Tag: Contemporary Irish Women Poets

“Ecliptic” and other poems by Karen O’Connor

June 8th, 2019

Red

He said my chi was unbalanced
Suggested I wear a red linen shawl
Around my waist – to keep my liver warm

Yoda of the herb world
Laughed at my expression
Admitted it sounded odd

But red always means heat, he explained
So I wore it, next to my kidneys
Like the scarlet woman

Wrapped in reminders of lust
I wore it for my gall bladder
For all hope of redemption

Then he heated me with Bamboo & Hoelen
Spiced me with Cinnamon
Peppered me with Peony

Seasoned so, he grilled me lightly
For three years, turning every quarter
Until my mouth grew apples

My skin sprouted olives
Peppers hung where my breasts had been.
Then he wrapped me in vine leaves

And buried me on the shore.
Warmed by the earth I waited – centuries
Until I was born from my sand womb

Wriggling out in a gush of warm sea water
Naked but for the birthmark
A ring of red around my middle

God Child – Still Birth

for Louie Joseph Collins

I am your Godmother
And yet when you were born
I didn’t want to hold you, or touch you
I couldn’t see past those plastic flowers
They’d wrapped your tiny peeling fingers round
Or the image of you being transported
From the labour ward in the blanket covered Moses basket
Or the room with the holy pictures and the low-watt lamp
Where you waited for our introduction

I was blinded by your frowning forehead
Your skin dark from waiting to be born
Hold him, hold him, pick him up and hold him
I took pictures, closed my eyes through the lens
Looked at the small table lamp, the crochet blanket, the floor

I watched your Nana though, my sister
Take away the plastic flowers; scoop you gently into her arms
And talk to you, talk to you
My darling little boy
I’m your Nana and I’ve waited a long time to meet you
It’s okay my darling, you’re safe now, nothing can harm you

And without warning you were there, in my arms
Surprised by the weight of you, the feel of you
I held you to my breast and closed my eyes
And I met you I met you
No words can explain that meeting
But I met you I met you

Now, when I am quiet, alone, painting
You pull the kitchen chair to the table
Kneel up to get a better view
Your curls wiry and unruly
Bounce with your rhythm
As your small fingertips – dip in the paint
Often leaving their mark at the edge of my canvas

Thaw

After three days
Of living in one another’s ear
I want to take my clothes off
Climb naked into the fridge
Curl into a foetal pose
Close the door
A hushed click
Marked by the trays and shelves
Piled with decaying cheese
Curdled milk, last nights Chinese
Or was it last weeks?
You’ll find me
A light dusting of frost
Like baby powder
My knees drawn to my breast
My fingers locked
Crisp, fresh, rejuvenated
In explanation, a short note
Pinned to the drinks dispenser
LEAVE TO DEFROST OVERNIGHT

Being your mother

I eat the things you spit out
I bend to your will
at night when I hold you
my shoulders breaking
from the strain
of your two-year
two-stone body
like my ribs will crack
and turn to dust
deep inside a place
I never knew existed
I sing, my breath catching
in my throat
your fingers instinctively
milking mine
settling into sleep
and still I hold you
pull you close
my muscles burn
the night ploughs on
but you and I are still suspended
in my mother’s arms
her fingers curling in my hair
her breath, like mine
breathing in with yours
so close, I often think
it’s you are holding both of us.

Ecliptic

Our daughter draws crop circles
on the hotel stationery
reminding me that we were married
on December twenty-first
the day the sun stood still
the warmest day
stunning after weeks of rain.
Your father, regal in his
soft cap and matching scarf,
your mother, my maid of honour
a role she had never fulfilled
and you and I after twenty years
saying ‘I do’ as though
we were new and shiny
looking into each other’s eyes
knowing nothing would ever
be the same again.
Afterwards in the hospice
his red rose buttonhole
pinned to his paisley pyjamas
your father told us to go,
waving his handkerchief as though
we were embarking on a voyage,
he sang a verse of
Limerick You’re a Lady
his voice unnaturally low
but clear and crisp
like those expanding circles
growing outwards, touching
space beyond the page.

