The Hidden and the Divine:

Female Voices in Ireland

ANU 2017
This anthology compiled by A New Ulster

Copyright © 2017

All Rights Reserved.

 CONTENTS

Mary McGonagle Johnson

Trish Bennett
Lynda Tavakoli
Shelley Tracey
Orflaith Foyle
Orla Mcalinden
Seanin Hughes
Cathy Donelan
J.S. Watts
Morna Sullivan
Therese Kieran
Jenny Methven
Beverly M. Collins
Liz Quirke
Fiona Perry
Frances Browner
Vicki Mullan
Ellie Rose McKee
Eileen Sheehan
Margaret O’Driscoll
Chris Murray
Moyra Donaldson
Maeve McGarrity
Amy Barry
Gaynor Kane
Eithne Lannon
Yvonne Boyle
Margaret Saine
Anne McMaster
Csilla Toldy
Women Writers published by Lapwing Publications
 MARY MCGONAGLE JOHNSON

Don't forget your roots.

All my ancestors lie here,

I tell my grandchildren
As we walk through
The small churchyard.
These were my mother's people,

I point to a name on the headstone.

He was my great grandfather.
Died 1907. I tell them.
I watch them make the connection.
Our great, great, great, they count.
Six generations, they tell each other.

Further along, another headstone,

My father's people I tell them.
They point to the name,
More great grandparents.
We kneel to say a prayer.

As I stop to look around

This churchyard, I think of the
Generations who lie here,
And of those who have left
To scatter all over the world
Many buried in foreign lands.

Now we see their descendants

Come to search for their roots.
And I feel lucky that I returned here
And can show my grandchildren
Where their ancestors lie.

1
Lammas Day

Excitement! Lammas day.

We gather in the garden, sheltered
By the fuchsia hedge. The perfect drills
Of pink and white blossom awaits us.
Our father with the new spade
Puts his foot on its shoulder

He sinks it deep into the drill,

Turns over the brown earth,
Lifts and shakes.
Like pearls, they scatter.
"A grand crop." He says
As he rests on the spade.

We hunker down to pick

And gather buckets full.
At the well we scrub them clean,
Lug them home to put in black pot
That hangs over the turf fire.
Our father follows, spade on shoulder.

We stand around the pot, watching.

Then cooked, a well is formed in
The centre, its filled with butter
Freshly churned, yellow.
It oozes out.
Spoons in hand, we sit around.

Then like a clash of cymbals

Spoons clatter and crash
As we compete to dip, taste
And savour every mouthful
Of the unique flavour of
The first praties on Lammas day

2
1920: The year diphtheria struck.

Here at my grandmother’s grave

I watch the delicate snowdrops.
Their soft petals create a
Comfort blanket for the children.
Their names etched on this cold stone.

But no snowdrops appeared that year.

I picture the scene, imagine the pain

Of the woman as she stands here
Heart frozen in grief as the box is lowered.
Dry sobs shake her body when earth
Clatters on top. He was her first born.
Danny, 5 years old.
Date. January 20th, 1920.

She has no time to mourn him. Just one day

Before diphtheria has another in its grip.
January 21st I read. John. 2 years old.
Now, baby James, a gurgling, 8 months old
Will fill her empty arms, but not for long.
Before that year is over,
His name appears here too.

Doctors didn’t give a reason

When her health began to fail.
No conclusions needed,
This cold stone tell her tale.
October 1920 I read.
Mary. 28 years old.
Her name passed on to me.

3
The Winter Of Forty-Seven.

It snowed for days, froze for nights.

We played in the deep silence
Of fields where our footprints
Left sins on that virgin blanket.
Icicles hung like chandeliers
From the spout where cattle drank.
We blew warm breath on freezing fingers,
Watched our father cut planks of wood
To make a sledge. He flattened
Out two bucket handles,
Attached them to the runners.
'That’ll make it fly', he said.
He crossed his feet, made a nest for us.
Then with two sticks he guided us,
Over bumpy hills,
Round dangerous bends.
Fear and excitement thrilled us.
Later we built snowmen in the fields,
Watched in awe as the moon
Threw a shimmering glow
On the magic of the night.

In bed, I listened to the silence

Of the white world,
Relived the magic of the day,
Stored it in my memory box
To share it my grandchildren.

4
Inishowen

Here comes me from Inishowen

A place of beauty, land of Owen.
A mini Ireland people say.
You’ll see four seasons in one day

In between Lough Swilly

And Lough Foyle. A Peninsula
In the north of Donegal
An emerald jewel that juts into the sea,
A special place we all agree.

Artists come to paint this scene

Enjoy its many of shades of green
They rave about the changing light
And marvel at this pretty sight.
As it shimmers through the day
It cast its light on Trawbreaga Bay.

Rich in artefacts of old,

Standing stones their stories hold,
Holy wells, and secret places
Priest and people hid their faces,
And we as children passing by
Crossed ourselves, and wondered why.

What’s unique to Inishowen

A special scent that draws you home
The perfume from a fire of turf,
The tangy sting of sea and surf,
It wraps you in a mantle rare
A welcome quite beyond compare.

5
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary McGonagle Johnson lives in Inishowen, Co Donegal. She lived in Manchester UK

for many years, where she was a member of Manchester Irish Writers. They self
published a few books of short stories, poems, and monologues, which they performed
in the Royal Exchange in Manchester. Having had other work published, Mary is now
retired and is in the process of trying to write a novel.

6
 TRISH BENNETT

Medb Speaks to the Shy Poet.

I.

In my time, the bardic kind

commanded the rath of royalty.
For fear of their sting,
we gave them everything.
They ‘liked’ me
shared my scéal*
Eireann’s Kardasian Medb.

The monks’ day dawned

and Kings were drawn
to the power of the quill.
The page turned
and the Bardic way
faded like old ink.

Clerics came,
they scripted my tale in “post truth”.
Two thousand years on
pilgrims still climb Knocknarea
with a stone for my cairn
believing I lie there
instead of Rathcroughan — my home.

II.

Twenty first century banfhile**,

cooking, cleaning, rearing young.
You hold back your words
for fear of their power
and twitter as you peer
into your faceless world.

Grasp the quill in your hand banfhile**

but feel the bard in your blood,
share your words banfhile**

7
script your celtic truth
let the tale prevail
or sit there
doing nothing
and become a relic too.

*Scéal means story.

**Banfhile means poetess.

8
Wisps

In the half light

betwixt day and night,
A glimmer whispers
by the fringe
of my eye.
Tendrils of a moment,
caught between
the suns last rays
and the moonlit sky.

