Matthew O’Rourke

Cannibal

i

The night the mob was shouting Cannibal!

and the fire glowed redder than the birds

whose calls sound like gunshots,

 

you held my eyes as if ashes buried and

skeletons nestled between branches

sat in curlicue within my blue

and could tell you

how to be

magnetic.

 

ii

In comes the cold and out goes the varnish,

ripens your shine, but praise me

now, while it rains, so

that I can say you

meant it:

 

so that I can tell them you were

always right. Even when you

unhinged your jaw

and took a bite.

 

iii

Pomegranate splits, curtains scorch. Your

gums strung with feathers, acrid flames:

my blood my blood my blood

seasoning your tongue.

 

Underneath these echoes we

have the shining night, and

each other’s teeth.

 

Matthew O’Rourke is a poet and short fiction writer based in Limerick whose work has been recognised by VIBE, Chinchilla Lit, Healthline Zine, and Rotary. His work traverses cursed settings, matters of healing and release, and identity.

Galia Admoni

Galia Admoni is a writer, musician and Head of English, media and film at a school in London. She has work published in Bad Lilies, Anthropocene, Atrium, Dear Reader, Streetcake, Zero Readers and is forthcoming in The North and Cape. She has also featured on Eat the Storms podcast. She has lectured at the Shakespeare Institute, BFI, British Library and is on the committee for the London Association for the Teaching of English. Follow her on Twitter @galiamelon

Eric T. Racher

For Lorine Niedecker

 

1.

So there you are, now: movement, rest, repeat—

a music all sublunary, a song

that’s keyed to the terrain beneath the feet,

between Rock River and Lake Koshkonong,

a paean to the marsh, the harshness there

that stirs up from the bottom of Mud Lake;

it lay beneath the leaf decay, its lair

antique among the blackness, half-awake.

Yet half a world away, the tide is low

tonight, and wave on wave here all the while

sings movement, rest, repeat against the stone.

Low tide reveals the sediment below

the thin, salt-eaten shafts of aging piles.

It shows the shallowness of this lagoon.

 

2.

The cabinet of consciousness we close

ourselves in cannot adequately draw

forth pictures of the world in which arose

our being, driven to discover law,

or, it may be, composing it within

its limits. The worldhood of the world, if at all,

reveals itself in things-at-hand we spin,

then weave like threads, or parts in a madrigal.

The young girl walks along the pebbled shore,

and dances with the waves, yet somewhere knows

the rhythm of those waves, and hers, is more

than wetness on the skin that comes and goes

in endless motion—something like a door

that opens to a world the waves disclose.

 

3.

In days when thoughts arose and kindly stayed—

late June, when morning twilight is displayed

above the northern forest like a net

that gathers up the trees in silhouette,

the kindliness of thought stands out; its heft

possesses all the strangeness of a gift;

its music, tautological desire,

abstracts what our exactitudes require.

The movement of that rhythm is intel-

ligence in beauty, cold water from a well

or spring whose coldness represents a dream

of extricating truth from passion’s seem.

A hope recalls this sonnet here below

the surface—we are of one pitch and flow.

Eric T. Racher was born in Akron, Ohio and currently lives in Riga, Latvia. He is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Five Functions Defined on Experience: for Jay Wright.

Jamie O’Halloran

Failing to Reach Percy Peaks, Christine Lake

 

 

The canopy of late summer arches over the trail.

No sign of autumn. The leaves are persistently green.

 

The trees, with the wind, fool me

to think I am at sea under bloated sails.

 

Blue paint daubed at eye level on the occasional tree confirms

the way along belts of root and granite. The forest floor is

 

dense and soft with seasons going. It lifts and drops

like the crickets’ chant. This is the path I want.

 

Jamie O'Halloran's Corona Connemara & Half a Crown won 2nd place in the 2021 Fool for Poetry International Chapbook competition. She lives in Connemara.

