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The Weary Blues Issue 6 PDF
The Weary Blues Issue 6 PDF
Weary Blues
ISSUE VI
AUGUST 2014
The weary blues
in this journal. New and established authors and artists are finding
hoped that The Weary Blues will contribute to the alleviation of this
pressing issue.
ISSN: 2009-521X
New Binary Press wishes to acknowledge its Advisory Board
Graham Allen Noel King
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Editorial
Cal Doyle
Editor, Poe t ry
Nora Duggan
Editor, Visual Art & Photo g raphy
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Lenora Murphy
Cop y -editor and Pr o of-r eader
J a m e s O ’S u l l i va n
Fo unding Editor
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Poetry
A n to n y Ow e n
ANTONY OWEN is from Coventry. His first collection of
poetry My Father’s Eyes Were Blue was published in May 2009 by
Heaventree Press.
Candy Cane
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Daniel Ryan
DANIEL RYAN was born in London to Irish parents and grew
up in Tipperary. After publishing poems in a number of journals
and magazines, both in print and online, he is at work on a debut
collection.
Blue
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Graham Allen
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No Name in a Junior Disco
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F e at u r e d P o e t
J o h n W. S e x t o n
John W. Sexton’s fifth full collection of poetry, The Offspring of
the Moon, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2013. 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 also
the blog poet Jack Brae Curtingstall. 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.
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Soul of a Thrush
a novel in solid
black ink ... Finnegan's Ache
still on my fingers
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lottery picket
a cough arrives
from the future
... A Sense of No
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blackbirds ate
her every thought ... a sense of no
in the meadow
weaving a thought-gate
the spiders spin moonlight ...
Tao unburdens Tao
without a weapon
or even a thought ... grass
takes back the world
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Pa Radox's
cunning inside-out-box
spills what it keeps
is-not of is ...
he rides upon the space left
by his stolen horse
tipped ...
the chair falls to a state
of perfect balance
can-opener ...
turning anti-clockwise
Miss Gnole severs a can't
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Tea Time is O
travelled by shuttlecock
to another Dimension
... returned forthwith
nightshade muffins
tea time is o
ver in no time
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in memory of
our invisible friends ... when childhood died
they died
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R a c h e l Wa r r i n e r
RACHEL WARRINER lives in Cork with her young family. She is
completing a PhD in the School of Art History, UCC. Her most
recent book Fine Lament was published by Critical Documents.
Rachel is a founding editor at RunAmok press and organises the
Soundeye and Avant festivals in Cork.
we made the baby for modernism, now he's all grids and
planes
banished downstairs
louder but defeated
thinpatience exposure
****MISOGYNIST OR SNOB??****
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filial bores
my god
stand up you ranters
'this doesn't stop anywhere'
male certitude?
destroy your rectitude?
am I here?
duckrabbit
whitewhine
professor without portfolio
up tripping
through mirrors
our scraping
at hallmarks
we're standing
in relation
but I
can't for
the life
of me
work out
why.
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'dose of prunes'
bird storm
a cappella
my cells
my sells
hive exception
webswarming
that touch-
strength-
stability
crackle at sea
that glimmer
pale & paler
gumsmile
slumped
strength fail
strive empty
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splatter blood
on the walls
(40s style)
doodlebug chic
just lovely
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R i c h a r d H aw t r e e
RICHARD HAWTREE completed a doctorate on Anglo-Saxon
poetic manuscripts at UCC in 2009. He now lives in Hindhead,
Surrey where he writes articles concerning early medieval texts.
Translations from German and Icelandic have appeared in
The Penny Dreadful. His poem Matinée Idol was shortlisted
in the 2013/14 inaugural Ó Bhéal International Five Words
Competition.