In the half light

they appear.
goosebumps
salute the past. Tense.
Yet, no deceit lies
in those prickly scents,
mellow roses, wisps
from a long dead pipe
envelop the heir
to their circle of life.

9
The Legacy of Care

There’s the swish,

an echo of days when nightingales
in bulbous Victorian dresses
rounded sharp corners in haste.
Long dead.

These days, people with anxious faces

rush in, to sit in queues of torment
on hard plastic chairs,
and glare at a strapped up TV
dripping daytime into night.

The smell of clean masks

an infinity of killing things.
One man stifles a cough for fear
of air-conditioned accusation while his wife
thumbs a magazine of MRSA.

The vending machine rattles, a snack,

in the florescent drone. A child cries
and all heads turn to stare
as she clutches her ted and hides
in her Mother’s chest.

There’s the swish. The curtain opens

we all look up in hope
to a burnt-out nurse
who looks at her chart and sighs
as she calls my name.

10
Rituals.

I stand in the corridor of power

and face the congregation.
The sun illuminates the island altar.

Solid walls echo the sizzle of pans steaming hymns.

Often, my chant…not quite gregorian,
catching the custard on the cusp of a curdle.

We leave soon and I will miss this chapel of a kitchen

the soul of this borrowed place
we never called ‘home’.

Our brown boxes — taped to escape

surround the naked dresser
in scribbled rows.

I plant my feet firmly, whisk in hand,

seize a tight grip on the bowl.

The final liturgy begins.

11
Stick

A wooden varnished cane,

honey coloured, roughly hewn, rubber end,
swinging from side to side
on a crisp spring day
in a lunchtime rush of city suits.
The type I’ve seen at home
supporting an arthritic farmer
in a grass lined lane.
He’d nod his cap, ‘doctors orders,
good for the cholesterol’ he’d say
as he made the slow march to town for stout.

This owner — a shiny lady,

all silver glitter thread and black,
legs stick thin beneath smart slacks.
Her hair belonged to someone younger,
loose waves to the shoulder
a hump on her back. Sensible shoes
for walking at speed, two handbags,
one flowers and cloth, the other blue
nothing matched.

Why the stick?

The sympathy vote from family and friends?
Rescuing a shopped out mate with a gammy leg?

Maybe she was just some old coot in comfortable shoes,

fond of handbags and swinging sticks.

I smiled as I looked down at my feet.

12
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trish Bennett grew up in County Leitrim. She moved to Northern Ireland to study and
was charmed into staying by a Belfast biker. They have settled themselves into a small
cabin by Lough Erne’s shore and try to keep the noise down in their bee loud glade.

Trish writes poetry, short stories and memoir essays. She has been published in several
magazines and anthologies and read her work on BBC Radio Ulster. She was long
listed for the “Over the Edge ‘New Writer of the Year Award” in 2013 and won the
Leitrim Guardian 2017 Literary Award for poetry.

Find out more on 'Bennett’s Babblings.'

13
 LYNDA TAVAKOLI

All the poems have been published before as follows:

Is this what I do? and KItchen Comforts - both in The Irish Times, Hennessy New Irish
Writing.
Moving Day - 4 by 4 Special Edition for International Women's Day
Done - Live Encounters magazine

They all come under the theme of 'Mother'.

Moving Day

I moved my mother
into our dining room
her presence boxed and waiting
for the final shift
to a shed outside

the pain of her absence

stuttered my will
to let her go
black bags remaining empty
of the detritus
I could not throw away -

shopping lists on paper scraps

repeated phone numbers
written in her tiny
disappearing hand
all about the house

‘just in case’

14
Is this what I do?

On a corridor of fresh-painted magnolia

sunbeams stroke from velux windows
onto freckled carpets, while a television
talks too loudly to itself in someone’s room.

I find you sleeping, head sagged

as on a mis-hung coat hanger, hair,
just brushed, still full of war-time curls,
a legacy that did not pass itself to me.

I say your name, see the reluctant

wakening of your eyes, the disappointment
you had not slept your way to heaven.
You have told me this before.

Today we talk of blue dresses and funerals

and how you love my coat, and how
you love my coat, the colour redolent
of something already scudding out of view.

You ask me now if this is what you do,

just sit and wait, and wait and sit,
the resignation in your voice
the hardest thing for me to bear.

For in this room, that thief of time

has measured out its false remembrance in
the ticking of a clock, as the past becomes the present
and the present loiters somewhere in the past.

15
Kitchen Comforts

Resistance hugs the small kitchen

hiding secrets amongst
gloomy cupboard space,
post-war austerity brooding
on strained shelves.

Empty jars wheedle their

glass weight into the wood,
its protest stifled only
by the hum of a fridge –
a magic fridge procreating
eggs by the dozen
their longevity evidenced only
by an absence of feathers.

Plastic bags like artificial flower heads

scrunch in hidden corners
anticipating usefulness –
receptacles for ashes and potato skins,
swarf from box hedges,
odd bits of wool waiting for the charity shop.

An Easter cactus prospers on a sill

heedless of the pills that leave
their tell tale tips above the parched soil
where she drove them in.

This is the place she planned her day,

where through a kitchen window
the dulled reminders of her life
still resonated in the ordinary –
a rose she’d slipped,
blushing the oil tank in summer,
the remnants of a forgotten meal,
animal fodder on the lawn.

Nothing went to waste

not even the birdsong
wakening her at dawn
that somehow hummed upon her lips
for the remainder of the day.

16
Done

Death bleaches into bone

the smell of oldness
secreting in the folds
of laundered sheets.

Old Old Old

Your face reflected

in the greying wood of trees
and origami limbs
a plicature of
skeleton and skin.

You ask,
‘Is someone dying here?’
and to the silence add,
‘You’re good. I’ll keep you,’

the words
your parting gift -

the love you left.

17
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lynda Tavakoli lives near Lisburn, County Down where she teaches special needs in a local primary
school and facilitates a creative writing course at the Island Arts Centre. Her literary successes include
short story and poetry prizes at Listowel, the Mencap short story competition and the Mail on Sunday
novel competition. Lynda’s poems have been included in a variety of publications including Templar
Poets’ Anthology Skein, Abridged, The Incubator Journal, Panning for Poems, Circle and Square, The
Honest Ulsterman and Live Encounters magazine. She was selected as The Irish Times Hennessy poet of
the month for October 2015. Lynda’s poetry and prose have been broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster and
RTE Sunday Miscellany. She has written two novels Attachment and Of Broken Things and has been
the recipient of both the Tyrone Guthrie and John Hewitt bursaries.

18
 SHELLEY TRACEY

Visit

Early morning doveswirl

imagination’s murmuration
a full-winged promise to complete the circle
lone crow serrating the impossible

In Rosslyn Forest, between trees

pared down like fossils, stone-rooted
two red deer feed, drink me into peat-deep eyes
look straight through me into truth.

