Tag: The Stinging Fly

“They say we made it up” and other poems by Wes Lee

January 6th, 2020

Lifesaving

They don’t do it anymore,
breathe into the mouth to save.

We had learnt it reluctantly,
lined up beside a recumbent dummy,

waiting to take our turn to kneel at that mouth.
The simplest things disturb –

at night when the fluoros shut off and the cover is pulled,
the tiles swabbed – there it lies open,

not even a ventriloquist’s dummy
is so exposed.

Ointment

You always thought crazy
was a defection of the will,
you’d been in that place holding on
for months, and you managed
(to stay on this side),
so you made up your mind
that people choose crazy,
but that was just one time
in your life
you thought was the worst,
didn’t know
the worst comes like waves
and you are
Mickey Mouse
and you are the brimming bucket
the mop
the stone floor
the castle with its interior
arches, and the wizard.
And your sore arms
get sore
then relax
(by your sides)
and sore
then relax
and sore
then relax.
And sore
you are rubbed with Wintergreen
with eyes
with understanding
until
you aren’t.

Halocline

And I wonder at those two distinct levels:
fresh water meeting salt water in the cave.

The dark of dreaming and the further deeper dark.
Your shape under the duvet; a book

falling at some point from your hand. Did you feel a click
like an elevator coming to its stop, and

there the floor, there the opening, there the greater
dark that some keep believing is light? I am stuck here

in this moment. The duvet and the dream. Sleep
then something else. I want to know if you

struggled? If I could look close would I detect a twitch
of muscle? I am stuck here feeling the clicks.

The elevator. Trying to translate in language
the last seconds of your heart.

They say we made it up

and I ask Why separate ourselves
from the herd? Why divide?

Paint ourselves outcast white and wait
to be picked off.

Why would we make ourselves the wolf
with one blue eye to unnerve

enough to snarl and lash? Hiss out
into the dark of the forest.

Tyrannosaur

I suppose I used to have the youthful dream of many
mourners. Of a packed house. Now this numb state feels
like the way I was when I slipped into teenage
depression and my mother said: You’d move, move…
move… You’d move fast if a great big tyrannosaur came
barging through.

And I often think of those children in Jurassic Park
when you and I are eating. The children with jelly in
their mouths and ice cream, smiling with full mouths
across the dinner table; chewing and smiling. The jelly
wobbling on the spoon as the velociraptor is spied at the
murky edge of the room. And the jelly wobbles and
wobbles and the children know.

“They say we made it up” and other poems © Wes Lee

Wes Lee was born and raised in Lancashire and now lives in New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in magazines such as The Stinging Fly, New Writing Scotland, Poetry London, The London Magazine, The Stony Thursday Book, Banshee, among others. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including, The BNZ Katherine Mansfield Literary Award; The Short Fiction Prize (University of Plymouth Press); The Over the Edge New Writer of the Year, in Galway. Most recently she was selected by Eileen Myles as a finalist for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2018, and awarded the Poetry New Zealand Prize 2019. Her latest collection By the Lapels was launched in 2019 by Steele Roberts Aotearoa, in Wellington. Her previous collections include a pamphlet Body, Remember launched in 2017 by Eyewear Publishing in London as part of The Lorgnette Series; Shooting Gallery (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2016). And a chapbook of short fiction Cowboy Genes (Grist Books, University of Huddersfield Press, 2014).

“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.
.

“Sundowner” and other poems are © Clare McCotter

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.

“Tarmac” and other poems by A.M. Cousins

February 23rd, 2019

REDRESS

After Junichiro Tanizaki.

Give us this day your problems.
Allow us to torment ourselves
about shadow and beauty and good taste
and we’ll swap all that we’ve got
for one hour in the life
of a tortured artiste
who wants to sit in a fancy lav
and listen to a mosquito.

We’d leave the shadows
to the banshee and the pooka,
and the nun who died young –
she lurks and snaps bony fingers
as your backside hangs
through a hole in a bench.
You tilt forward to tear
a scrap of newspaper.

All useless decoration stripped
in Sunday’s Well where Little Nellie
dances for Holy God,
Artane boys march
and Heaney’s henhouse child
views the moon
through a chink in a plank.

Ancient Magdalenes and crones –
sister-stitchers with blackened teeth
and white, pinched faces glowing
overmodest grey kimonos –
enhance heaven’s cloth,
embroider Limerick lace.
Give us this day.

(published in The Stinging Fly.)

