
she was probably asking for it
They took
samples of her blood,
checking for drugs
because one less junkie off the streets
was no harm done
They rummaged
through her phone
looking for signs of provocation
since one shouldn’t make enemies
if they can’t afford to
They examined
the knife jutting out of her abdomen,
blood curdled around it
making sure that it wasn’t in fact her
who had somehow found a way
to twist it through her insides

Last night
I found a girl murdered on the streets
and it was sad
that I felt happy
about her not being alive
to witness that she was robbed of her life
in a world
where the tag of a victim
came with a price to be paid
and where dying
just wasn’t enough

|Serenading Through A Broken Heart|

I know now what people mean when they say that they can feel their heart breaking

I know because I am breaking yours
and I can see the anguish with which
your pupils dilate when you look at me.
You unflinchingly carry the conversation on
but your voice breaks precisely eight times
in the past minute.
I try to inch my hand closer to yours
and your fingers shrink away
sensing my touch
which isn’t welcome anymore.
Your lips quiver ever so slightly
and I can hear the accusing words
that you try to hold back.
You look unchanged and unaffected
but the blood in your cheeks that
I have grown so fond of,
has slowly started to drain away.
You look away
and fixate your eyes at nothing at all,
letting your dry cappuccino grow cold
and with it,
your heart

I know now what people mean when they say that they can feel their heart breaking,
because the entire time that I thought I was breaking yours, I was sucking the life
out of mine

|My Type|

He said he knew my type.

He said, I was the spoilt kind
and if I slit my wrists
they would bleed out alcohol
four pints of Jameson, three of Miller Light
and ten shots of Calle 23
staining the skimpy dresses
and short skirts that I wear
to attract countless lusting eyes
in bars or the corners of dimly lit streets
where I much rather stick my tongue
down the throat of a beautiful redhead
who later finds herself in my bed
while I find myself in a white man’s arms
telling him made up stories
about the ink that I’ve used
to turn my body into an exhibit
fluttering my eyes, showing off my piercings,
teasing and taunting,
and spreading the smell of tobacco
splashed across my breath
into the many salivating mouths
that I’m too distracted to keep count
before heading back only to find
those captivating curls of red gone
and mourning her absence over
a perfectly rolled Malana
losing myself in smoke
and silhouettes of other conquests
that I allowed to get away

He said he knew my type.
He couldn’t be more wrong.
He couldn’t be more right.

|The Girl In The Photograph| and other poems are © Shreya Barua

Shreya Barua is a recent Trinity postgraduate. She moved halfway across the world, from Delhi to Dublin to be able to indulge in the two things that have her heart: literature and travel. When she is not too busy daydreaming, one can find her hiking on the Wicklow mountains or sipping a glass of red by the grand canal.

“Vase Painters” and other poems by Magdalene Fry-Bigby

January 12th, 2019

Fractyl Poem — Seeming, Appearance and Being

How the true was with world
Is sometimes bricked
Out with bangles,

Sound and sight both alike.
Put your paint this
Side, put it that

Side, we talk a lot, like
Talkers. And face
This way, blink, brush

Through lashes, powder on
Powders, a look
For, or about,

Female, they say, so too,
Some male, they say,
So too this or

Sewn to that. Or, some say
Wine is crossed best
In a vat, brains,

Birds, nests like glowed on
Dendrytic leaves,
A state, or a

Syntax, both one
And the same. Say
Most who say on

What is seen and what is
Thought, and what it
Is that being

Is, and yet can sometimes
Be not, and then
Become again.

Fractyl Poem: Be Nothing That Is, Not

Hello is good, morning,
Evening, night,
We say Good to.

How are you is peaceful
It brings glad and
Not angry thoughts.

We listen, we hear things
The conversing
Has its ears told.

Which is how televised
Religious yes
Religious no

Is brought to table and
Brought to lowly
So we know some.

Fractyl Poem: Fruit from the Tree

Growing earthward, not sky
Bound, or even
Thinking sky

With the hair of the branch
That thin — and more
Thinning still does,

To stretch and to store with
Storing done as women
Are known to store

Up skin and grain and cloth
To prune and ply
Some with as they

Needle a strand over
And under and
On across, in

Where the earth is bound with
The rock and the leaves
And the waters

That run about, surface
Ridden, sky phased,
But forgotten —

She is the gleaming on
Moon soft not I
Seeming as me.

Vase Painters

In the temple,
In finite,
Two opposites —

Th’pokeberry crushing
Cosmographer,
Feather a’tilt,
Shadow tossed.

Th’sea duct, eyebright
Singing Thinker
In sustained quiet
Waiting thought.

___

A candle burns,
N’the coarse clay wall;
He sniffs, paints worlds —

The philosopher’s
Eye emerged:

A blink, nearly
To word, almost
Alike.

He eyed, the map
Drawer, feed win
Whinnier,

Him, thought him,
Of him, on him,
Himness,

The thinker
Huffed at such, th’vase
Painter —

Brushing there the
Divinity
To a

Life t’live beneath
The palm that lifts
The grain,

The wine, barley,
Such th’things we store.
Thinking

Salty thoughts,
Wounded like some
Yester’

Great ache were born
Where thought, light leaned,
Said no

Thin, bird legg’ed,
Th’Philosopher
Pursed his

Lip, scoffed at such,
The near Sophist —
Painter! —

There like pulling
Her who the moon
Winks to,

Who th’wine pink sea
Roves at, n’rides
Given’at

The low lay set’n
Rolled horiz-
On cupped.

Between what
We see n’what we
See we

See. “Him” he scoff
Thought aloud, n’returned
To wait.

The cosmographer,
Barb berried,
Dripped lines, he was, he

Was questioning his
Sight, he, he was
Pluck berried
Quill dipped,

Questioning him,
His sight, “Did he
Blot his

Vase painting?” At
Artemis,
There now

Smeared, the whole of
Her virgin breast.
“Mistake!”

Heraclitus
Recognized it with ease
From there

Where he sat smug
Across th’temple room.
“All good?”

He flung his words
Like the dark that
Flings right

On shadows flicked
Out at snarked darkness
By wicks

Bid to dance, to
Linger, “Dear god
Maker?

Are you quite well?”
Him pursed and him
Both pursed.

Th’Cosmographer shim
Slimmered eyes drew
Out an

Inaudible “No.”
Thinker sound! Blast him!
He thought.

The bow, curved long
The plumb vase belly,
Flickered

There, could it, please,
Just th’slim candle
Light be?

Vase Painters and other poems are © Magdalene Fry-Bigby

Magdalene Fry-Bigby is an Appalachian Queer poet and Single Parent advocate from Wayne County, West Virginia. She was educated in Philosophy and Literature at Marshall and Anglia Ruskin Universities. Her poetry and nonfiction can be found in several online and print publications. She is the founder of the Grand Rapid’s Michigan press, Deciduous Imprint. She lives in Northern California where she works as a Peer neurodiversity, social and human services consultant. These poems are from her unpublished works Pocket Book Three and A Book of Poems: for Heraclitus, respectively.

“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/

“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.

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.

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.