Karen O’Connor is a winner of Listowel Writers’ Week Single Poem Prize, The Allingham Poetry Award, The Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award for Poetry and the Nora Fahy Literary Awards for Short Story. She is a poet and short story writer and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Karen’s first poetry collection, FINGERPRINTS (On Canvas) was published by Doghouse Books in 2005. Her second collection, Between The Lines, also from Doghouse Books (2011), was featured on RTE Radio 1 Arts Programme, Arena.

Website: https://www.karenoconnor.co.uk/

“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.

“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.

“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.

Hair and other poems are © Kasey Shelley

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.

‘Poet Mother’ and other poems by Felicia McCarthy

January 30th, 2018

Reading the Omens

A chorus of voices called, No!
when I reached for the latch
Don’t let her out, she’ll die.

A monarch hatched from the rafters.
Her orange and black wings a mirror
to the hot coals that waked her.

A trail of twisted cobweb sported flies
as if it were a kite tail tied with bows
and she ready to be launched to the sky.

Though we turned away,
she is with me still, as
I plan for the days ahead.

Take this as written:
when my time comes,
to hatch from this body

I want you to open the window.

First published in Boyne Berries 18, in the autumn of 2015
Published online at Trevor Conway’s website; Poems in Profile #17 (April, 2016-07-15)

Let Morning Come

(after Jane Kenyon)

Let the street lamps blink out,
the lights of Ballyvaughn grow dim,
as darkness gives way to day.

Let the shush-shush of the tides
slide into your dream, beckon you awake,
to open your eyes. Let morning come.

Let the sky lift her grey skirts,
draw up her shawl of cloud, the way
the curtain must rise before the play.

To the heron strutting along the shore,
to gulls drifting above the bay, to lovers
still in their beds, let morning come.

Let the gold disc deliver on its promise.
Let the wind come up. Let the fishing boats
sail from safe harbours. Let morning come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
keep yourself back. The world begins fresh
each day, so let morning come.

Skylight 47, issue 8, 2017

Poet Mother

(for Liz)

Don’t let the baby swallow your words,
the ones that arrive in the night
while you swaddle her, humming.
Sing into her small ears the lines
you will write in the morning.

She won’t mind what it is as long
as you talk softly and rock her gently
in the rhythm of your next poem. This
will keep the words from stifling you,
from choking her.

She loves all of your creations.
The lines you remember at dawn
become the maps she will take
away from these sweet days
and nights in your arms.

Skylight 47, issue 7, 2016

Where I’m From

(for Margaret McDonough)

I am from corn, hot Ohio miles of it. And the smell of ether
seeping from a black leather bag stashed on top of the fridge.
I am from pony men and card sharks, drunks and steam train drivers.
I’m from blue pencil marks on galley proofs, created on an upright Royal.
I am from screen doors slapping against armies of Canadian soldiers
every June. I am from the dog days of August, the ice storms of winter,
the frozen mud trenched roads of spring.

I am from a lake that died and a river that burned,
from The Erie, The Cuyahoga, and a town called Ashtabula.
I am from ore boats and the fog horns sounding long and lonely
as they herd the hulls of boats into their lanes. I am from the Bascule bridge,
the brick yards, the railway yards, and a back yard that was the lake.

I’m from The Mother of Sorrows, The Confraternity of Christian
Mothers, and the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary.
I’m from a ham-fisted man with a fedora and a black skirted priest;
both with whiskey breath and an enviable reach.

I am from among her effects:
The loose powder box made of pasteboard,
stuffed with letters from her Iowa mother,
My dearest girl, she wrote, and Dear grand girl.

I am from Mayo’s Foot of the Reek
to the Allegheny farm on the Black Creek
still walking on from the Great Famine of 1845.