BLESSED

after Padraic H. Pearse.

I grudge them –
more than any of you will ever know –
my two strong sons
and their stupid, bloody protest.

I have cried all day and all night,
every day and every night
since then, ever and forever –
no amen on my tongue –

for Pat, our melancholic prophet,
fainting at a drop of blood,
but calling out for insurrection
over an old warrior’s grave.

He set off that morning,
his pawn-shop sword
threatening to catch the spokes
and throw him off his bike.

And Willie. Will, my baby boy –
his big brother’s shadow –
took the tram to town
to throw away his life too.

You must not grieve,
You too will be blessed,
Pat wrote to me
that terrible day.

Blessed. Ha!
I tend the graves.
I feel the burn of lime
on my boys’ flesh.

(published in The Wake of the Rising, The Stinging Fly.)

TARMAC

For Garda Adrian Donohoe (1971 – 2013).

When Death was a sacrament and needed to lie down,
on a feather bed with cool white sheets and a quilt
made from the remnants of your great-aunts’ tea-dresses,
there was a candle – blessed and holy –
steadied in your hand by a neighbour;
sacred oils and Extreme Unction;
a litany of saints and martyrs to light, to guard, to guide you;
and tears on a face of love.

So,
when smoke and badness billowed from a car-window;
when the shotgun’s snout slid out to answer the policeman’s knock,
Tell me that the old ones climbed the stile –
or slipped through the bars of the gate –
rustled their way up the hill and along the road
in their sepia gowns and wedding-suits
to kneel on the wet tarmac, to cradle your head, to hold your hand.
Tell me that they looked on your face with love.

(published in The SHop.)

HARE

After the nuns left
we noticed that a hare –
a beast of a fellow
with strong back legs,
proud ears
and a thick fur coat –
had moved in.

Superior now, our hare
lays waste to what is left
of the lay-sisters herb garden,
savages Reverend Mother’s salad bed
and emerges fragrant from the Mistress
of Novices’ lavender border.

Sweet and sated,
it bounds through the cloisters –
not a chance of prayer
passing its cloven lip –
its soul long saved.

(published in The Best New British and Irish Poets, 2017)

BED-SIT

For Brendan

Once, the city stood ankle-deep in snow
and in a single bed in Rathmines,
we listened to the joyful news –
sombrely announced at the scrag end
of universal bad tidings –
that schools had closed until further notice.

We walked to Morton’s for butter and fruit, sugar and spice.
My cowboy boots let in wet, your work-boots weathered all.

Rolling pastry with a beer bottle
we raised a blizzard of our own,
filled sweet shortcrust with cloves and apple,
challenged flatland’s drag of Vesta curry and cigarettes
as molten caramel flowed,
burned the rented oven.

(published in Poetry Ireland.)

Saorstat

On one of those hot summer’s mornings
between the Troubled Times and the Emergency,
he found a penny outside the mart.

Backed by the harp of Saorstat Eireann,
a proud hen – with confident wings
and abundant tail feathers – sheltered
five chickens and promised better times to come
for some, if not for all.

He remembers considering the box on the nun’s table –
the slot, snugly cut to fit a brown penny,
over the picture of a hungry child –
but his small palms still smarted
from an encounter with the good sister’s strap.

So, when his father matched the copper with another –
the price of a bag of liquorice sweets –
he forgot the nun’s black baby.

He thinks on these things now,
as a young woman – with liquorice braids
and the whitest teeth he has ever seen –
coaxes him with custard-spoonfuls
and calls him her darling boy.

(published in Skylight 47)

TARMAC, for Garda Adrian Donohoe (1971 – 2013) and other poems are © A.M. Cousins

A.M. Cousins‘ poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, The SHoP, The Honest Ulsterman, The Irish Literary Review and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear Publishing). Her work was Highly Commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Competition 2015 and 2016, and she featured in Poetry Ireland’s Introduction Series, 2016. She also writes memoir and local history essays and is a regular reader on “Sunday Miscellany.”

‘Wild Fennel’ and other poems by Tess Barry

September 4th, 2017

Raspberries

I started out in western Pennsylvania hills
with wild raspberry and blackberry bushes
and my mother’s apple field.
Bread and ripe fruit and fresh milk.
My mother cleaned the carpet right off the floor.
My father was a Troy Hill boy who played piano
and smoked Pall Malls and drank whiskey.
He won my mother in a dance contest.
Who wouldn’t learn to jitterbug for a prize like her?
They took a train to Cape Cod for a honeymoon
and bought hats for their mothers.
They sailed all the way from the Cape to ten children.