I dream of meeting you this evening

unfolding roses sharing secrets
two fine goblets, side by side
plumdark wine, soft kiss-stain

19
On The Shore

The perfect whiteness of swans

an affront to the eye
tired of seeking miracles

You are past

asking
for anything

Enough for you

small fish rising
to mouth their brief condolences

20
Asymmetries

trees planted in a line

shift on their starting blocks
lean into their rooting

in a room of silence
straight-spined tulips in a vase
incline themselves apart

angel with one stunted wing

still goes about its business
paralleling faultlines

21
Spare

Space

Thank full ness

makes space
for emptiness,
swells the heart’s
dark-panelled
room.

Pine

Spare
words
lean
deep
into
their roots.

Forest

Lightened
pathway
through
an arc
of highness.

Home

Door
threshold
one
step
closer

22
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shelley Tracey is a South African who has made her home in Lisburn, County Antrim,
where she has been living for the past 25 years. Shelley is a member of the Women
Aloud NI writing collective.

23
 ÓRFHLAITH FOYLE

A New Caberet for the Dead Dog Years

First of all you need sweat, so dust cumin

beneath chairs then run your tongue
along the edges of invitation
envelopes. Keep some spit back
for further derision or avant-garde whistling
and resurrect old photographs of poets,
artists and those others that hardly survived
other regimes.
Place tables at half-circle
with orange lamps. Pop plastic violets
into thin vases. Keep the chairs hard...
all the more to keep poverty alive
on the bones of backsides and keep
the outside out...those dredged up ghosts
with dead dog smiles hanging on
their blasted-out jaws.
Don't listen to them – don't listen to that poet
who drinks your wine – all his words are
dead now.
No one walks the plank anymore, he screams
at you, while in the osmosis of this night, your
dress is sipping sweat from the blackened floor.

24
A Snail Yawned

A snail yawned as my friend and I walked by.

No eyes but a wide mouth, no teeth but a grin
of pale green and a tubular body
of brown and yellow.
It did not speak but sat on a stone
and I don't remember walking any further
with my friend.

The light came down like a mist, then dark as if

the whole earth was nothing but a left over slice
of silent sky. It was like standing on air and the
snail turned its open mouth at me, while my
friend, walking on, did not see, could not see
me getting on my knees, moving close to
the snail with my eyes and ears, waiting for speech
and it came like a strangled, tiny scream at first
then harder as if the stone itself
was roaring out its life to me.

All there is – is this.

The roar made my heart hurt. I looked at the snail's mouth.

Its cells, my cells, knitted into slime and flesh.
I stood up and I saw the cut jaw of the bog
open and shining. I saw my friend walking on
ahead and I followed, picking up destroyed
flowers in his wake.
Purples and blues with their stems shattered as if
he had taken his teeth to them.

25
Poet Junkie

On a bus careering around the Cathedral,

a man sucking chocolate saw my book.
A poet junkie, he said.
I glanced at the words on the page.
The half-eaten sentences, the hung rhymes,
Syringes of phrases, needles of punctuation and
the whole rubber tubing idea of structure.

First there was June Jordan. I liked her words on

breasts and crotch. On men and women, on white men
and black women, on colour and the way it kills.

Then Marina Tsvetayeva and the grey stare of war

in her eyes. I could hear the sway of her body on
its rope as her son returned with his fish.

Or for Christian sorrow there was Rosetti. First the plush

and sheen of her little goblin-men. Then God.

Or Charles Bukowski and his blue bird tweeting against his

ageing beard. His sick-rot liver and lungs; his usual fucks
beneath a dirty window in a cold room overlooking a
New York alley.

And Akmatova, her length and beauty, starving for her words,
loving Osip long before he died, and her Grey-Eyed King turned
Harlequin in the end.

And Sylvia standing near Emily on a foreign moor,

the long cry of the wind keeping them sane
until something else came instead.

The bus careered on as I looked at the clouds

above the hospital, the flow of humans
on the streets as I imagined Keats loping
from a corner, side-stepping the mess of
his blood tubercular,
Poet junkie, I told him
and we smiled to each other.

26
The Boot Man

1 Attack of the Boot Man

The boot on the head is easy to see.

It grinds a rubber sole into my ear.
The tarmac is slick like glass
The boot pounds my head into
brick walls. The pain gushes.
The hot ease of pain, hot joy,
pain grinds my teeth,
my veins, and into my brain that
sludges at the edges.

The man with the boot and the fist has

no name. He is me in the other sex.
My words are in his mouth, smashing into
letters smashing into powder, going down
his throat like slime into his stomach and
my face is printed onto the tarmac where
his boot has placed me.

2 The Birth of Boot Man

He was born in yellow town so called

because the sun never gave up.
It shone until the very edge of dark
then arose hot and pulpy.
The Boot Man had a father and a mother.
She was a librarian and he was welder.
They lived frugally. They ate normally.
They barely understood spaghetti.
The Boot Man began as a normal boy
until one day a friend of his
made him tie his pet dog onto the back
of a car and made him watch the dog
dragged to his death.

27
3 How The Boot Man Survives in My Mind

He likes cigarettes. He sits in a chair

and bursts fresh cherries between his
fingers. He has a drawer-ful of accents
and I often hear them in my head,
running down vowels and filleting
consonants. The Boot Man likes T.V.
He likes long walks and he likes to
watch people live their lives.
He watches me write and he
smashes me down.

4 How To Deal With Boot Man

He taps at the edges of my brain.

He gets in via osmosis of thought
He misses his parents, he tells me.
I made them up, I say.
His hot stink crawls to my nose.
He calls to his dead dog and it comes,
like a breeze with musk of animal,
like muscle covered in words,
like pen on paper, and the Boot Man
calls out against my words
so I write them to smother his voice.

5 How To Kill The Boot Man

Kiss him.
Kiss me.
He sits in his room, in the hot stink of his fear,
like a muscled cat with half-broken claws and
he spits when I come near, with my deformed
head and my tarmac breath.
I want him dead.
So I kiss him dead
Feel his suck and moan.
My own sweat is his and
he recedes to my own bone
and I tip-toe out into the
night where night birds
stare down.

28
The Dead Mosquito

You grow up when you see them old.

You drop your child’s heart.
They repeat the doctor’s words, and
you try to shut your head to the
slow sound of the end.
Perhaps far off but there it is,
and it cracks open a space
where nothing is left.