Jenny, YSA online journal, 2016

Felicia McCarthy practices the arts of poetry and healing in the West of Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Boyneberries, Skylight 47, as well as in The Sea, An Anthology by Rebel Poetry. She was a featured reader for December 2015’s Over the Edge. She has also read her work at Belmullet’s Festival of Words and Letterkenny’s Northwest Words. In 2015, her work was shortlisted for the Bailieborough Prize. In summer 2017 her poetry was shortlisted for the Dermot Healy Award, The Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and the Over the Edge Writer of the Year award. Her poetry was published online in September 2016 in Jenny, while four poems were published in the UK ezine, The Blue Nib, issue 14. Felicia is also an Energy Medicine teacher, speaker and therapist with a specialty in cancer support. Her articles on Energy Medicine have appeared in Perspectives in Healing, The Living Link and Positive Life.

The Blue Nib

‘St. Brendan’s Floating Isle’ & other poems by Stephanie Conn

October 11th, 2017

Biding Time

She sits by the split cottage door knitting
a navy sweater on five thin needles –
seamless, to resist salt water, biting
winds, the neck tight enough to make ears bleed,
no swell wild enough to strip it from skin.
She knows the pattern by heart, each bobble
stitch is a prayer, each basketweave a hymn
to the deep. She ignores the new grumble
from her swollen belly, thinks of the dropped
stitch above the waist, a small gap in wool
to identify the man she loved – loves.
His worn boat has not been seen for days, caught
perhaps on some other island’s rocks. Still
time to return before the next storm hits.

After the Storm

Cyclone Nathan left behind six new islands
and drowned one. When the sea stopped
churning, she was the first to step
onto the coral rubble outcrop,
to press a size five footprint
into the sand, and feel
the warm grains filter
through her fingertips.

It was too early to tell
if this land would last
long enough to be mapped
or sink back down into Holmes
Reef before she’d had the chance
to form its name on her chapped lips,
but below in a hollow underwater cave
flashlight fish create dozens of pinprick stars.

First published in Bare Hands Issue 20

St. Brendan’s Floating Isle

Fed up to the back teeth
trying to swallow my tail,
I took to watching islands;

small figures on the beach
hauling nets, eating together
on the sand; telling stories.

It is not easy being at sea.
Some days the sun makes
my scales shine and quiver

but in truth they are grey
and there is nothing to do
but dive into the ink swell

feeling the currents’ tug;
so when I saw them coming
I paid attention –

skin stretched over wooden ribs,
tar smeared where the hides met
and the strange scent of oak bark;

voices carried like salt in the wind,
making my eyes sting, the lilting
sound was an unknown symphony

and the sight of those men side
by side, oars in their skelfed hands,
was all it took to draw me in.

I kept myself still, as though
twisted roots held me to the sea bed,
and lowered my head as if in prayer,

longing to feel their feet on my bare
back, exploring my shoreless edges
to translate their talk into glorious kinship.

I did not know it would burn;
the warmth of their heavy limbs
turned to fire and I cast them off.

First Published in Copeland’s Daughter (Smith/Doorstep) June 2016

Rough Island

Below the locked tower
Comber Estuary twists,
rich enough in salt marsh
and eel-grass to tempt
Brent Geese from the sky.

We are restricted by tides,
must wait for the reveal
of a narrow path, walk
the concrete causeway
still wet beneath our feet.

The route is circular –
a mile and a half round
the island edge. Strangford
Lough strung out for us
like a blue silk ribbon

or an old rope tightening
around the neck. Time is short.
Our joined hands have barely
warmed but there is nothing
to be gained by getting trapped.

Our fingers come undone.
I’m unaware this patch
of disappearing land is named.
We hurry into the dark,
slip inside separate cars.

First published in Honest Ulsterman June 2016

What the Trees Whisper

A rook clawed free an empty wooden house,
took to the sky, content with the weight of rooms,
left behind three apple trees, their shadows
lengthening under a neon sky on the orchard floor.

