Tag: Cyphers

“Passing through” and other poems by Betty Thompson

October 18th, 2020
Balloons

A stream of them – long and
ribboning before they were inflated;
breath-filled they turned into
globes and cylinders: fat demi-lunes
ably shaped by the long-fingered
magician who, in his downtime
offstage from the Hippodrome,
relaxing by the fire, legs stretched
across the hearth, would plunge
those long hands into his pockets,
to pull out rubber neon
proto-chameleons. How he joined
limbs and torso, how he conjured
heads, ears and tails, I never knew,
just watched this flow of colour
and shape become a rabbit or a cat.
My own cat retreated to the yard
when this post-performance
played out: a narrow space, walled
high with London bricks, it shielded
her but not me from the fear I felt
when he threw his voice out there
to ricochet into the kitchen,
a prelude to his suite of tricks.
There were cards among his props
that he showed and shuffled, got
some gasps in return, but not from
me. As for the bouncy animal he
gave me – a red rabbit with swelling
ears – I pressed till I found a bursting
point. This was after I had seen,
through the back window of his
parked-up van, a cage of doves.

Passing Through

Do you find it dark in the underpass?
Crab of the thorn, a small light for small people.
The travel time is short. I’ve counted the steps
From start to finish. What’s more, St. Lucy
Blesses passers-through, steadies their heartbeat.
Her icon is set into the curvature of the archway.
Look up at the gold leaf glinting. Then emerge
To see the vista of a city farm, its luminous glass
Porch, eau-de-nil paling, fronds of faded lavender
On the verge. If you are there, the street is not
Abandoned. On sad days, I try to remember
The name of Johnson’s cat, memorialized in bronze
In a London square. It comes eventually, bringing solace.

Note: Line 2 is from ‘The Haw Lantern’ by Seamus Heaney.

Quay

In those minutes close to twilight
when the air shines
and the sky is pale as layered muslin,

trees swayed in a line along the quay.

In the river’s waves –
vivid as ink wedges on a Japanese scroll –

in the curving, widening river,
and on the road above, a bus appeared.

Its ample shape grew.
```
Gérard Depardieu in Eustace Street

His fleshy face aslant fills the screen
here in this vaulted room
           still light enough to see the patina on oak

though the lights are down
as I sit in a plush row where
benches used to seat the friends who met here

in silence mostly
unless one felt impelled to speak
 about the light within.

We too sit in silence
looking up at the screen of light
receiving its forms and tints, tracking their force,

tasting the full        mouthed vowels and moist consonants
of its habitués this day
        who, sojourning in the drab part of town,

relocate for a scene or two
        to its volcanic hinterland
to daze themselves with light and air.

Gérard Depardieu in Eustace Street and other poems © Betty Thompson
```
Betty Thompson was born in Dublin, now living in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. Graduate of UCD, the University of Bristol, and Bath Spa University. A collection entitled Painting the Vestibule published in 2009 by Scallta Media. Poems have appeared in Coffee House Poetry, Crannóg, Cyphers, The SHOp, Poetry Ireland Review, The Scaldy Detail, and The Irish Times, and included in the anthology If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry & Song, edited by Pat Boran and Gerard Smyth (Dedalus Press, 2014). They can also be found on the Irish Film Institute website, on the Coffee House Poetry website, and on the website of the UCD Library Digital Irish Poetry Reading Collection. I am a member of the Irish Writers Centre and I took part in the Women Across Borders Literary Readathon there in 2018.

Grafted: Referendum 2018 and other poems by Ann Leahy

December 1st, 2019

Making for Open

Today she is learning to walk
again. One month after
a minor fall, my mother
heaves and plants

each foot in turn,
toes dragging the hardwood floor.
Her eyes are fixed ahead
as far as they can go

beyond her new walking frame,
which she grips and shoves,
elbows unbent, as if it were
some brash sergeant

who she must keep
at arms-length, and who
has ordered this stop-start
frog-march down the hall.