And you fill it with crisps and

bottled water, with phone texts
and jokes that stitch your voices
together into a kind of laughter
and you look for their youth,
how they used to be when you
were thirteen, wearing sandals and
slapping red earth between your
palms, damp in the afternoon heat;
the crickets in the bush, the wood-
smoke from the houses at the
back of the compound.

Your parents had different hair.

Different skin and drank wine at
dinner parties, and discussed
the Dictator’s visit to the school
Down in the garden the others
were playing Tag with dead rats.

‘When we are old,’ your father joked.

His face was young with beer.
The mosquito fell dead to the veranda
The sun began to come down.
Your mother’s arm was young and warm.

Tag! Tag! You’re It!

29
Summer

And women forget they are not in Rome

And so drop their breasts wide to the sea,
And men with pendular guts and lax pecs
lie back and think of who they haven’t been,
Varied flesh walks ordinary streets.
It jiggles, curves, lurches, stretches and pops.
Skin boiled, fried, browned, blistered,
skilleted between bikini strings; sweat and
oiled male bellies in a sun-shine slither
while young girls play the sand between their
toes, and later they strip inside the sea, and
the cold licks them entire, turning slow into
the hairs of their flesh, reaching from some
old god in the sea, the sun on their eye-lids
murmuring heat, the heat in their necks, in
their chin and tongue and later they kiss a
real boy and run his salt between their teeth.

30
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Órfhlaith Foyle is a poet and writer and not on Facebook. Her website is
https://orfhlaithfoylewriter.wordpress.com and her latest collection of short stories
'Clemency Browne Dreams of Gin', was published by Arlen House in 2014. She is
currently writing a novel.

31
 ORLA MCALINDEN

Buachallain Buí – a harvest story

Tug and twist. Tug and twist. Down on your hunkers. Pull the blades of coarse meadow
grass away from the thick red stems of the ragwort. Grass roots pull up hard, and the
task is hard enough already. A drop of sweat falls from your eyebrow into your left eye,
blinding and stinging. You dash the tears from your eye, rub your sleeve across your
forehead.
Gather the stalks again, strong thumb of the right hand seeking the bend of the stem
as it curves off and becomes root. Hands between your feet, arms between your
hunkered knees. And pull and twist. And rock and rock and rock your weight gently,
left and right and backwards. Left and right and backwards and the thumb in its
workman’s glove following the many-fingered root down into the soil.
Crunch and crunch and easing up into the daylight the snaking white root, obscene
pale ghost of the sturdy red stem above. And try not to fall over at the pop and
sudden release of the buachallain buí, the yellow boy, the deadly poisonous ragwort,
as it gives up its grasp upon the land.
Across the country the buachallain buí has been setting its hold deep, and sending
out scouts to colonise new pastures. “One year’s seeding means seven years’
weeding,” your husband says, shaking his head at the lunacy of weeding the field,
when the co-op sells squat tubs of herbicide and the licensed sprayer lives in the next
townland. “Take out the whole of each root,” he adds, “or bear in mind that every
plant that snaps off in your fist will be back to taunt you in six weeks’ time.”

The deeds of the paddock are sitting on the desk in your room, beside the guide to
self-sufficiency. You are still calling it the yellow-streaked field but soon you will christen
it afresh, when it is clean and green, docks and thistles beaten back into the
hedgerow and ragwort not tolerated even there.
You turn and throw the uprooted plant onto the rising pile, carefully, so that the full
extent of the root network can be seen, in case your husband will notice when next he
comes to empty his bucketful of weeds upon the pile. He need not be here, but he
has come — shaking his head — his forearms as thick as your calf, his shoulders
massive under the collarless shirt, he will pull, in the half hour he has free, as much
ragwort as you will pull in all the yawning gap of time until dinner.
Gather the stalks, the strong thumb of the right hand seeking the bend of the stem as it
curves off and becomes root. Hands between your feet, arms between your hunkered
knees. And pull and twist. And rock and rock and rock your weight gently, and snap
and fall backwards and stare at the broken stalks in your hands and the thick tap root,
as big across as a main-crop carrot, still buried deep beneath the soil. And know that

32
soon the deadly leaves and stalks will have pushed back up through the grass and the
root will be more wicked still.
Damn and blast and hell’s curse it and blink away the stupid childish tears.
The grass is mowing-high and bending with the weight of its own seed, dragging at
your legs as you swim through it, from one buachallain buí to the next, and the
paddock must be cleaned and the weeds carted away for burning soon. The hay
must be cut and won before the days shorten too much and the dew falls too heavy
on the curing grass.

A foot away, another plant, eighteen inches tall and the yellow blooms already
shifting to the grey of seed. One years’ seeding is seven years weeding you think to
yourself. In seven years your oldest boy will be nineteen. And, one day, will he pour
chemicals on the soil over which you now sweat? Time will tell.
Gather the stalks again, strong thumb of the right hand seeking the bend of the stem
as it curves off and becomes root. Hands between your feet, arms between your
hunkered knees. And pull and twist. And rock and rock and rock…

33
Christmas in October

“Cathy McCormack, where is your lunchbox?”

Cathy looked down at her empty hands and then up, innocence radiating from her
big blue eyes. Josephine McAliskey, the lunch room and playground supervisor waited
for an answer.
“I’ve forgotten my lunch, Mrs McAliskey,” whispered Cathy, “I’ll just sit here and do
without. Mebbe one of the girls would give me a drink of water.” Please let me go to
the canteen, please let me go to the canteen.
Cathy’s lunch was carefully hidden at the bottom of her bed, tucked under the
bedspread and buried deep in the scratchy woollen blankets, which raised a cloud of
dust each Saturday when she helped her mother shake them out in the yard, before
flinging them to breathe on the washing line. Cathy wanted to try a delicious hot
dinner from the school canteen. It’s not bloody fair, even Sarah Brady gets to eat
school dinner. Why does my family never get anything?
And it was true, they never got anything. Cathy’s father earned just enough to
disqualify his children from free school uniforms and free school meals. They didn’t get
a bus pass, so they walked to school come rain or snow. They didn’t get a free
Halloween party, paid for by the social, and St Vincent de Paul never brought them
coal at Christmas, although they were cold enough to want it. It would sicken yer
happiness. It’s enough to make a body quit work altogether and go on the brew, said
Cathy’s mother, to see other people’s children getting everything, and the parents
lying on their holes watching tv and smoking all day long. Cathy’s father would snort in
disgusted agreement. Wouldn’t it just poison you? Then he would sigh and polish his
work shoes to an even higher shine.

Please let me go to the canteen. Just this once.