Gottfried Maria Heuer

Birth of a Poem

 

Out of nowhere,

‘cross the star-lit meadows of my mind

flocks of strange birds

swoop this-a-way and that,

wings silver-feathered,

each of a diff’rent kind,

aflutter in night’s velvet-blue,

they hover over sacred ground:

a quick decision — then touch-down

to lay their jewelled eggs,

oh so gently, ‘mongst the flowers

and the soft green blades of grass,

before they rise again,

to soon be gone:

just a single, downy feather,

gliding down that first ray

of an orange rising moon,

whose shine will over time

caress those eggs to full-term,

until they’re ripe to hatch —

and then — — —

as their soft shells split open,

flocks of strange words

fly this-a-way and that,

sparkling star-bursts

‘cross the shimm’ring meadows  

of my mind,

settling down in time,

in rhythm and in harmony,

a poem fully formed and wild

born of my soul:                                                 

my child,                                                              

    leaving home                                                        

for the unknown.                               

Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer, Jungian Training-psychoanalyst, Neo-Reichian body-psychotherapist; West London practice for over 45 years; work in most European countries, North, Central and South America, Australia and Asia; independent scholar with some 70 papers published in 7 languages. His books include 10 Otto Gross Congress–proceedings (LiteraturWissenschaft.de); Sacral Revolution (Routledge 2010); Sexual Revolutions (Routledge 2011; Russian edition 2017); and Freud's 'Outstanding' Colleague/Jung's 'Twin Brother': The Suppressed Psychoanalytic and Political Significance of Otto Gross (Routledge 2017); and he is also a published graphic artist, photographer, sculptor and poet. Interviews @  https://vimeo.com/196609212 and https://youtu.be/zxEkj9SsAKw                                                         On beauty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK5HSUgngQE&t=165s                                    Artwork: https://youtu.be/fha4jiiN2MI

 

  

Eilín de Paor

Unleashed     

 

She stops with a tug, a raptor’s whine,

ears swivelling antennae,

back legs strained elastic.

This is her habit every time we pass this gate.

She never gives up hope of an unclipped leash.

 

I can see her as she would be, let loose—

a flash of white, tearing around the garden,

taking pots and bushes

like a scaled-down steeplechaser.

 

I recognise this chase—

want without empathy,

frenzy and resolve.

It ends in a stand-off hiss and growl,

the cat having escaped deftly to the wall.

 

 

  

 

Hedge School            

 

Let’s slip on up the Mobhi Road,

past the queue at sanitised gates,

you tucked flat against my back,

duck into Albert College Park.

Let’s swing through trees to a clearing spot,

spend the morning investigating under rocks,

loll under horse chestnut trees,

estimate the quotient of the swelling breeze.

We’ll know it’s breaktime by the traverse of the sun across our lids,

home time by the changing hue of panicles against the clouds.

For our return, you’ll cling, belly-side this time,

we’ll zip down the road, telegraph pole to telegraph pole.

I’ll scale the gable, hook the window ledge,

flick the latch, lower you to bed.

 

 

 

While the Whale Song Plays

 

What Lena sees in skin—

the pattern of its use,

its scars and weathering,

 

can feel in the tension of a jaw,

trace in the spiders off an off-white eye,

hear in the smells the breath confides.

 

What she knows from the wear of nails,

from the depth of shoulder grooves,

reads in the biliverdin

 

of a week-old bruise.

What she comes across

in tender covered places.

 

What Lena sees, must have seen.

  •  

Eilín de Paor has poems published in Abridged, Banshee, Raleigh Review and Belfield Literary Review, among others. Her pamphlet, 'In the Jitterfritz of Neon', a collaboration with Damien B. Donnelly, is published by Hedgehog Poetry. Twitter:@edepaor