When the shuffle and thud ends,
I come, find her standing,
arms elbow-deep in the hot-press.
She turns, says, with a little edge,

“you’re watching me like a hawk today”,
as if I’d thwarted plans to plumb
the depths of the town watercourse
and to make for the open sea.

And this was before, by one month,
her death – a week when time
seems now to have been
advancing and receding at once,

a week of fierce, contained ardour
for her life, or for whatever parts
of that life – just then a pile of laundered
night-attire – were still hers to rearrange.

My mother is learning freedom
again. Today freedom means
to stand unravelling a ribbon
that loops the neck of a nightdress.

See how calmly she pulls it towards her,
worries its knot between thumb
and forefinger, plays it through her hands,
till the slip and fall of its unmoored end.

In the Fitting Room with Mary Hick

We’d say, ‘It’s Mary Hick,’ to put a stop
to trying-on; a name to jinx
a certain look – a skirt in chequered folds,
or gathered sleeves with lace around the cuff,

a something dowdy we could always spot
if not explain – a fatal glimpse
of what we feared was dull or old
and not supposed to manifest in us.

Later on, I learned
that other women knew her as well
or knew her by a different name:
Wee Maggie, Minnie Banger, Martha-Anne,

tools in a cruel arsenal of terms
we trained upon ourselves
to self-police (mousy-haired)
and grade (mutton-dressed-as-lamb).

Now in that no-man’s-land
of comfy flats and shapeless layers,
Mary Hick remains the mirrored form
of frowzy that I never wish to own.

And here’s to the everyman who gives a damn
for chic or anti-chic in leisurewear,
for mates who caution round his fitting-room
of risks in patterns, safety in monochrome,

for homely cousins they invoke to chasten with:
Fred Flump, Cracked Alf, or little Jimmy Hick.

Grafted: Referendum 2018

The cherry-blossom burst in two that year,
clashing with itself in the verge before the town.
Half its branches grew light-green leaves
and flowers – not blowsy pink, but artless and wan –
that betrayed its foundational family secret.
Behind it, amongst the thistles, a dog-rose
flushed puce (whether with glee or regret)
that its neighbour’s subterfuge had been exposed.
And visitors observed how closely
houses rub shoulders here, how paint
blisters on closed front doors; how the grim
intimate makes public property,
and how all our wishes and constraints
come grafted on the same lopped limbs.

Mince Customer

Pinned to the door
was a diagram of a heifer
with sections straight-lined

across her side: sirloin
jigsawed between rib
and rump, shank slotting

into round. And the people
who came in, we sorted them
by the cuts they bought:

Mince customers wanted cosseting,
all the work done for them;
A fillet woman wanted only lean,

leaving all the fat
and gristle on our hands;
But a brisket man

was a prince, who’d take
his lean where he could get it
between the bone and thews.

Inside too a series of lines
ran through the house like skewers.
As a child you couldn’t see them,

but bit by bit you’d puzzle out
the no-nonsense pattern they laid down,
plot yourself a course in which

your silverside was out
with your flank protected
your tenderloin concealed

or else you’d feel the chill
from the refrigeration unit
as sure as any mince customer.

Published in Collection: Ann Leahy. The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards. (Arlen, 2008)

A Good Rogeting

I keep to myself on one side of a bed.
Its other half is occupied by books
meant to match my moods, catch the thread
of all my thoughts, from hard-angled works
of reference, to magazines, loose-leaf pads.
A collection of love-lorn verse
hugs an impenetrable masterpiece
while Judith Hearne’s eclipsed by glamour ads.

When I bring a new one back
over dinner with a glass of wine
I imagine removing its paper bag
running my fingers down its spine
how I’ll fan the pages to inhale
its pristine smell, then make it my own:
easing back the sleeve and going down
on the biographical detail.

Sometimes that’s the best bit
on evenings when I’m not in form
to get stuck in or to commit
not even to paper. One volume
alone then seems able to interject:
Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary –
something new with every read
and no long-term effects.

I can fall asleep over a phrase whose
meaning remains a stranger and wake
in the morning with Roget’s Thesaurus
poking me urgently in the back.