He dropped it into the sea at dawn and left
to find a single storey house. The open windows,
not accustomed to salt winds, slammed shut,
wakening the ghosts and raising the roof

five metres into the air. It is easy to imagine
lightning cracking open the solid slate sky above
this island house. Tropical birds emerge from sea-mist,
squawking of turquoise pools and a distant sun.

I’m not drawn in to their dripping pollen stories
and try to dream myself back behind three apple trees,
their shadows lengthening under a neon sky –
but find myself staring at barbed wire, a corrugated

iron fence, my own reflection. I never was content
with the weight of rooms, tended towards open fields
and paths I didn’t know, would happily catch a train
into a black, forgotten tunnel. The track twists

back on itself, clicks and creaks and groans
in the record temperatures. On the grass bank
an abandoned grandfather clock ticks and tocks;
a child falls over it following the scent of a forest.

First published in Abridged

The Viewing

I admit I came to lay it at your wooden door
but stop to let the flaking fact sink in, as if
it mattered; you haven’t painted the door in years.

They called it Burning Ember on the colour chart.
It’s sun-baked now but still reminds of the buttercup
you held beneath my chin, nodding as it shone.

I pretended you were right. For years, when you passed
the little gold parcels across a coffee-shop table, I smiled.
I learned to like the texture but never the salty aftertaste.

The lock remains, the rim now freckled with rust. I must
still have the key; could filter through the bottom drawer,
feel for the grooved edge of a key, cut to mirror yours.

I could check if you ever lifted the carpet in the hall
to reveal blue mosaic tiles. Did you strip the paper
from the wall? Let the roses drop in a soggy heap?

If I climbed the stairs I’d be careful to miss out
the sixth step in case it creaked; could pad softly
to the spare room where the curtains are pulled

to dip my head below a mobile of moon and stars;
watch her breath rise and fall under brushed cotton.
Her golden brows are yours. Her gorgeous lashes flit.

Do you remember the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam?
How we argued over Vermeer and de Hooch, the former’s
windows, the latter’s doors – dutch doors – horizontally

divided, so the two halves could open independently,
allow just enough light to illuminate a patch of terracotta
tile. And how you laughed as I mistook A Mother’s Duty;

saw only silk, not the leather shoes or the small head buried
in her mother’s lap. I believed she was sewing, not picking
nits from a mop of dark hair. I’ll leave the key beneath the mat.

First published in Spontaneity

St. Brendan’s Floating Isle & other poems are © Stephanie Conn

Stephanie Conn’s first collection, The Woman on the Other Side is published by Doire Press and was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection. Her pamphlet Copeland’s Daughter won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and is published by Smith/Doorstep. Her new collection is due out in May 2018.

‘Lepus’ by Stephanie Conn

‘Delta’ and other poems by Stephanie Conn

‘Ism Writers’ by Susan Millar DuMars

July 5th, 2017

Ism Writers

The world is full of ism writers
sobbing, always sobbing
for many distant victims –
but if they found ‘you’ bobbing
in the river, clearly drowning
they’d explain in patient tones
how your privilege, not the current,
is what’s dragging you down.
They’d talk until the bubbles stopped
pen an elegy then
for now that you’re a soggy corpse
it feels safe to call you friend
while sobbing, always sobbing.
That’s what ism writers do.
Every word they write’s correct
but not one word is true.

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.

Sunflower
Madame Matisse is shown her portrait, 1913

“The Devil, Oblique Angles and Polka Dots” by Sue Cosgrave

March 29th, 2017

The Devil, Oblique Angles and Polka Dots

For Grandmother

Your host shimmers
beyond the margin of this page
as my fingers tap-tap you from the dead.

It takes you a while to snap into focus.

You remind me
of a day when I was eight,
or ten, at most,

the day I got lost in the woods.
How I blubbered and wailed for you!