My whole life has been ripe with wild fruit.
All the men I’ve loved had left feet. I was innocent
until I got myself a good pair of rain boots.
There is no point in wondering what I’ll come to.
With my first words I wrote my own path
straight to New York: all night accents, brick stoops.
I left there like a mad dog running free
like our Dusty who got himself killed down the street,
chasing the neighborhood boys. He ran smack into a fender.
We buried him up in the woods after a proper funeral.
No amount of experience can shake
the ripeness out of me, or my mother, or my father
who didn’t just win a bride
with his right feet and big shoes.
He won a green thumb.

Near the Ocean’s Edge

The bus that took my mother to Atlantic City in 1945 was a Greyhound.
She was fourteen, leaving home for the first time
to visit Adeline and John Higgins, who used to live next door.
They were childless and good to her.

She traveled alone, a tiny solitary thing.
A drunken sailor sat down next to her and stared then asked
Can I suck a hickey on your neck?
She had no idea what he meant, moved seats and sat alone.

Seeing the ocean for the first time she wept.
She couldn’t swim but walked the shore for hours.
Near the ocean’s edge she first saw seahorses, a herd of them floating.
They were beautiful and stationary, too magical to be living—

she thought them shells. Packed her suitcase full of them,
laid them gently between her worn cotton dresses
and underthings. Arriving home she opened her case
to show her treasures to a friend and they’d rotted.

The stench so strong it dizzies her still.

My Father’s Remains

The moment he died,
my father’s remains
grew small in size, shaped
by our hands and fingers.

The faint and lingering scent
of tobacco rose from
our paging his hymnals
and pawing his coats.

His wallet was frayed,
its outer-edges rawhide again
from years of his palming.
It held very little cash.

We opened that wallet
and found a fold-out tent,
stitched together in plastic
rows of worn faces.

It unfurled easily and we
fell down in steps. It held
all ten of us and our mother.
We found the wallet

in his small sock drawer,
the socks all uniform, all
black. I took them all and he
was laid to rest in borrowed.

Wild Fennel

render me yellow
a little while longer
bedside coast through sea window
render me open
scent my bedclothes with pollen
in cupped water linger
dusting May with your flavor
render me axis
stolen stalk of Prometheus
wand of forethought
weed-stem of longing
perennial center
render me umbel

After Singing Midnight Mass

The rest have gone ahead.
Old enough now
to walk the distance alone.

In these short hours
snow has fallen, just
a dusting marks the streets.

Cold air breathes all around.
Here now.
Wreathed doors beckon. Turning

the corner to North Avenue
the moon follows,
white against the clear blue night.

Up and down the sleeping mile
choir voices
echo still, the loft’s round staircase,

filled with joyful noise, silent now.
Our conductor’s wand
waving, his final smile

humming on. Already Christmas
morning. The paved road
ends, rough surface comes.

Ground known so well.
Almost there now.
Quiet woods to one side,

the tree trimmed before church
glows in the window.
Skating down the stone steps, one

by one. Gliding on. Hands
gloved, still warm.
Sound and light within.

Deciduous

I am the seed that roots and spreads,
I am the underbough unbearing.
I am the meristem, the forest in refuge,
the division in moss and the division in fern.
I am the absence of sound in deep rise,
in snow-buried mound, in matter-of-fact serration,
the feeling of stillness, that widens
and widens, then rustles and spills
from forked tongue to tadpole-spitting stream.
I am boundlessness of now, when it
is good to bear nothing but the weight
of its great vastness, while winters
pass from absence to deafening gathering
to absence again, many re-births
and sprawling coverings, till the falling ahead
becomes the falling behind, and half
the short seasons of the day are sameness.
Widening pools cast my perpetual echo,
I am bark of skin dividing out,
I am winged vertebrate weaving,
I am cambium, the forest in refuge,
the division in fern the place
of meristem division.

Tess Barry was shortlisted for the 2015 Manchester Poetry Prize (UK). Twice a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Magazine’s (UK) Poetry Award, she also was shortlisted for the 2014 Bridport Poetry Prize (UK). Most recently, her poems appeared in or are forthcoming in And Other Poems (UK), The Compass Magazine (UK), Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), Mslexia (UK), Mudfish, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly (Ireland), and The Woven Tale Press Literary and Fine Arts Magazine. Barry is a Fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and teaches literature and creative writing at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. Website: Tess Barry

Publication Details

Wild Fennel, My Father’s Remains, Raspberries, Near the Ocean’s Edge, and After Singing Midnight Mass were shortlisted for the 2015 Manchester Poetry Prize and previously published on the Manchester Writing School’s website as part of the press release announcing the shortlisted poets.