Published in Collection: Ann Leahy. The Woman who Lived her life Backwards. (Arlen, 2008)
.

Grafted: Referendum 2018 and other poems © Ann Leahy

Ann Leahy’s first collection, The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards (Arlen House, 2008), won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Individual poems have twice been commended in the British National Poetry Competition and have also won or been placed in many competitions. Most recently, a new poem came second in the Yeovil Literary Prize, 2019, another was a prize-winner in the Troubadour International Prize, 2018. Poems have been widely published in Irish and British journals (including The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Stand, AGENDA, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Cyphers) and have been included in several anthologies. She used to work as a lawyer and now works as a policy analyst and researcher. She recently returned to writing poetry after taken a break from it while completing a PhD on ageing and disability. She grew up in Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary, and lives in Dublin.

“A Life Unanswered” and other poems by Susan Kelly

November 10th, 2019

The Bittersweet

Her passion was historical biscuit tins
or so he’d tell visitors
who marvelled at the growing stacks of embossed lids
that glinting with landscapes, landmarks
locations she hadn’t seen,
he thought it best if the world came to her.
He liked her to display these gifts he brought back
from places he visited with work,
that was what he called her.

He’d produce a new one
the morning after his return
assuming her quietness over breakfast
had been due to the non-presentation of a tin,
she accepted them
but never the treats
that she bagged in black
where they grew crumbly and green
and sweated in the confines of their own wrappings.

No tins came for some months
work no longer needed him
so he dozed his days away in front of the box
until he breathed his last,
the remote control limp in his hand.
She scattered the tins around the living room
and took a hammer to the shiny lids
that remembered everywhere she had never been
until they didn’t shine anymore.

The Bittersweet – Poetry Ireland Review, editor Eavan Boland

Skinny Jeans

His quiff came undone in the night
to fall about an acned face
that contorts in an afternoon yawn.
He shifts his body about the bed
to untwist the studded belt
that pockmarked him as he slept,
the impressions red against his gothic skin.
The seams of his skinny jeans draw lines
up and down his tall boy legs,
revealed as he inches them off
with pink-heeled persistence
before they’re dumped on the floor
in a dark, denimous pile.
The day looks in on him
through not-quite-drawn curtains,
the gap, the width of an ice-lolly stick,
the day, bright as July.

Skinny Jeans – The Stony Thursday Book, editor Paddy Bushe

A Life Unanswered

Dust smothered hat boxes stacked, empty,
blue and white Switzers stripes dulled by years.
Flapper dressers and bridge club receipts idle in drawers
lined with the Letters page from a 1920’s Irish Times,
fragments of lily of the valley talcum powder tangible.

I have your eyes but I don’t see what you saw
history witnessed, decades endured,
did they roar, were they hungry, did they swing,
did scarcity wage a local war to leave you wanting,
did world events impact, always make contact?

Did you mind leaving Achill to settle in Westport,
urbanity on your new doorstep,
did faith and prayers of two Roman-collared sons
ease untimely widowhood?
Clacking rosary beads, murmuring novenas your mantra.

Was my mother an appreciated ally
righting the balance, nurturing anima
or did she steal your mantle as lady of the house,
did you mind or was your arched-eyebrow sternness
an act of survival in a male domain?

November evening your pen ran dry
and expired batteries silenced your radio
yet you needed no replacements,
you knew that night
that you would also go.

A Life Unanswered – Abridged, editor Maria Campbell

Lapsing

He files his thumb nail on a match box
softened by pockets,
the swatch almost worn by forty strikes.
A neighbour walks by,
he nods to the al fresco attendees
who religiously avoid a pew,
preferring to stand the hour.
A speaker nailed to the buttressed porch
bugles across the hedges
crackling its master’s voice.
It spouts prayers for the faithful
who respond en mass
in a monotone breathless recitation,
pausing on cue by rote.
He drops the smoothed box
and squashes it into the green
joins his hands and breathes deep
the flinted air.
He rests his head on the pebbledash
his weekly penance
meted out in pointy pastels.
A couple arrive too late to creak open the door,
they angle for wall space
budging him from his idling spot,
the flock thickens in the noonday sun.