Julia Webb

I was pigeon holing the second infection

 

and you were standing behind me

your hand on the small of my back

and your other hand holding an umbrella

above the two of us

impossible not to see an umbrella

now we have spoken of it though it was

probably a parasol now I come to think of it

because it was white with gold fringes

and you rarely see fringes on an umbrella

and I was stepping outside of my body

without even meaning to

not hovering above but standing side

by side but I was also in my body

and there was a hollow at my centre

that the other me had stepped out from

and I might have had a fever

though I doubt it because my temperature

is always on the low side almost as if

my body has given up the ghost already

a palm reader once told me that when

you lose the moon on your thumb nails

you will be dead so now each day

I watch my thumbs and worry

if I was a TV I would be stuck on mute

but if I was a radio I would choose static

or one of those spooky numbers stations

sometimes I feel like a haunted building

all my lights flickering

or perhaps a disused underground station

no arrivals or departures

except for a handful of spiders and rats

Julia Webb is based in Norwich, UK where she runs online poetry courses and is an editor for Lighthouse. In 2016 her poem "Sisters' was highly commended in the Forward Prize. her third collection The Telling was published by Nine Arches Press in May 2022.

Ciarán O’Rourke

Ciarán O'Rourke lives in Galway. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was highly commended by the Forward Foundation for Poetry in 2019. His second collection, Phantom Gang, is available from The Irish Pages Press, and his extended essay, American Epic: On Paterson, was recently published as a pamphlet by Beir Bua Press.

Twitter: @corourke91

Cáit O'Neill McCullagh

Tethered

There is always this one scene
a lens dips beneath the water
and you spy her
a woman floating
sunk in a pond or a loch
ribboned with sea-dulse
the lens - in and out
and in, and then you see
you see that …
that she is …
she is you
or the version you keep tethered
the one you have named Nemesis

sometimes there is a wire or …
tight-rope tight-slices her ankles
winds to bind her arms.
Her arms how she used them
like full fledge-wings
she turned the air into words
tie-tangled apron strings

(they hold us all
those mother-fasteners).

other times the plot twists
a noose clenched to a coil
made by a lover
a friend
another
you?

Her?
adrift
in flow
crowns of gold
a nest of serpents
billowed barley fields
all the willows weeping

(one maid a drowning)

you never really see her
your dreams are mirrors
and you are like Cousteau
dive-lighting every depth
if you did gaze face-to-gaping-face
get spun that full-flux double helix
you could never swim free

'always'
she whispers
'always'

and you remember then
the hand you once set loose
how it reached to break the water
how it caught and kept a mighty sword




Whale: A Planet Dream

(After 'Description of My Funeral' by Giovanni Giudice)

I was like a child being taken
brought by foot along the red-road narrow
it was only a question of hours

into that earth beside my own world
me somehow smaller yet more fearless
I was like a child being taken

her laid on her side in the sjusamillabakka
shadowy breath emptying into the ebb
it was only a question of hours

I was weeping as she drowned
my height buttressed in baleen
I was like a child being taken

into the blood-lined belly where we shared my birth
‘learn to keep dying’ she saughed ‘no death no life’
it was only a question of hours

that world beside my own always known
not gone-gently & no serenity nor bliss
she was like a mother being taken
& it was only a question of hours

sjusamillabakka – (Old Norn) between the sea and the shore




Cáit O'Neill McCullagh has been writing poems at home in the Scottish Highlands for one year. She has had poems published in 'Northwords Now', 'Drawn to the Light' and 'The Banyan Review'. She tweets at @kittyjmac.

Ronan Fenton

Senescence

bless me father for I have / padlock in fist to mandible
sinned for the last time / unlaced boots trudging up to attic
for the last time in my life / snicking shut around the latch
for the first time in my life / what have we done wrong father
for no reason other than / nothing, you have done nothing (wrong) at all

bile-heavy with the past’s plucked teeth / wasp nest up in rafters
chewing my meals with ribbons / will be there until winter
to a carrion pulp / then die of starvation
empty mouthfuls all taste the same / put them in quarantine
to a tongue levelled with acid / there will be no further colonies in this house
licking barbs of stingers from carpet / no escape routes in the attic
black forest embedded in pink mucosa / no playing doctor to pests
curling inwards towards the throat / no search parties for skeleton keys
plates of the coming self / staircase off limits until further notice
bitten down to scraps and regurgitated / frost-laved sun plummeting unbidden

bless me father for I have / padlock in fist to mandible
sinned for the first time / unlaced boots trudging down from attic
for the first time in my life / doorway breached by widening beam of light
for the last time in my life / what have I done wrong father
for no reason other than / nothing, you have done nothing (wrong) at all
reeling ligament from inoperable futures / wasp nest up in rafters
tying my limbs with it / yellow jackets burying eggshell carpet
until swollen numb / lying countlessly still under winter sun
tingling from lack of blood / crunching underfoot