Deciduous was a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and published in North American Review’s Spring 2014 issue.

‘I Saw Beckett The Other Day’ and other poems by Órfhlaith Foyle

August 31st, 2017

Photograph of Her Brother’s Skull

They give you to me,
a numbered skull from a high shelf
and in my hand you are
a strange brute thing – a thing I hardly see
-my brother.

The clean smooth bone of you
– the whole of you no longer with me.
In this room of discovered skulls,
I have lost my memories
And the photographer fixes your dead stare
for his lens.

In this room of skulls,
Your face is lost,
my brother,
and I grips hard to what is left.

After Sunday Mass in Malawi

After Sunday Mass they whispered:
‘he was a poet, perhaps.
A dissident, yes.’
He ignored the spies in his classroom.’
Then someone else also remembered:
‘Of course, this is not our country.
We are Whites, you see

I Saw Beckett the Other Day

I saw Beckett the other day
in the doorway of that café
where you took his photograph.

You know the one…
when he looked up at the lens
and realised how he could
haunt us all.

‘Hey Beckett,’ I said
Rejoicing in my discovery of him;
his hand on the door, his eyes
skimming over the interior image
of cigarette smoke and coffee.

I stood beside him. He rubbed his face so
he might recognise me. I smiled and
said even I didn’t know what was
happening these days.
Even I could not stop the end.

He nodded, coughed and looked sly; his teeth were
yellow over the pink rim of his lips.
He mentioned the photograph. He said his face
had collected worms under the skin as if ready for
death and he smiled to show them dance
spasmatic with age-spots and veins.

Someone entered the café. Someone left.
Beckett touched the hair above my ear.
I stood on tip-toe so he could whisper down.
He said nothing. It was just a kiss
with the cold wind at our feet and the
smoke and egg friendly air
released in draughts between
the opening and closing of the café door;

Which he stepped through to find his table
and entered some other world,
under greasy lights
coupled with table shine and coffee cups,
and thoughts of death, where she stood
groomed for an entrance, were held back by
the odd moments of life
that still strung the useful breaths
Beckett used to blow his coffee cool.

‘I Saw Beckett The Other Day’ and other poems are © Órfhlaith Foyle

Órfhlaith Foyle’s first novel Belios was published by The Lilliput Press. Her first full poetry collection Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma (Arlen House) was short-listed for the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award in 2011. Arlen House published Foyle’s debut short fiction, Somewhere in Minnesota, in 2011; its title story first appeared in Faber and Faber’s New Irish Short Stories (2011), edited by Joseph O’Connor. Foyle’s second short fiction collection Clemency Browne Dreams of Gin (Arlen House 2014) was chosen as one the Irish Times books of the year. Her work has been published in The Dublin Review, The Wales Arts Review, The Manchester Review, and The Stinging Fly.

Órfhlaith Foyle was born in Africa to Irish parents and now lives in Galway, Ireland.

“The Valley” by Kerry Hardie.

January 8th, 2011

The Valley

by Kerry Hardie.

The first valley is the Valley of the Quest,
the second the Valley of Love
the third is the Valley of Understanding
the fourth is the Valley of Independence and Detachment
the fifth of Pure Unity
the sixth is the Valley of Astonishment
and the seventh is the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness
beyond which one can go no further.’

That is a Sufi story
about a whole crowd of birds getting ready
to go on an Awful Journey.
They elect the Hoopoe as leader
because he knows a thing or two,
for instance the lie of the various valleys,
and which one comes after which.
What I like is the way it’s all more or less as expected
until you hit the sixth.

I should like to go
to the Valley of Astonishment.
I wonder where it lies
this astonishing Valley of Astonishment ?
In China perhaps?
Or Peru?
I wonder if you could stay there
Out of your wits with astonishment,
or if , in this witlessness, you might find yourself
stumbling on , over the mountain –

Note : the first stanza is quoted from The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, written in the second half of the twelfth century AD. This rendering in english is by C.S Nott.

Taken from The Stinging Fly , 25th Issue. Ed Declan Meade.

Kerry Hardie bio page from Poetry International Web
Women writers on Poethead 2010

Tapestry Bird from Fine Art, America.