“This won’t do Cathy, you can’t sit all day on an empty stomach. Why didn’t you tell Sr
Brid and we could have phoned your mother?”
Cathy’s mother would have searched the kitchen and hallway for the missing lunch
box, to no avail. Then how would Cathy have reintroduced the lunchbox to the
kitchen cupboard? It had taken months of pleading to get the lunchbox, months of
trying to explain that Cathy was the only girl in the whole school who carried her lunch
to school in the plastic wrapper of the Ormo sliced pan. It was bad enough having to
eat the bloody sandwiches without the shame of not being able to afford a proper
lunchbox.

“Maybe I could go to the canteen?”

Cathy didn’t think Mrs McAliskey would make her sit empty-handed in the lunchroom,
and what else could be done at this short notice? Please let me go to the canteen.
Maybe it was true what the other girls said, Noeleen and Sonia, that the school dinners
their parents paid for were actually worse than nothing, and that the stew was bulked
out with the boke of sick children in the local hospital. Let me just try it for once, and

34
then I’ll know. Surely to god, it couldn’t be worse than ham sandwiches?
God, how Cathy hated ham! The thin, almost transparent slices, glistening with
unspeakable jelly. Boke.
Lorna, the kind lady behind the counter at Marley’s butcher, often set aside the tail
end of each breaded ham for Cathy’s mother — the little nubs too small and fiddly to
bother pushing through the slicing machine and trying to sell. Big, fat Lorna would drop
the nubs into the bag along with the slices — fifteen slices every week — after she had
weighed them, and wink at Cathy’s mother. Her drooping jowls would quiver as she
smiled conspiratorially. On those days, Cathy wanted to die. “It’s the least she could
do,” said her mother, “the amount of money I spend in there every week.”
Fifteen slices of ham every week. Three rounds of Ormo ham sandwiches every day.
Monday to Friday. Cathy, Liam and Mark. When things were good, the bread would
have butter. When things were tight, it was Flora margarine.
Couldn’t Cathy maybe, just some days, have cheese? Just for a wee change, now
and again? No, ham was better for growing children. And what was wrong with the
ham? Freshly sliced ham from a butcher, not out of a packet? Did Cathy think ham
grew on trees? Did Cathy think her father was working himself to the bone so Cathy
could turn her nose up at butcher’s ham, when children in Africa were starving to
death? If Cathy thought she was too good for ham, maybe she would prefer caviar?
God, how she hated — even more than the jelly — the slimy rim of lurid yellow crumb.
She dreaded biting into a sandwich to find her teeth closing upon the grotesque
horror of white, connective tissue gristle.
Even worse were the days of Plumrose Chopped Ham: tinned, spiced, sliding
glutinously out of its container with a sickening slurp. On weeks when the fifteen slices
could not be stretched until Friday, when an unexpected visitor had called to the
house, prompting sandwich-making and the sending of a child helter-skelter to
McKeevney’s shop for Bourbon Creams, Cathy’s mother would reach into the larder
and produce an emergency tin of Plumrose chopped ham. On those days Cathy’s
lunch could not even be salvaged by the usual remedy of removing the hated ham
and eating the bread. Plumrose Chopped Ham sullied even the innocent bread,
leaking its ghastly juices deep into the white crevices.

“Will I go to the canteen, so?” asked Cathy.

Mrs McAliskey took a quare gunk at her, and rolled her eyes behind her big owl-
glasses. “Certainly not. You can’t eat a school lunch you haven’t paid for. That won’t
work. The potatoes are bought and peeled depending on how many lunches are
paid for on a Monday.” Suddenly the light dawned in her face. “You’ll have to go
over to the Convent. Run along to the kitchen door, it’s the one beside Sr Monica’s
room, and tell them you’ve no lunch.”
What? You cannot be fucking serious? Eat my lunch in the nun’s kitchen? “It’s alright,
Mrs McAliskey, I’m not even really that hungry.”
“Nonsense,” she was all smiles now, problem solved, disaster averted, “run over to the
kitchen quick, the lunch is half over and you still empty.”
“I’ll be fine—”
“Go now, for heaven’s sake and stop dawdling. Run!”
Cathy slammed out of the lunchroom and across the yard, pausing with her hand on

35
the wrought-iron gate which separated the playground from the convent garden. To
her left lay the nun’s graveyard, she could just duck in there for twenty minutes. She
took a quick duke around, but no-one was watching her. Would anyone be any the
wiser? Would oul bootface McAliskey think of double-checking? In the end she was
too cowed, too institutionalised to disobey.
She pushed the gate open and trailed her feet towards the pair of doors in the
basement of the convent, one leading to Sr Monica’s room where the slow girls
revised the cat sat on the mat and the six-times tables, one — never broached before
— leading to the kitchen.
“What is it, child?” asked the elderly nun who answered her knock.
Cathy didn’t know the nun’s name, or recognise her face. She must be easily a
hundred years old. She didn’t teach in the school, didn’t come across to demonstrate
knitting, or needlework, didn’t even appear for the May procession when the statue of
Our Lady was carried around the nun’s graveyard by Stephen the caretaker while the
girls walked behind carrying flowers and chanting, “I’ll sing a hymn to Mary, the
mother of my God, the virgin of all virgins, of David’s royal blood…”
Maybe this nun was a prisoner in the basement, nameless, never seeing the sun, nor
feeling the wind on her face.
“Come in, come in, you wee pet,” a big smile creased the old nun’s wrinkled cheeks.
“You must be starving. Sit yourself down beside the range.” Heat belted out from the
big cast-iron cooker, which had several pots rattling and hopping on the hotplates. A
glass of creamy cold milk appeared by magic in her hand, and Cathy took it from her
and sipped gratefully.
“Forgotten your lunch, daughter dear, and you working away over in school, with your
stomach thinking your throat’s been cut.” The nun was opening and closing
cupboards, drawing out a long, vicious looking knife. “I’ll sort you out in two shakes of
a lamb’s tail. God called me to the life, and for sixty years my vocation has been to
feed the hungry.” She smiled and opened the door of a huge floor to ceiling pantry.
“How about a nice ham sandwich?”
Fuck. Fuck. Think for fuck’s sake.
“Sister, I’m actually a vegetarian.”
“A what, dear?”
“A vegetarian, sister. It means I don’t eat meat.”
“Don’t eat meat? I’ve never heard such oul guff, your mother should be ashamed,
allowing such nonsense.” Cathy thought of the fifteen slices of ham, and the fact that
her mother never ate one. Never ate, nor got the chance to eat, the five slices of ham
that every week Cathy crammed down the side of the lunchroom bin, or sometimes
gave away to another girl, if she were discreet enough about asking. She thought
about her mother hacking at the little nubs of leftover ham from Lorna, salvaging
whatever could be trimmed off for her own lunch. A small tear sprang up at the side of
her eye.
“Ah, don’t! Don’t be crying. My bark is worse than my bite. Do you know what that
means?” Cathy nodded. “Good girl. Just wait a wee minute and you’ll be as right as
rain.” Jesus, two clichés in the one breath, Sr Brid would take away marks for that.
Cathy nodded again and tried to smile.
The nun bustled about, sawing two thick cuts off a crusty loaf and covering them with