I am brought to scraped knees / sift them around in my hand / stare at the grey clump / of a defective heart / abandoned in the rafters / fill my palms with brittle bodies / bring them to my lips / tell them all the things I have done / all the things I am about to do / I tell them
nothing / nothing (wrong) at all.

blue dance river

blue dance river
substance
atoms belong
tranquilized ring from nowhere
judgement space void
velocity
voluminous
inkling
numerology necromancy knowledge
necrophilia
sisterhood
linkage lineage
transmigration
ataraxia ambivalence
lucid peregrine paladin vocoder
tinsel logograph listening
turbulent palomino wingspan
origami utterance
usefulness usual
usury usurper tingle
rhizomatic omniscience pattern
wavelength
system
singularity
hopeless
perfection
pinpoint
glistening
glory
savage
silence
ending



In my poetry, language itself is as important as any fluctuating meaning that might be interpreted by the reader as residing beneath the words. As such, the text as it dwells on the page can be read in a number of different ways: as asemic visuals, as a narrative, or as sonic poem poetry. Senescence and blue dance river are both written in an experimental vein. The former revolves around an incident in my childhood when I discovered an attic full of dead wasps, an image that has remained with me vividly after so many years, and I juxtaposed this image with the feeling of unease I have continued to associate with the event since then, albeit a feeling that shifts over time as I grow with the memory. blue dance river was more of a linguistic experiment meant to explore the relations between seemingly unrelated words, examining how the poet's mind creates their own links through the apparent randomness of word selection and how the reader likewise creates their own unique links. These poems, in a way, can thus be read as an interrogation of the mind that spins the world from the text of the poem, as disordered as experience itself.

Ronan Fenton is an Irish writer living in Dublin. He has an MA in Creative Writing from UCD and a BFA in songwriting from BIMM. He writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and art criticism, and is currently querying his debut novel.

Twitter: @Ronanfenton36

S.C. Flynn

THE EXILE
Meteorite in the Australian desert

Nothing here has changed at all
since this burnt rock thrust itself
deep in dirt red as sword wounds
all those thousands of years ago.
Once the noise that no one heard had faded
and the cloud of blood that hid the sky
had settled, this exile waited
for someone or something that might evolve
while the constellations slowly swirled
around an unseen vortex:
teardrops of angels
stirred into a black cup of loneliness
by the finger of a hand so vast
that even the gods of the galaxies
would not know what to call it.

Our planet scorched a hundred mouths
on this ragged surface,
but they all speak unknown languages;
maybe those to be will learn them all
and come to understand
that not everything has a reason.
There should be many others
gathered round this patient grail
to watch until that day arrives,
but there’s only me sitting in the dust
among the countless shrubs
and ants glinting in the sun.
As the sprawling wash of black
sweeps the desert cold,
I warm my hands over this stone
that lost its heat
before there was anyone to feel it;
I’m made from the same stellar slag-heap,
equally cold and ancient
and just as alone and uncomprehended.

S.C. Flynn was born in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has recently been published in Abridged, The Waxed Lemon, The Galway Review, SurVision and Neuro Logical. He tweets @scyflynn

Jennifer Lynn

Leonora's Looking Glass
— after Leonora Carrington

she is smooth volcanic skin vitreous glass
but fractures with sharp edges
glass knives sharper than the steel
edge of a scalpel trepanned lustrous
brunette in the obsidian mirror reflected
in golden blonde looking into a pool of oil
anointed in ivory black made from
the soot of bones bone char lightfast
fingers smudge smoke the eyes
tears fall black globules plip plip
scrying into her soup dive out of her depth
into the sacred cave sweated cenotes
subterranean rivers ribs coated in glittering calcite
sacrificed she is the pot that calls
the kettle the great smoking mirror
she finds her double in the polished obsidian
polished gold in hand flying with mirrored
forehead making crossing after crossing
the hero twins in horses' heads with hyenas on leads
find each other in oil slick
in the painted black of her pointed boot

Jennifer Lynn is a writer based in Bray, Co. Wicklow. She has recently begun writing poetry.

