Tag: Crossways Magazine

“Safer Distances” and other poems by Jennifer Horgan

July 17th, 2020

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 I have, as then,

you’re sure-footed.
There’s ceramic grace in your descent
confident

decanting scant, satisfied goodbyes,
cascading floors,
myriad lives.

The wind snaps my back door shut
as I move about the kitchen.

I look over to where you’ve been.
Take in the disappointment of your seat.

Taxi

The driver’s words are tumours
fat and fibrous, with teeth
sure I’ve seen ‘em blacks fightin in our streets.
his mouth is a gargoyle spout
ink-snaked neck
moss on rivered stone
young voluptuous women
blown across his bones
Tell ya girl, soon Cork won’t be our own
Soon Cork won’t be our own.
Down the bend of the road, he shrinks to small talk
his trip up North
not noticing the cold tap run inside my tone.
Got the cataracts done
Got a deal
Living in a fog, and me behind the wheel!
Fright to god I didn’t get killed.
His eyes are clean; they’re clean
but there’s no light in them
they belong to a child
unsurprised by what’s been done to him.
By the time I leave,
I’m wishing him well.
Remembering again
what it means
this being human

Safer Distances

I’ve seen my city’s private parts, advertised on plywood signs
in block-lettered chalk
Adult Only Store Used-up girls inside, starting life in another country but still
I know them from somewhere
I’ve eyed the types, those grey-skinned soggy men, sunken-eyed from watching
body-parts unfurling

The ships that line our docks are tough but grieve to watch the washed-up
purchased lives they’ve lost
Born without footing across slime and muck, slipping up and down inside
our harbour walls
Freezing to death in backs of trucks, not surfacing long enough to breathe
and float and see

black- water swirling menses, spitting ragged blankets up, onto concrete blocks,
no longer fit to warm them
until summer dries them out, maybe days from now, maybe never, maybe lost
in the hacks and splutters
The muttered lines about safer distances between us, between me and these girls
on scratchy screens

inside stores I’ll never enter

 Riverrun                      
      after James Joyce                            
 
Riverrun
     past Eve and Adam
Drip and bubble
 on his tongue
River wash through
       stone and gravel
 Hot traintracks
 His schoolbag
Oh River Run
 Thank him for the gift
 he gave me
to celebrate my newborn son
 River protect
the London boy
 who praised me 
For just
 being there      
River run
 through his black hair
His wings so small
so tightly clipped
Riverrun a song of loss
Forever present on our lips 
    Riverrun
         past Eve and Adam
     Thalweg
 Land bend
  Delta
   Flood
Once 
upon a time
we left him stranded 
but the current’s changing
A change has come
Riverrun, from where
 he kissed him
 in some 
Underpass
Overpass
Armpit
 Ledge
Behind a wall
 Wedge of stone
River how you’ve
   always known
to carry Adam
Carry Eve
Carry every love you see
  River run, past Eve and Adam
Past songline 
Fault line 
Border 
Blood
Past tall orders
Boys 
born in armour
 Tense 
Protective
 On the run
Riverrun 
through tidal waves
Mudflats
Basins
Wider plains 
River find the mouths you need
Inside us 
Make them speak 
of ripples
Oxbows 
Currents 
Streams
 Forever carving
   Changing shape
Oh river run 
and river make
 Build new mountains 
                                   
His life’s at stake

                      None of this is helping
                         None of this is helping

I hate feeling      wanting to hit something           not you
something thick and unsuspecting    a giant block of ice maybe      
 maximum impact 
   Your words are GRATING            and I hate bloody zoom
pressing small hard LUMPS under my skin   Declaring the ugliness 
of life,
My life        how I’m living it      Telling me how many mothers 
are raped
Speaking to their pain, explain      invisibilised deaths at sea.
You turn words into verbs            even your words have energy  
I can’t summon.
You explain the wrongness of charity      Only solidarity, 
connectedness  
but I don’t feel it with you             hard blow to the ego
to feel rage and your language, your speaking to, Honouring, 
framing, your sensitive lens
None of it is helpful;        I’m not at all helped.  
Your naming of friends,  Libya  Syria  Ghana,
Reminds me     how I’ve never met them. My life is angled away 
from, what you call
                      the Global South

I’m left    in no doubt      I’m not good.     I am not good.  
Not like you, whose mascara is too 
thick to look nice,         your hair still wet and dripping
There is no time, no time, no time    your hair still wet and dripping
I want everything to be better         the privilege that’s 
mine is layered and sickening.
But    none of this, nothing about this, or you,   is helping. 