Lasping – The Weary Blues, editor Emily Cullen

Room 41

Bath-freshness beckons
but she chooses to accept
the week-old grime
and the specks of kamikaze talc
that land on her lashes
as she powders her oily hair,
the ash-brown lank.

She doesn’t care,
there’ll be no neighbours calling
like the news-hungry vultures
they pretend not to be,
no postman delivering a daily chat,
nobody knows how committed she is
to being alone.

A large orange pill
wrestles its way down,
eased by tepid water
from a polystyrene cup
and condescending words
from a woman in white
who locks the door as she leaves.

Room 41 – Boyne Berries, editor Michael Farry

A Life Unanswered and other poems are © Susan Kelly

Susan Kelly is from Westport, Co Mayo. Her work has appeared in Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Crannóg, Revival, Abridged, The London Magazine, Boyne Berries, The Weary Blues, Burning Bush 2, wordlegs.com and was short-listed for the Writing Spirit Award 2010. She was a featured reader at Over the Edge in Galway 2011, shortlisted for the New Writer of the Year 2013 and longlisted for the 2014 WOW award.

“Sundowner” and other poems by Clare McCotter

September 29th, 2019

The House

The regularly-occurring representation of the human form as a whole is that of the house
~ Sigmund Freud

This is my house my place my home
first one I ever owned
leave now you dirty scum
she screams at auxiliaries gripping
wrists and raging elbows
washing face and neck
and shoulders.
This is my house where stairs climb roots
to a crouching door
there an old key turned in a raven’s heart
spreads out blankets of bare brick
a pear tree’s silver fruit
a skylight in low rafters
its pendant handle – first night’s umbilical.

This is my house it is mine alone
one tramps like you could never own
she shouts as holding her hands tight
we chisel faeces off nails
ours wrapped in disposable wipes.
This is my house, these high windows –
a geometry of winter echoes
dreamt in dusky corners.
And over there a rosewood armoire
its soul kindled with rags and linseed oil.
In its lacquered drawers
prayers and poems
laid out like ammonites and white shells.

This is my house always my house
so get out to hell
none of you are welcome to stay she sobs
while we insert a catheter tube
dodging flailing fists
and sputum heavy with MRSA.
This is my house, these the contours
of worn cellar steps
where stars born under earth
flower on a cobbled floor.
O my house, my heart, my home
your hearth stone drawn from the west
all your great timbers, all your dark arches torn.

The Stache

He had buried strange things
in that great drooping Mexican moustache.
There were the lines, two from Saint Luke
five from Frank Zappa,
printed on tiny scrolls
rolled up inside a wren’s hollow bone
and somewhere near the corner of his mouth
bleached seahorse ribs
strummed with selenic whispers
and a plectrum of green ship’s glass.

First and only rebellion against a father
who knew a bloody gimmick
when he saw one
the Zapata had been there right under his nose
for the best part of forty years.
She liked it from the start
thinking that first winter
it made him look like Omar Sharif
in Doctor Zhivago
and during the long laudanum summer
a badass cowboy kicking up dust in Dodge.

Settling soon after his appointment
to a grammar school where that pelmet of hair
was quietly at odds with the navy suits
and brown brogues
he wore weighing words like emeralds
each and every morning assembly.
For some a mask hiding scars or jutting chin
his shielding nothing behind
rather a holding within.

Exposed in white astringent light
after cerebral vascular accident swept him
down long corridors in a centre of excellence
to his very own primary nurse.
With reports and care plans correlated
and risk assessments all up-dated
what could he say when she asked to shave
his food-stained moustache?
Six weeks to the day since a left-sided stroke
what could he say what could he say?

Sundowner

Reciting place names bright with the smell of opals and sun
he leans in close to her chair.