Scarlet Katz Roberts

Let me try and explain how the Morte D’Arthur is like Grand Theft Auto

1

Open world games. The Los Santos sunset is an all too precise copy of those orange evenings in LA. Vespucci beach and the way the waves feel when Michael goes swimming or after an impromptu jetski ride. Each kingdom is as beguiling as it is regulated. You are permitted to wonder for hours (or fictional hours) so maybe a few minutes, until you happen upon it. Your vision/ a prophecy/ The Sankgreal.

2

Impassable barriers. Gravity in Los Santos is mostly real…or realish (let’s ignore careering from the top of Mount Chilliad as evening gives way to black night and bright morning in the space of one ride). But have you ever tried to swim to the edge of the world? Once I accidentally ejected from a plane I had stolen from the airport and taken for a pleasant afternoon ride. I fell straight into the sea, and got eaten by a shark — WHAT?

Sometimes you can’t push the world as far as you need to. All this is a long way of saying that Lancelot is not virtuous enough to reach the grail. Poor Lancelot: he gets thrown out onto the flaming flagstones, comatose.

3

Right place, right time. Go to Los Santos customs at the wrong time and you might be accosted by an escaping robber, who would’ve simply made off with the goods if you hadn’t been there— or would he? What happens to the block after you drive away? Does everybody stand in place until you come back? Another way of saying predestination is important. Poor old Lancelot is the moral key to the Arthurian cycle. The most precious piece, the holy hand that heals cursed wounds:

Then King Arthur and all the kings and knights kneeled down and gave thankings and lovings unto God and to His Blessed Mother. And ever Sir Launcelot wept as he had been a child that had been beaten.

And yet he cannot help himself. His duty to protect the queen, his loyalty to his treasured King tears him asunder. A real body couldn’t contain all that. Maybe that’s why the knights in the Morte D’Arthur sleep so much (Franklin and Michael are in and out of hospital) they need to go into standby and let the world pass over them, just for a bit, until they get their strength back.

He was in grete perell/And so he leyde hym doun and slept… so when he was aslepe there cam a vision unto hym.

Scarlet Katz Roberts is 23 years old and has just begun the poetry MA at the University of East Anglia. In her time as an undergraduate at Oxford, she was published in the Isis magazine and was the recipient of the 2021 Graham Midgely memorial prize for Poetry.

Twitter: @skr448

Oisín Breen

Caesura

All we love, today,
Is drenched and bleary,
And we are
As temporal as a poem.

Yet unlike words, for us,
Sequence is no prerequisite state,
Instead it is the onus, on us, the steady hand
At the tiller, too, that makes all action incumbent.

Yet tonight we must sit together to remember
Our dreams, and those fantasies we lost, in time,
Now that our cities are empty except for feathers
And blood, and the grey ley lines we travelled once.

So it is, I weep blood under the crimson-bloom
Of red leaf maple trees, crossing myself
With a ritual of spent stars shattering in the sky,
And I know the ceaselessness of time.

The End Anew to End

Death is a snare, and we the trapped hare –
Senses in lieu of limbs bared like torn muscle
In steel jaw-traps – suffering
Under a merciless gloaming of the soul
Which racks even the flesh of children at play –
They in pirouettes – those shadow dancers
In the dusk, of harvest time – realizing
In one long day they’ll race each other’s heartbeats
To a standstill, and pull flecks of hay
From each other’s temples, laughing;
Then one of each pair will fatten with the weight
Of another marked utterance of life wrought unto being –
For they, like us – hareish – watch the fires burn
And traps snap – senses again in lieu of limbs –
Racked with fulsome distemper,
And each mile fled is marked by a funereal stone.

But one marker is harder to traverse than the rest,
Because when your mother dies the tether snaps,
And something is gone that will never return.