36
as much butter as Cathy’s mother would have spread between the six slices of Ormo.
That’s perfect, that’s enough, don’t destroy it with ham!
Next, a huge platter banged down onto the table. Cathy stared it in wonder. On the
platter sat, resplendent, a large pink ham, its rind blackened and sticky with a honey
glaze.
It’s a ham, a Christmas ham, a “Turkey and Ham” ham. But it’s October. What’s
happening?
The nun hacked an enormous slice off the joint and placed it between the lavishly-
buttered bread slices.
“Drink up your milk and eat your sandwich, daughter dear, and hurry off back to your
classroom, for the sisters will be finishing their own lunch now at one o clock, and I
need to clear the dining room.”
Cathy bit into the bread. A taste explosion. The firm fibrous texture, the salty butter and
the honey-sweetened ham melting together. The cold fresh milk. The dense, nearly
black crust of the bread. For the first time Cathy realised that a slice of ham, could
mean a slice of a ham. A Christmas ham.
At three o clock Cathy didn’t even have time to think about the unfairness of life as
the other girls with their bus passes, or their fifteen pence bus fare, were left behind by
her flying feet. She was round the corner and out of sight of the bus queue within
seconds.
She burst through the door of her home, slamming into the kitchen.
“Mammy, wait til you hear. Would you would believe it! My lunch got wet from my
water bottle and I had to eat lunch in the Convent. Would you believe it — the nuns
eat Christmas ham all year round.”
Her mother turned from the sink, turnip in one hand, knife in the other. “I’m uneasy
about them,” she snapped, “I’d like to see them feed five people on thirty pounds a
week.”

37
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Orla McAlinden is a Pushcart Prize nominee, the Cecil Day Lewis emerging writer 2016,
and winner of the BGEIBA Irish Short Story of the Year award. Her debut collection The
Accidental Wife won the 2014 Eludia Award from Sowilo Press in Philadelphia, and was
published in July 2016. The fourth story from the collection, BGEIBA winner The Visit, is
freely available online. During March 2017, The Accidental Wife was the chosen text
for the inaugural Armagh Big Read hosted by Libraries NI, and Orla attended library
events throughout her native county of Armagh, discussing writing, and her own work,
with members of writing clubs, schools, reading groups and the general public. The
Accidental Wife was also chosen as the BBC Radio Ulster Nolan Show bookclub
choice July 2017. She is delighted to announce her upcoming participation in the John
O’Connor Writing Festival in Armagh in November 2017. Orla is working on a
forthcoming novel The Flight of the Wren and a second collection Full of Grace. Her
website is www.orlamcalinden.com

38
 SEANÍN HUGHES

Pink Is A Sister Sick

with sweetness. Bright;

blinds beautiful men, robs
them of their enamel, but

they never protest.

Fat lashes fan those

flushed cheeks, like

blood blushing milk,

bones so high and hollow

beneath. Pink licks the dark,
but refuses to wear it.
I went panning for
black diamonds in her hair
in our girlhood, and found

nothing but dirty pebbles

and rust for treasure; I

couldn't love her. She’s
a predator with doll parts,
a perfect Pinocchio gone
rogue and hungry

for boyprey.

I've got a perverted

prayer that in time, she'll
dissolve into herself;
melt at midday,
nothing more
than a

discarded boiled sweet.

*First published by Chris Murray at Poethead, June 2017.

39
Equilibrium

I'm strutting stratospheric,

embellished and splendid
in my NHS wedding dress.

My mother was here before me,

her father before her, his uncle
before that -- lucky, lucky me

-- our platinum gilted heirloom hops generations and genders,

our gene pool a puddle of madness

thickened with blood and tear-streaked shrieking saliva.

I’m in my unsilent season,

souped up and bursting,

far too sexy
to sedate. This is my circus

and I am the airborne acrobat

defying my earthly anchors
until they come for me,

saturnine.

*First published by Chris Murray at Poethead, June 2017.

40
Showreel

Womb wrapped/skin silk

Pulse pure/warm milk
Hours soft/heart drum
Rose mouth/clasped thumb

Loose tooth/gummy gap

pillow treasure/starmapped
Skinned knee/knuckle pop
Tongue catching/rain drop

Other body/lips lost

Limbs enfold/criss crossed
Foster flesh/breath songs
Here going/going gone

White shock/slow rest

Hands locked/full blessed
Last psalm/cold coil
Into fire/into soil

*Shortlisted for the Fifth Annual Bangor Poetry Competition 2017; as yet unpublished.

41
I Don't Believe In God, But

I like to think that

: some part of us watched from a great height this pool of mortals clustered together
like lost stars,

how we wander with our brittle bodies

and these purple-blue balloons

fist-deep in our chests,

fit to burst from their delicate sac
with the slow ache of feeling

: some part of us arrives deliberately,

our map plotted with miniature fires,
unafraid of human things - not cuts
or grazes, split skin or spilled milk, but

our impossibility, atoms and alchemy

the bliss and the exquisite pain
of how we are somehow here,

made mostly from water

while gathering kindling.

42
Fireproof

You don't understand.

The house will definitely burn

with us in it
unless
I neaten (evenly) the edges
of sockets and doors,
locked, off, locked, off
and if we’re two minutes late
for something, or nothing,
I'm chewing my cheeks
because that's two revolutions
of the small hand and none of the big

it's small things

I collect: the openness
of a body, invisible tones;
the yellow velvet of sunshine
between my fingers, and sentiments
for safe-keeping like lucky sevens

small things I prize:

tiny attentions, penny sized
kindnesses, punctuality,
the significance of a silence
and its undertow

small things I fear:

these words wasted,
lost to the landfill I'll pick through later
to find all the errors numbered,
glittering, grotesque
and indelible
so
I'll neaten the edges and openings
(more than once, an even number):
off, locked, off, locked,
every socket and latch,
every exit,
just in case -
just in case.

43
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanín Hughes is an emerging poet and writer from Cookstown, Northern Ireland,
where she lives with her partner and four children. Despite writing for most of her life,
Seanín only began to share her work in late 2016 after penning a number of poems for
her children and since then, she has been steadily working on an ever-increasing
volume of new poetry. Drawing from her varied life experiences, Seanín is attracted to
challenging themes and seeks to explore issues including mental health, trauma,
death and the sense of feeling at odds with oneself and the world.