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Short Fiction
D av e Lordan
Dark Madonna
She decided to stop washing herself. She decided to stop grooming
herself in any way whatsoever. I don’t know if she continued wiping herself
after going to the toilet. I don’t know how she dealt with menstruation, or
if she avoided it altogether by taking the pill. If she made any exceptions to
her filth regime, they were not obvious.The stink was obvious. It was dense,
and complex. It had tones and layers and unexpected interactions; sweat,
dirt, feces, urine - fresh, maturing, fully matured - all mingling, all churning
one into the other. Whether the stink came at you intermittently in waves,
or whether it settled unbudgingly around you, there was no getting used to
it. It was best not to eat or drink anything for a few hours before you went
to visit her. When somebody retched, or fled out of her presence to go vomit
somewhere, she just clicked her tongue and continued to smoke. Everyone
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At first some of her concerned and anxious friends tried to talk her out
of her decision, but there was no talking her out of it. Her laid-back friends
just said let her at it, she’s stubborn and contrary and that is why we like her,
that is why we started hanging out with her in the first place. Rebels forever,
remember? In a month or so her filthy condition became both familiar and
unmentionable, like a mother-in-law’s alcoholism.
Many Irish people believe, or say they believe, that you can drink
yourself sober. Similarly, some who heard about her in the pubs and groves
rumoured that she counted on achieving a perfect, edenic cleanliness through
letting nature take its course all over her, from head to toe, from foot-sole
to follicle. She was convinced her body would learn, or remember, how to
clean itself using it’s own natural, gaia-like, self-regulating processes, which
had been smothered under the relentlessly promoted chemical treatments
of industrial modernity, especially those treatments aimed at modifying the
female body in a romantic way. She could have easily picked up such a
notion, they said, during one of her penniless hitches around lesser-crossed
europe, perhaps from the crusties she reputedly lived among in a settlement
of tepees and treehouses somewhere in the foothills of the Slovak Tatras.
On her return to Ireland - when the only immediate sign of what was
to come were matted dreadlocks and unseemly feet inside rotting old clogs -
she had ended up in an emergency hostel sharing crowded space with alcies
and junkies, who never leave off moaning and scrounging and rowing, not
for one minute of the day or night. The real reason she turned herself into
a ball of stink and dirt, into a germ hive, into a bearded lady, was because
it stopped her undead ‘housemates’ from hassling her all the time. The way
she was, the way she had made herself, the addicts wouldn’t go near her.
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She disgusted them and they were afraid of her. They thought she was some
kind of witch who could curse them to death if she wished*. She was a dark
Madonna I suppose, a Madonna of the worms, the beetles, and the bugs.
Eventually, her HSE assigned social worker, who had long taken to
wearing a mask and surrounding herself with a cloud of air freshener while
visiting her, found her a place to live and she moved in to it. She started
washing herself again shortly afterwards. She shaved off her beard. If you
were to meet her now you would never in a million years guess what went on
with her before. She looks amazing and smells of rosy soap, lemon balm and
mild perfumes, subtle intoxicants evoking airy formal gardens and gently
raining summer days.
The Book
She longed for the book to escape her; an ecstatic ringing out in several
languages at once that would be going on for days, after which she'd be
surrounded by a glowing nimbus of never-before-scented perfumes. Surely
the perfumes would survive her for a while and might even be enjoyed in
distant and unprophesied times by creatures with unknown minds and
purposes. The book would be made of secrets she had held inside for
decades. These secrets were from her childhood and her teenage years.
They concerned certain unforgettable, almost unspeakable things she had
witnessed or overheard, which she had done or which had been done to
her. At first the secrets had been unruly and nomadic. They mingled and
meandered in her brain and her blood, crying and shouting and racing
around dangerously like a mob of toddlers in a playground. They had no
proper order or tellable pattern of motion. Occasionally one would bubble
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up from her throat unpredictably and she would bite down hard to swallow
it, whether or not she was in company. As of yet, she wasn’t ready to give
voice to any of the secrets and she felt sure that they were not ready to be
given voice to either. The kind of secrets she had needed at least twenty years
of cooling down and losing radioactivity, losing viciousness and virulence
before being let out into the world. They must be released at the optimum
time and only for the right reasons.
Her lover said she spoke nonsense while she slept, so she set up her
laptop with an audio programme that could record her sleeping all night.
For a couple of weeks she exhausted herself by spending most of the day
listening back to the noises she made in her sleep. There were many, all
of which were of interest in some way, but none related to her secrets. She
concluded that her secrets kept the same hours as she did and slept when she
slept. This made her feel happy, confident, and exonerated.