Stooped forward she is silent, her arms
like the thin lucent wings of a bat

mark X on her chest. With the fading of the day outside
her neighbour begins to shout for mother

while a small man driving a wingback chair
screams can someone open the door

soon the shuffling, the banging, the pacing; her Cuban heels
deafening among soft slipper soles.

Up and down, up and down,
up and down the long corridor he walks beside her

past doors with pictures of toilets
past the woman strapped to a wheelchair

dragging herself along with two bare feet
but when he begins to hum a song from Street Legal

she stops, stares at his face
and for a second something

then on her way past the window framing a solitary star –
a chamois of starlings shining the grey.

Early Dementia

Crisp like the accent you brought back
from the south
your hair is snow
fresh and falling on a spine
so silently straight
as he says
only for a short time only for a short time.

Spancelled to minds wandering
the blue borderlands
patients’ bodies trudge past
the Lenten chapel of your hands
its ciborium – a locket
bought years before he said
only for a short time only for a short time.

Sifting memories in that silver heart
you recall the night he returned
in a clapped out Ford
your name encrypted on his arm
but not the hour
since he said
only for a short time only for a short time.

Chic in black beside a bed not your own
you are unsure how to act
here where there are no maps
no neatline or legend
to quiet the wings in your breast
till he says
only for a short time only for a short time.

Self-isolating no longer you have become
a good mixer, stains on your clothes
mixing well with stains on others
the weekly bath four days away
settles grime under nails
and still he says
only for a short time only for a short time.

Confused by the new roads he travels
you ask
why a woman’s wayfaring soul
cannot follow, watching him
punch a keypad at the door
before reaching out
to catch for you a falling petal from a rose tattoo.

Advanced Dementia

Matisse dancer tripping chemical light
he comes to me

naked and pale at four in the morning.
Arched arms held high

are courting cranes; wrists and palms
buttocks and thighs glisten

with night soil as turning he sings
Scotland the Brave.

No longer can he recall a walled garden
cut from purple and muslin

where in dusk he walked, and stooping
whispered at the mouths of roses.

Self-Neglect

Thin winter moon
set on the pale blue edge
of an orthopedic chair –
her spine (like her face
her heart her hands)
has a history
going back a good three years.

All there
documented in black biro –
the food stains
round her mouth
the whiff of urine
on her clothes, the first fall
wearing carpet slippers in the snow.

A voluntary admission
coming without any trouble
she melted
into the routine.
The face
of an old woman called Pet –
soon the only one she remembers.

Until a nurse fills her lap
with the sepia tones of a girl
grinning at someone
behind the lens.
Five-ten-and-a-half in heels –
a girl in a pencil dress
click-clacking down

A garnet-dark evening in Berlin.
.

Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won The British Haiku Award 2017, The British Tanka Award 2013 and The HIS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2011 and 2010. Her work has been included in the prestigious Norton anthology – Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. Her longer poems have appeared in over thirty journals including Abridged, The Blue Nib, Crannóg, Cyphers, Envoi, The Honest Ulsterman, Iota, The Interpreter’s House, The Moth Magazine, The Stinging Fly and The Stony Thursday Book. Awarded a Ph.D from the University of Ulster, she has also published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Clare was one of three writers featured in Measuring New Writers 1 (Dedalus Press). Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, appeared in 2012 (Alba Publishing). Revenant, her first collection of longer poems, was published in 2019 by Salmon Poetry. She has worked as a lecturer, a teacher of English, a psychiatric nurse and a full-time carer. Home is Kilrea, County Derry.

‘Prime’ and other poems by Peggie Gallagher

May 19th, 2018

Parlour

A bolthole, a room half elsewhere
adrift in distant grandeur,
where breath condenses between damask drapes
and the wing of a mahogany table.
Where an ear might catch the scratch
of a pen, a girl trawling the depths of an inkwell
pouring words, slippery as a river of fish
spilling loose of their net,
slapping their wet tails on the brocade.

What to do with such riches —
feed them to her mother’s wedding gifts,
pile them into fluted dessert dishes,
fling their blue-black panic into the belly
of the lamp ravening on the sideboard,
the soft spill of innards silvering her fingers
cracking their verbs and consonants
the way her mother cracks
the necks of chickens.