But in loss there is also the renaissance of stillness:
One heartbeat in which to live, one vision, one mind,
And a coalescence – Our footsteps illumined
By what we may yet become.

So with one heartbeat,
One steady moment of exultant pleasure,
In rapture,
I am become the sum of my parts,
And beyond it,
The end anew to end.

A poet, part-time academic in narratological complexity, and financial journalist, Dublin born Oisín Breen's widely reviewed debut collection, ‘Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits, forgotten’ was released Mar. 2020.

Breen has been published in a number of journals, including About Place, the Blue Nib, Books Ireland, the Seattle Star, Modern Literature, La Piccioletta Barca, the Bosphorus Review of Books, the Kleksograph, In Parentheses, the Madrigal, and Dreich magazine.

Twitter: @Breen

https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/oisin_breen

Louise Mather

Metronome

we have had you / made into stone
it is nothing / the metronome
counting back / the edge / myth
possession / the passage / deceit
we can lie to you / an answer
to be wielded / if chaos / cannot be
made / striking / serenity / golden
alchemy / once an ocean / labyrinth
old malachite / an amulet
from beneath the willow
under the solstice / lapping / coal
of warm fire / you slept beside
the snow / falls / lullaby
gracefully / melts / prints
elfin particles / of opal
marks / on the iris /
were they / always / that way
veiled / embers / crushed
into enclosed palms
when were we / ripped apart
the metronome / counting back
reveries / blades / stars
we never talked / about the day
bequeathed / with gloaming rain
shadows / halcyon / plummeting
umbrellas / spokes / catacombs



Solar Terminus

the luminary / mapping our atriums
with still drawn curtains / soliloquized
reflections / of the nebula / towers
molten-quartz / unguarded
clustered sparks / in welts
blood clouds / fusing / augmenting
to scarlet-gowned tidal / words
of solar flare / ancestral dreams
from Salem / in one exhale
after the lunula / syphoning
blossoms / of melted porcelain
sallow skin / anchored / against
the dawn / an archaic memory
of liquid waves / advancing / beyond
space / departing / photographs
the curve / of the sun / you shouldn't
be here / so I know / all the paths
rivers / roads / are labyrinths
avalanches / they would only
lead back here / the terminus
will annihilate us / every sliver
of being / and there is not
enough time / to wake



Marine

stardust / old snow / the last globes
of light / sea creatures / without wings
or vertebrae / a mirage / to perdition
ridges / of mandarin coral / membranes
ricocheting wavelets / metallic prints of eyes
slow paralysis / succumbing velour
in place of solar ascension / abound
miasmic molecules / blunt glimmer
a myriad of debris / cataclysm
the doorway / grey swirls of smoke / entities
swarm / morsels of words / immortalised
nettles / coiled to legs / kinesis / pierced
hooked / parchment / through
intimate details / expressions / mesmerism
gold-leaf mannequins / in all lands
incantations mercy remorse consonance
our war / to sleep / anonymity / to be
painted blue / marine / penumbra
encompassed / love



Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. Nominated Best of the Net 2021, and a finalist in the Streetcake Writing Prize, her work is published in various print and online literary journals, including Fly on the Wall Press, Crow & Cross Keys, Green Ink Poetry, Nymphs, Hecate Magazine, Feral, Beir Bua Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk

Laura Varnam

THE WOMAN'S LAMENT

(after the Old English)


To be loved and lauded,

they tell us

to be leohtmod, light-minded,

to be rumheort, big-hearted,

to keep their secrets, rune healdan,

to cheer their jaunts and capers.



But ic eom oflongad.

I am strung out with longing.



Temper-taut.

Over-stretched.



From what tight-corner shall I draw my courage?



HYGD (REFLECTION)

(Inspired by Queen Hygd in Beowulf)


Who am I, if not her?

If not her, who is me?

If I’m the reflection,

Who is the mirror?



I’m beside myself.



Round and round the oak we go,

Til I lay me down to–

What if this place, eorðscræfe,

earth-cave, is a grave?



Something’s scratching at the lid.

Eyes. Shut up. Ears. Clam up.

Start counting before we flare up.