44
 CATHY DONELAN

See the World Inside Out

Ma used to tell you of the dying flames that fall from the sky as the cold sets in. Orange
flecks lining the paths. They stuck to your boots in the rain and sound like Salthill when
you ran through them. She loved it when it rained pink in the Spring, soft velvet that
lands on your face with the breeze. You found cherry blossom puddles down the
market where you could feel your stick run smoothly through them. The men on the
stalls would curse you and your stick, knocking on their tents. They speak like the men
around your Ma, always looking for something from her.

You liked it down the arch, you can sit and the heat spreads over your eyelids, you
can taste its brightness. You know there’s a dirty rain cloud coming when the cold
takes over. The place quietens and darkens. You won’t hear children teasing around
you anymore and you rush for shelter, you always find a shadow that corners the wind
out of your hair.

She told you, your eyes were taken at birth so you could see the world inside out. Feel
its corners with your fingers, taste the seasons on your tongue, hear the earth
underneath and smell the souls around you. She said you were born under the faerie
tree, on the longest day of the year.

Ma would love the story. You’d listen, on the edge of the crumbly kitchen counter as
she cleared her throat and scraped her hands downwards, to straighten her dress. The
starch cracking in the folds, her voice would rise an octave. The labour began the
moment the sun rose till the fields darkened. She was walking to coax you out, said
that tree was calling her to it. They didn’t believe in going to a doctor back then,
robbing bastards she’d call them. She said the little people saved a breach birth but
took their dues. Always a price on the soul.

You waited until your twelfth birthday. Cocooned in your duvet, you counted to three-
hundred and fifty-four after you heard her soft steps down the hall and felt her
bedroom door scrape shut. The key was left in the back door as you felt your way
around, you slipped out and closed it with such silence, you could imagine not even
disturbing the fat snail crawling up its glass. The grass was wet under your toes, it made
your nightdress cold and soggy. You lifted your head above and could see under your
eyelids the spreading of stars above, lighting to the full moon as you stood among the
large roots of the faerie tree. You knocked and waited for the little hands to welcome
you in.

45
They were silent when they came, you sensed them before you heard them and they
whispered a tale in your mind. A blind woman who sacrificed a child’s eyes for her
own, eyes that still let you dream through hers. They whispered in tongues you never
knew existed, sharp clicks in their lisp dialect. They carried you back to your bed and
you woke to the quiver of a swallow’s song outside the window’s pane and Galway
Bay FM blaring from the kitchen as you longed to touch the eyes that had belonged
to you.

46
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cathy Donelan is a writer from the West of Ireland, she's in her final year of Arts with
Creative Writing at NUI Galway. Her poetry has appeared in The Galway Review, A
New Ulster and The Blue Nib. Her fiction has appeared in ROPES, The Honest Ulsterman,
Dodging The Rain, Spontaneity, The Lamp Graduate Journal, The Nottingham Review
and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. She has been highly commended in the
Fool For Poetry International Chapbook Competition.

47
 J.S. WATTS

The Effect of Moonlight on the Human Voice

I am listening for the effect of moonlight

on the human voice remembering
when I heard it first heard it last
listen

I am listening for moonbows trailing

their pale gauze over high stone beds
the sleeping grounds of countless
nameless ages hunting
the siren’s call of the riderless horse
as it wades breast bone deep
in the lulling sea-green waters
clasping the island like a holy child
head straining up and out
towards the plains of sweet wide grass
trodden only by the wind

The wind is singing moon songs

I hear strong hands planting their music

in the rich damp soil of the mother home
hymning the beauty that serves as
goddess to his priest
her pure Eucharist poured
from his softly torn throat
the songs flowing back arterial green
into the land across the hills
bathed in the flame
from his heart’s flawed emerald

The heart is always sighing moon songs

Its singing is a tear drop from the moon’s silver

the crying of owls in the feathered black
on an empty moonless night
as it rustles through abandoned factory halls

48
the touch of a once loved hand in the endless dark

It is hereit is now
it is always

listen

*First published in Psychic Meatloaf and appearing in “Years Ago You Coloured Me” -
published by Lapwing Publications

49
Woollens

This jumper
was knitted with love
and made to last.
It’s seen out many winters,
the advancing cool of autumn
the unexpected chill of spring.
It still has
a few good years left in it
if treated respectfully
and as I wash it through
yet one more time
feeling its fibres
under my finger skin
I wonder if
it might out last me,
if it will still hold my shape
when my shadow
no longer fills it.
Who will bother
to wash it by hand
when my hands
no longer can
and what will they think,
if anything,
of the painstakingly crafted stitches,
the soft but serviceable wool,
the practical colour,
the one who used to wear it?

50
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.S.Watts is a UK poet and novelist. Her poetry collections, "Cats and Other Myths”, “Years Ago
You Coloured Me” and "Songs of Steelyard Sue”, are published by the Belfast-based Lapwing
Publications. She may, or may not, have Irish ancestry (family legend, no proof), but she’s
visited Ireland and fallen in love with the music of Christy Moore.

See www.jswatts.co.uk for further details

51
 MORNA SULLIVAN

Before the rains fell

We had peace before the rains fell

Incessant monsoons, warm rain that ran
In torrents down our muddy streets, taking everything
And everyone prisoner, washing away our homes.

We had plentiful food before the hurricane roared

Tearing up trees by the roots, sweeping away
Crops from our dusty fields, leaving behind
A path of devastation in its wake.

We had water before the drought descended

Slowly creeping in, drying out our land
Baking, boiling, parching the soil, killing
Our crops, our herds and our children.

We had hope before the storms came

And took away our former lives.
Washed away our freedom
Destroying our bright future.

And we still have hope, that

Somehow amidst this carnage and devastation
Life will go on for all of us
And we will live to see more storms.

52
Come Outside

Tempt me outside in January for a coffee on the garden bench.

Ever-changing, entice me with tender asparagus shoots.
Feed me with sweet sun-ripened juicy strawberries
Comfort me with the rich pickings of an autumn crumble.

I feel your grip as I crack the ice on the bird bath.

Gritty weeds under my nails draw us back together.
My constant companion, you refresh me with cool grass under my toes
And restore yourself with crisp, curly oak leaves for the compost.

Your rich, cold, damp earth patiently waits for my return.

Ever faithful, you woo me with rain-splashed hyacinths.
You intoxicate me with heady blends of lily, rose and sweet pea
And stimulate with tangy tomato vines.

From your stubborn silence on a still, cold February morning

You suddenly awaken with a blackbird’s shrill.
The neighbour’s droning lawnmower intrudes on our rendez-vous
While drowsy bees buzz round us while we harvest.