The Three Card Trick Man

After a line by Tom Duddy

The reason I come here is not the horses,
though bookie shops abound and a litter of crushed slips.
It is always sunny and work is over for the weekend
and the girl in the red dress has just stepped out –

not exactly a carnival atmosphere, more
a thoroughfare of anticipation, the mood buoyant,
a painter’s delight,
the air still holding the day’s warmth.

There he is just off a side-street,
part of a circle hunched around a makeshift table.
The scrubbed nape,
an odour of soap and aftershave.

The picture steadies, the table is swept,
and the look when he turns to her
pales the red of her dress.

Impossible to say what passes between them –
a wager of innocent measure,
the small treacheries of love and its necessities.
Here I will leave them with everything still to play for.

Prime

It is midwinter.
Your hands are chilled.
I lift you,
gather your first whimpers onto my pillow,
knowing as much by instinct as touch of skin.

We lie here amazed at the dark,
aware of the house sleeping around us,
the quiet patterns of breath.
Outside, the snow lies thick.

In this landscape of wild skies
and running tides,
and mornings lit with rapture,
I think
I must have been falling most of my life
to land here temple to temple
in this pre-dawn calm,
this kinship

of breath with breath
your hands cupped in my palms.

Early Delivery

What had us on the road
that early May morning
when the Ballisodare bread van
slalomed past
and dropped two wax-wrapped, sliced-pans
on the tarmac
warm and fragrant
as two babies
tossed from their cradle.

The van sped on
swing-doors unbolted
like a run-away train
or a liberated pony
lifting its tail.

Prime and other poems are © Peggie Gallagher

Peggie Gallagher’s collection, Tilth was published by Arlen House in 2013. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Poetry Ireland, Force 10, THE SHOp, Cyphers, Southword, Atlanta Review, and Envoi. In 2011 she was shortlisted for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition. In 2012 she won the Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Collection. In 2018 she is the only Irish poet on the Strokestown International poetry competition shortlist. Peggie Gallagher’s work was facilitated by Paul O’Connor.

Author image: Southword / Arlen House

“Tea with Akhmatova’s Cat” and other poems by John Sexton

April 23rd, 2016

Tea with Akhmatova’s Cat

I’m having tea with Akhmatova’s cat
who purrs in English passable enough
that half-wit mice can follow what she’s at.

She speaks in metres forcible but flat:
a mix of Milton, Keats, hairballs and fluff.
I’m having tea with Akhmatova’s cat.

Quite bored, I count the fibres on the mat,
pretend I’m listening, fake attention, cough.
The half-wit mice can follow what she’s at.

Her ginger body trembles in its fat,
remembers pogroms, deaths, and other stuff.
I’m having tea with Akhmatova’s cat.

The truth is, I’m not worthy of her chat,
miss the point, even though it’s not so tough
that half-wit mice can’t follow what she’s at.

The cat consumes the mouse and that is that;
in canine jaws the cat will know its worth.
I’m having tea with Akhmatova’s cat;
the half-wit mice can follow what she’s at.

John W. Sexton
From the collection Petit Mal (Revival Press, 2009)