© Jennifer Horgan

“Way-Tamer” and other poems by Kathryn Keane

March 6th, 2020

Driving Lesson

All I have in this breath is
This brain in this tin shell
In this endless second
My grip choking the wheel –

This brain in this tin shell
Rattles and stutters and jerks
My grip choking the wheel
So letting go is the only thing

That rattles and stutters and jerks
Will let past the steering wheel.
So letting go is the only thing
Left now I’ve learned to fly:

Past the steering wheel
My wringing out of skill has
Left now I’ve learned to fly
Like a cloth uncurling
Like a fishing line unspooling –
This tin shell flies, and flies, and flies.

bones

at eight i saw it.

the smell of earth
thick and foreboding
in the air;
unearthed by accident,
its sickly white
a shock
against the dark.

i teetered on my toes
and held its hands;
powdery, dust-dry,
like old cheese,
its fingers were brittle.
its grip was strong.

and i welcomed it,
when the vertebrae floated
in my glass of milk,
when the ribs curved up
between the bars
of the xylophone:

and i played house
with the gaping skull.

Way-Tamer

I earned that name.
Through eons of the giant stirring
beneath the broiling earth,
Through his waking, and the first breaking
of the land into its parts,
Through the sea’s first fury
when it was split in two,
I still wandered.

I stood alone on the first beach,
on the first rock
battered into dust,
and watched the formless churning
at the end of every world,
and I still wandered.

I saw the first hanged man
jerk and splutter upon his rope,
and saw that the one who watched
like a hungry dog
would die on the gallows too,
and I still wandered.

Even when I warm my feet
in front of my own fire
and the quickest of the dances
pushes the gales away,
the road-song beats within my mind
like the cawing of a crow.

For when I first began to seek
the familiar and the strange,
all those things I thought I sought
but ended just the same
as each useless, petty, little thing
I thought I’d left behind,

I found the tree – that gnarled old beast –
from which I had yet to swing
and as I stared at the looming branch
where I’d soon taste nine days’ death,
I pushed a gnarled old hand against the bark
and spat upon its roots.
For, I was not dead yet.

question

do i glimpse a brute in you,
when we sleep flesh to flesh,
when your moist breath
clings to my face
as it rasps
past teeth and tongue,

or, in your forehead softened,
and your lips come slowly loose,
do you release each thought and word
that hides each of your hurts?

do i catch you unfiltered
and raw as morning breath?
within our sleeping, flesh to flesh
is there room left to hide?

is there room to scour ourselves
as we scour dirt from our teeth?
or can you see the brute in me
and its every snarling hurt?

My Boyfriend’s Beard

I asked him, once,
as between my fingers
each riotous strand sprang up,
‘What would happen if
you straightened it?’
And laughing, he said
it would go on fire.

I hope he never does.
For when the world dizzies me
with its anarchy,
and I burn myself
fumbling for order,
his beard between my fingers
wild and weird
as any of my spinning thoughts
makes a straightener seem a straitjacket
and turns the whirling of the world
into a waltz.

Way-Tamer and other poems are © Kathryn Keane

Kathryn Keane writes poetry and short fiction. Her work can also be found in Culture Matters, Silver Apples Magazine and Bitterzoet Magazine, among others. She has previously been a guest reader and performer at Mary Immaculate College’s Fem Fest, Stanzas: An Evening of Words, Thoor Ballylee’s Tower Poetry Slam, the Intervarsity Poetry Slam and On the Nail.

Tag: Crossways Magazine

“Safer Distances” and other poems by Jennifer Horgan

If you were able

Taxi

Safer Distances

“Way-Tamer” and other poems by Kathryn Keane

Driving Lesson

bones

Way-Tamer

question

My Boyfriend’s Beard