As the years went by the secrets quietened down a little even during the
day, yet continued circulating energetically inside her, interbreeding with
her organs, her dreams, her impressions, her lusts. The secrets made her
inner life unpredictable and vivid, a rambunctious carnival as opposed to
the passionless stage-play of her outside existence. Even so, no behaviour of
hers did not somehow bear the trace of one or other of the secrets.
In her forties her aging secrets and their no longer youthful offspring
gave up their separate lives and, dying off, congealed into a book. She
felt the book's hard, pressurizing mass fill out her stomach, her bowels,
eventually her lungs and her throat, her pancreas. She did not have the
time (children, husband, parents, work, illness), nor perhaps anymore the
drive or the intelligence (she was smarter, more driven when young and
under-burdened), to figure how to release it. It was not solely a question of
method or orifice, of finding the right coach or right oils to ease passage. It
was a matter of hunting, relentlessly, the key question, the inevitable riddle
in response to which the book would spin out of her and appear before
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her in material form as the only possible solution. Over the long and then
suddenly vanishing years, she asked herself endless questions relating to the
book. Unfortunately, although the process was at times educational and
engaging, the book itself was the answer to none of these probings and
interrogations. Slowly, mercilessly, the book turned from solid to gas, heated
up, and expanded. Everything solid and not solid inside her was in turn
dissolved into the encroaching gas of the book, which knew no limits and
trespassed into everything without concern.
Time dripped on and on until the day she was nothing but an inflatable
with a barely working tongue. The book evacuated her simultaneusly through
all her pores and exits; a long, agonising exorcism that went on for weeks,
punctuated by screams and ululations, after which she had been absorbed by
a fog of her own unoriginal stink. Briefly, the stinkmist floated around and
above closest friends and relatives. Soon it had completely dissipated, and
will eventually participate, along with all the rest of her, and all the other
written/unwritten books, in the heat-death of the universe.
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Art
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Art
Mark Doherty
D ubl in, Ir el and
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Mark Doherty
Artist Statement
"My work seeks to create alternate worlds in which to satirize
our own, allowing us to look at our foibles exaggerated and thus
challenge them by laughing at ourselves. Through this framework I
build narratives which address such diverse issues as body image, our
view of the ‘other’ in society, urban social isolation, mans conflicted
relationship with nature, and society's newfound adoration of science,
celebrity and material wealth, among other things..."
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http://www.oliviercornetgallery.com/#/mark-
doherty/4562132026
https://www.facebook.com/MarkDohertyArtist
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M i c h a e l H i gg i n s
D ubl in, Ir el and
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M i c h a e l H i gg i n s
SMOLT
http://f6-preview.awardspace.net/mgmh.me/SMOLT/about.html
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R u b y Wa l l i s
D ubl in, Ir el and
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R u b y Wa l l i s
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R u b y Wa l l i s
http://www.rubywallis.com/
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S u b m i ss i o n s
The Weary Blues welcomes submissions of poetry, short fiction,
visual art and photography. Please follow all submission guidelines
precisely as they are listed on this page – scroll down to ensure that
you have read these in their entirety. Submissions that do not adhere
to these guidelines will be rejected.
Submissions Guidelines
Literary Submissions
The work of literature, biographical note and profile photo are all
to be contained in one single file ( .pdf, .doc, .docx or .rtf ), which
should also include your full name, e-mail address and contact
details at the beginning. Please ensure that the formatting of your
work is print ready and will appear as intended across differing
productivity suites.
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Example:
Poetry – Joe Bloggs – Title of Poem
Please submit no more than two images, and please ensure that these
are named. In addition, include some brief biographical details, and
some details on the origins of the submitted work (background,
inspiration, influence, methods etc). If available, please also submit
a suitable profile photograph. Please include your full name and
e-mail address with your biographical details. Include all photos and
details within one single file.
Example:
Art – Joe Bloggs – Title of Artwork
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Please allow sufficient time for a response. The copyright for work
that has been submitted remains with the author, though we would
ask that you credit The Weary Blues and New Binary Press in any
subsequent publications. All issues pertaining to existing copyright
and licensing agreements are the responsibility of the individual
making the submission. By submitting your work to The Weary Blues,
you are giving permission for that work to be freely reproduced by the
journal in any particular mode or form that they see fit. Your work
will be offered freely online and via other means of distribution, to as
wide an audience as possible.
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