When you finally found me—
a snot and hiccup spewing fountain
– not pretty.

“What took you so long?”

It was strange how you appeared, seemingly out of nowhere;
haloed in spring beyond the green fog of young birches,
your sudden presence, not reassuring – not at first –
“why did you leave me?” I cried

all the while, you, unruffled, reproached me: “Shame on you. A big girl crying
like a baby. And for no reason at all. Don’t you know that God
is watching over you, Detushka?’

Aha! This is where I should invoke the DEVIL.
Yet, there is no need,
for he’s here, already, lurking.
in the detail, wearing

your best navy polka dot dress – what else –
the one you were buried in.
The one you had kept shrouded, when alive,
in a film of translucent tissue.

How well I recall the day:
me, six years old and agog

for the morbid. For hadn’t you whispered to me:
“I’ll tell you a secret – something you should know
for when I’m dead.”
Of course I was disappointed! A DRESS? IS THAT ALL? Polka dots!
What the devil! I should have / could have exclaimed, but sure,
at that age I didn’t know any better.

But no, it is you, not the devil I see hovering just there,
where my eye does not dare
appearing to me as you did that day in the woods:
light streaming over your left shoulder, oblique, aimless—
the light, of course,
not the shoulder, for the shoulder, even lopsided,

knew where it was heading.

Heaven was always your destination,
as I knew only too well.
And I knew, equally well, there was no place for me

astride a puffy cloud my nose buried in your soft breast
gleaning comfort from your old woman smell.

No.

My place was in the woods. Kneeling on a bed
of prickly pine needles.

Of course I hated that icon of yours;
that dead-eyed, flat-faced Madonna
and her miniature child simpering at me in his nakedness
when all I wanted to do was sleep
while you, awake at the crack of dawn, genuflecting

to them,
praying all the while:

I hasten to Thee,
O Master, Lover of mankind, and by Thy loving-kindness I strive
to do Thy work

… and oh, how you worked!
digging the permafrost. Building His canal,
the one that went nowhere.

GLORY, GLORY THE REVOLUTION!

and I pray to Thee: Help me, O God, at all times

Did he ever!
But, perhaps He did, at that.
What is it they say about God and burdens? He did help,
after a fashion:
by the time I was born, your once dainty feet,
He had magic-ed to the size of a man’s,
and your delicate hands to that of shovels.

and deliver me, O God, from every worldly evil thing
and every impulse of the Devil OHO, HERE WE COME
TO THE CRUX OF IT:
WE CAN NEVER ESCAPE THE DEVIL.

Yes, I fed him tasty morsels to do my bidding – unknowingly –
I believe.

I made him promises,
offered him rewards,
without knowing I was doing any such thing. Like the time I cut
my Barbie’s hair for him
(he liked her shorn of course, her eyes, hence, more visibly dead).

You see; the Devil was honest that way. And a good teacher too:
no more worship for me at the altar of Barbie! That’s why
when your icon fell off its perch

I knew IT WAS HIS DOING!

So what if it was my rubber ball that hit the shelf where the icon rested,
Madonna and Child no longer serene above the ever-burning flame?

Sure,
even the Devil needs a helping hand.

Sue Cosgrave was born in Russia and spent her formative years in the United States, in Iraq and in Finland. After travelling extensively in Asia and the Americas, she worked in various parts of Africa before settling in Ireland. Her work, drawing on many cultural traditions, appeared in the Cork Literary Review, The Five Word Anthology, Can Can, Abridged, The Bone Orchard and The Irish Examiner among others. She featured as a guest reader at various events both in Ireland and the UK. Sue has a Masters in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is currently working on a trilogy set in Iraq as well as a poetry and a short story collection. In 2016 she was finalist for the Wisehouse International Poetry Award

“Sunflower” by Susan Millar DuMars

March 4th, 2017

Sunflower

In Memory of the 796 infants and children who died at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

I dream a face as rounded as a girl’s
and then the petals bright like sunlit hair –
I dream a sunflower unafraid to touch
my shadowed skin, the nourishment of air.