Tongue tastes iron red.

Ears chime with treasure-bright,

thwack of horses’ trappings.

Smoke sniffs straw and crackling,

mead froths. I spy eagles skirming,

cloud-cresting, over this head.

Wolf keeps his distance, skirts the tree-line.



Clutch Wealhtheow’s gift, clamp it tight.

Chin up, love. The choker bites.


Laura Varnam is a Lecturer in English Literature at University College, Oxford. Her poetry is inspired by the medieval texts that she teaches and her poems have been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Oxford Magazine, Green Ink Poetry, Dreich, and forthcoming in Atrium and After…Poetry.

Orla Fay & Maeve McKenna

Auto-da-fé

 

The dead-weight door of varnished oak wheezed in the blunt force

of an easterly gust. You were pushed through, wheels impulsive like 

a child’s pram, each pew hemmed by stagnant tweed or synthetic leather.

Nothing was as it should be, though they reeled off each hymn,

and outside, on the car floor, a crushed tube of puce lipstick.

 

Remaining is a burden, a coffin heavy with floral guilt,

its gnawing knot colouring timbre, anger’s torched inscription.

There is that longing; burn the witch, the past, the unsaid,

mount up the sticks as they did in medieval practice, tar,

want then the swift death to feeling, to remembering, to pain.

 

In the morning the birds sang, and we were glad to be alive.

Later, fledglings hovered against window glass,

by the kitchen, at the back door, testing their limits,

ignorant of such human construct, their reality

as impermeable as a faith you prayed would dissipate.

 

And yet the river had broken its banks in a fury of will

pouring out across fields, where cattle grazed

by the abbey that once held a muscular echo.

Everything was as it should be, though you struggled in flittering 

thought, anchored as a rock-dragged current to sea.

 

Rhythms sloped out over sand dunes, past 

the insistent threat of water and into a car, 

seat reclined inside the swelling of a three-inch bruise.

The tide would take it all away, receding idly, the vacuum

before a tsunami of violence, the watching of it from out here.

 

Treacle vinyl, wire-mesh speaker, black circle of music; 

the decline into sound. You sense the needle rasp fill hair, 

feel flesh inch along flesh, until streets thin with silence, 

leafy footpaths and picket-fenced gardens recoil from the boom 

of a gate-crashed house party, fun, exiting ears.


Orla Fay is the editor of Drawn to the Light Press. She is the Poetry Town Laureate for Dunshaughlin, County Meath. Recently her work has appeared in Southword and Abridged. She is working on her second chapbook, What Became of the Horses, and received a professional artist development bursary from Meath County Council Arts Office and Creative Ireland earlier in the year. 

 

Maeve McKenna lives in Sligo, Ireland. Her poetry has been placed in several international poetry competitions, published in Mslexia, Orbis, Sand Magazine, Fly on the Wall, among others and widely online. Maeve was a finalist in the Jacar Press Eavan Boland Mentorship Award 2020, shortlisted in the Allingham Poetry Competition, 2021, and third in the Canterbury Poet of The Year, also in 2021.

 

About the poem: Maeve and Orla collaborated on this poem over a year ago and it has undergone several drafts. The process involved a blending into something seamless of their different voices. An auto-da-fé (act of faith) involved a trial and punishment by the Inquisition. They looked to the works of Dostoyevsky for guidance in research for the piece. 

Kevin Higgins


Never
after Alfonso Gatto

The dread of being together
forcing us back to sleep.
The sewer pipes are
our murderer clearing his throat.
And light not needed by the day,
throwing itself uselessly against
the sea-salted window pane,
leaves evidence of itself
on the prehistoric carpet.
Animal sounds. Then words
we don’t yet know the meaning of.
Each still behind their mask
not yet quite alive. The hours refusing to pass
for fear this might amount to more
than a thought two ex-people once had
in private. And never dared
sing out in chorus.

In 2016, The Stinging Fly magazine described Kevin Higgins as "likely Ireland's most read living Irish poet". Kevin's sixth full collection of poems will be published by Salmon Poetry next March. https://twitter.com/KevinHIpoet1967