The World under the World

It is midnight with no moon. The sky is dulled
with cloud and the stars burn above unseen.
The old woman carries a lantern and swings it
over the long grass; the grass reveals its own tangle
of shadows. She is looking for the seam of the hill,
where it was sewn tight before her mother’s mother’s
mother’s time. She was told of it when she was a child,
but neglected the task of unpicking it. Unpick the seam,
she was told, and the true world will be able to get out.
An owl passes overhead and she looks up. In the gleam
of the lantern the owl’s work is clear. It is weaving the air
tight, so that the true sky is held back. Her bones are stiff
and a tumour is growing in her brain. From the woods below
a dog barks three times, three bites of the night. Her mind
will soon be tangled thick as a kittened skein. In the hilly
meadow she finds a thick ridge under the grass; the ridge
travels the height of the hill. This is the seam she seeks.
Setting the lantern carefully down in the uneven ground
she bends to her task. But she knows she is far too old
for it now. A snake passes under her and follows the ridge,
and she knows it is tacking an extra thread into the seam.
She falls exhausted. The lantern gutters and everything
is dark. The owl passes overhead once more. The true sky
has no hope of returning. The true world will remain
deep in the hill. The old woman drifts into sleep. If she
can sleep a thousand nights through, her true mind
might return. In the morning her lantern will be found,
cold in the grass. There’ll be no sign of herself, not even
a thread from her shawl. She’ll be searched for, the entire
height of the hill. But in sunlight she’ll be too frail
to be seen. Eventually she’ll become a story; then
a mere rumour. Some dusk perhaps, or on many dusks,
her voice might be heard in the meadow. If it’s ever her
then the hearer will know that it is merely the complaint
of one who is waking before a thousandth night is up.

John W. Sexton

First published in The Stony Thursday Book #14, Edited by Mary O’Donnell

A Father Escapes by Rain

Daddy’s grassy fields had been driven in
by the feet of cattle; a stone-black bull,
throating complaint, shone from the rainy hill.
She took nine steps up steps of exposed stone,
slippery rocks that jutted through the grass,
until she stood before the bull, his head
massive, his hide grazed where earlier he’d shoved
his way out of the bull-shed. The bright brass
ring, like an ouroboros of golden snot
pinched through his nostrils, hung with a milk
of lesser snot. The bull puffed rancid breath,
stepped through her as if she was fog, a silk-
nothing like the rain itself, sopping rot.
Daddy’s constant rapes would keep their secret.

John W. Sexton

A Matching Coat for Her Man

With each step her bare feet
un-silvered the dewy grass.
The blossoming furze, buds
tipped with rust, unwound
in bursts of birdsong. With
a long pointed twig she gathered
a skein of spider’s silk, dismantling
web after web onto her stick.

Under the flickering dust-light
of moths, her shadow seated
beside her, she made a coat
from the gathered strands. Made
a coat for her one true man, one
he could wear for the fog, stepping
visibly invisible as smoke, one
that would be lit by the sun.

Or, lit by the moon, one he could
wear to be bright as the stars, one
he could wear stepping out
with the hares; light as the air
he’d take her hand, and down
by the long lane they would walk,
their long grey coats a-stuck,
moth-light bleeding around them.

John W. Sexton

First published in Sixty Poems for Haiti (Cane Arrow Press, 2010)
Edited by Ian Dieffenthaller and Maggie Harris

The Witch

With a laugh like a clattering shutter
the magpie flew into the bedroom, knocked
bottles of perfume from off the dresser,
scattered her underwear all over, picked
one fine golden ring from out of its box,
then out through the billowing curtains, out
into the trees that had escaped the axe,
the border of willow yet to be cut,
and flinging the ring straight into its craw
began to shout like a jester gone wild.
So when she came wet from the bath and saw
the perfume spilling from jars, the unpiled
clothes and mess, she slipped the latch of her tongue
and cursed the bird, who withered bone by bone.

John W. Sexton

First published in Cyphers #46,
Edited by Leland Bardwell, Eiléan Ní Chuilleannáin, Pearse Hutchinson & Macdara Woods

John W. Sexton is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being Petit Mal (Revival Press, 2009) and The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry, 2013). His sixth collection, Futures Pass, is forthcoming from Salmon. Two novels for children have been published by the O’Brien Press: The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed, which have been translated into Italian and Serbian. Under the ironic pseudonym of Sex W. Johnston he has recorded an album with legendary Stranglers frontman, Hugh Cornwell, entitled Sons Of Shiva, which has been released on Track Records. He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007. Also in 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. Recent poetry has appeared in The Irish Times, The Edinburgh Review, The Ogham Stone and The Stony Thursday Book 2015.

John is a pagan and Muse poet, believing in the Goddess of Complete Being. His poetic process encompasses the literary traditions of Metaphoricism and Magic Realism.