Bury all the children underground
far from harm, sheltered by the dirt.
Stunted seeds, tucked in muck-dark beds.
Safe from you, safe from me, safe from hurt.

© Susan Millar DuMars

Susan Millar DuMars has published three 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.

“Love: After Neruda’s Sonnet XXXIII” by Ingrid Casey

September 26th, 2016

Love: After Neruda’s Sonnet XXXIII

Florica walks behind Inspector, to home where she’s not
at-home. Children’s eyes and begonias meet
her here, on this threshold, waiting
for her to give them chocolate, water.

Her crushed velvet skirts have followed
his silver through tracts, across karst; Carpathia, Kiev,
Berlin. Now here, to eternal damp and clouded
summers and loved masonry.

He sees the amber of the sun
in her kitchen eyes at day’s end; she’s
a building that flies without buttress.

He lets her make coffee and listens
to her laugh peal in time to the
boiling water, bells in unison.

Erasmus

Anwar and Pierre flew to the
university town on this damp
island at the edge of Europe two
months ago. Zarabe and gros blanc,
they are a marbled unit, lines blurred.
She is too cold, he rubs life back into
her but she’s not singing any more
Creole love songs because the fruit
here is so shit, she says. She watches
droplets of condensation on the window
with an intent that is also a portent. He
goes out to the chilly garden to play with
that damn cat and it’s too-beautiful owner.

Single Mother

Is a poem I read, once, about a
girl hitting her head, in the dark. But
more than the discomfort of sharing
rooms, is the discomfiture that’s got a
rind of dis-ease. Empty rooms; silence,
and you left the back door open on an
August night. Further into the forest now,
than a teen mom with one cute accessory,
there is a gaggle to protect. And, of course,
yourself. Alone with no tribe, in the dark.

Mandible

Draw this beak, this jaw. It can
susurrate, masticate, oscillate, fellate, well
assist with at least. It forms a well-rounded
chin, which you stick out when petulant or
guarded or inquisitive. Never slack, except
for on one side, the left, which betrays your
emotion. Gristle inside, temporomandibular
tantrum. Too much talking, moil in sleep,
lopsided feelings. You need to speak, write,
execute what is inside, balance the blue
throat chakra. When you walk past trees it
relaxes; tightens in the car, under the duress
of traffic and all the spineclimbing aggravations
the stress, the grubwork of teeth, of gears. Lying
on sand can wrap this Hermes-in-the-bones
around on itself. Also hot stones, aromas and
the hands of others sliding along the lines of
para-sympathetic systems, slackening, the
opposite of nervous. Once, a criminal caressed
it, gently and unexpectedly. Out shot colours
from your crown, six or seven weeks. Limning
your outlines, a shaman from the wrong side but
all was yellow then, a clear river. Cock your head
now, cup it in your own hand, remember to choose
to rest. Bird, be free. Sing, speak, sleep.

A Belgian town

Skirts the diamond capital, but almost all here go without
work. A man is released. Approaches the media, lace windows
will bleed long after the media scrum. My brothers were acting
normally, he says. Mother is devastated, we are peaceful people.

He burns, shame flaming, pin-pricking down to the
moons at his fingertips. Another time, it’s the emerald
place, wartime. Teenage son and two comrades, caught.
A bomb on a bike, propped at the wall of a garda station.

A detective on his way to work flings the
danger into the river. Hard labour, refusing
to recognize the State. Imaginable tragedy.

Avoided at the eleventh hour. An Irish city
during the Emergency. An almost-man, imprisoned
with Thomas Aquinas, repentant, alive.

“Love: After Neruda’s Sonnet XXXIII” 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 groundbreaking short documentary on families living in homeless accommodation: Through The Cracks.

Ingrid Casey’s blog
Looking at the stars (Dublin Simon Community Fundraiser)