Rugged and handsome, transformed by a snowfall

Ever faithful, again you burst with green shoots and buds.
You dazzle me with California poppies, dahlias and nasturtiums
And hug me close with golden, red and orange foliage.

53
Stretch Marks

Each year as I inched taller and taller,

Trying to reach the treat jar became ever easier.
My parents showed me how to love you,
How to appreciate you and have regard for you.
Our love blossomed with buttons and bunnies;
They tasted best when they left their trace
Of sticky love, melted on my fingers and face.
As our affection developed, deeper, stronger,
You wrapped me firmly in your arms.
I couldn’t imagine a day without you then.

Each spring your branches extended higher and higher

Trying to touch the sky, sprouting ever taller.
My parents showed me how to love you,
How to appreciate you and have regard for you.
Our love flourished as I played under your shade
Running beneath your strong branches
Your faithful love left marks on my heart.
As our attachment developed, stronger, deeper
Our roots grew stronger and deeper together.
I couldn’t imagine a day without you then.

Each year my waist expands wider and wider

Trying to touch my toes becomes ever harder.
I have shown my family how to love you too,
How to appreciate you and have regard for you.
Our love has matured to rich chocolate bars
They taste best when anticipated and savoured,
Their sumptuous indulgence melting in my mouth.
As our affair develops, deeper, stronger
You hold me firmly in your clutches.
I cannot imagine a day without you now.

Each year your trunk extends wider and wider

I can still wrap my arms around you and hug you.
I have shown my family how to love you too,
How to appreciate you and have regard for you.
Our love has prospered with each harvest
When we gather in your bountiful crop
Securing our income for another year.

54
As our adoration develops, deeper, stronger
Our roots have become entwined.
I cannot imagine a day without you now.

55
Treasures from the Depths

His boat bobs on the sapphire bay

Weaving across the pearly bed.
Gulls squawk, soar and dive in its wake
Into a sparkling turquoise sky.

She watches his emerald boat

Criss crossing over diamond crests
She prays for his safe return while
He asks Neptune for a prize hoard.

His frozen hands haul in the cache

Clinking like silver castanets
Onyx shells gleam in setting rays
Boarding in a bright crescendo.

She waits the Pearly King’s return

Welcoming the best catch in town
Jet chests encase gold cabochons
As his arms encase her on shore.

Nightly in their gleaming bistro

Diners savour the amber gems.
A banquet for kings is served of
Fragrant, steaming nacre caskets.

Faithful Neptune’s precious bounty

Provides a wealth that can’t be earned.
Treasures from the depths, gold nuggets
Dive in and discover them now.

56
You Have Gone, Journeying

You have gone, left us for good.

You left quickly without saying goodbye
Left an empty chair weeping by the fire,
A vacant place gaping at the table.
Your glasses sit forlorn on your desk
A half-started book lies abandoned by the bedside.
We listen for your footsteps at the door
But you will not be coming back.
Without you, our home is empty and dark
And life can never be the same again.

You have gone, but left a rich legacy

In our memories and in our hearts.
An inspiration to those you’ve left behind
Who follow on, for whom life goes on.
You followed your heart,
Your dreams and your star.
With no regrets, you lived life to the full
Intelligent, industrious, inquisitive
Never looking back, determined to succeed
You ventured into the unknown before.

You have gone, but now watch over us

A celestial body, radiating brilliance,
Nightly, glittering, light years away,
Daily, leading us, guiding us.
You shine down, illuminating our path
As from desolate oceans in a different century
You were steered to distant lands.
Unforgotten, you dazzle from afar
Ever present, you have passed on.
But passed on so much to us.

You have gone, leaving no mansion or jewels.

More precious than heirloom gems
Your character shines on through us,
Brave, kind-hearted, humble, forgiving,
Your memory comforts us as we slumber.
Nightly, you illuminate the heavens
Smiling and winking in a midnight sky
As you smiled and winked at us on earth.
You journeyed in search of gold nuggets
But now you sparkle like a diamond every night.

57
 THERESE KIERAN

To You We Bear Witness

Around 9am, we sip tea from the oceanfront rental -

my husband and I
gently rocking in chairs,
enjoying the silence we have perfected these twenty years
and more.
We fix our gaze on the breakers,
the breeze buffets warm against our skin,
signals the promise of another hot day.

Painting the scene in my mind’s eye

I lay down a wash of sky,
then underneath, a stippling of blue for sea
then a band of gold before dry brushstrokes of green,
until finally I pull sienna’s brown towards me,
an anchor for weathered decking.

The beach populates with dog-walkers, joggers, fishermen,

sun-crisped seniors and muscular guys with umbrellas and chairs.
But then, a young couple’s stroll falters at the water’s edge
and something about them has me on my feet, gripping the guardrail
as he drops down on one knee, while she, holds his gaze taut
like fishing wire;
then, his hand in hers, the other plunging his pocket,
removing something small - oh, I gasp
and now she’s nodding, they’re hugging
and he’s lifting her up for the length of a kiss,
dangling her toes in the spray
until slowly she slides down, feet on the ground again
then arm in arm they walk away,
cannot hear my mad whooping and clapping;
cannot see my husband - silent, still rocking.

58
Life Lines

It was 1993.
San Francisco in the spring and the sun freckled my Irish skin. Its shine was mine and
life was wave upon wave going west. I took a
bus across The Golden Gate to an artist’s
commune near the woods. Forest bathed under
towering giants; leaf canopies of shade but
excitement coursed my veins. So later, in the line, I offered up my palm to one who
told me
she could see. There, she said, right there, your
life line changed and nothing will be the same.
I shrugged it off and hugged the trees. Made
daisy chains and strung them through my hair.
Hatched plans and plotted, screamed who I
would be. The scene was set. I’d made my move.Then one week later, two lines of
blue
confirmed what she already knew.
His life in my hands.

*Published in Tales of the Forest January 2017, and short-listed Poems for Patience
Galway Hospital Arts trust 2017

59
Forest Bathing

I walk The Glen most days

and stopping by the waterfall
I close my eyes and summon words
that might describe the sounds:
the rush of water hurtling down,
the wind that drowns the din and drone,
the step and rev of a city’s stealth approach
on what remains of the thousand acre wood.

And when my eyes are too deprived

I flood them with a ribboned froth
so white against the glade,
its spray unfurling ferns to splay like plumes,
splashing to pools, running ripples over shale and stone
then trickles by, where I, am forest bathing.

60
The Handmaiden

People say, she sits at home all day and paints her nails.
So one day, a Monday, as I recall, she decides, I’ll show them,
I’ll just show them.
And right after the laundry and before peeling potatoes
for the evening meal, she drives into town,
heads for a high-end department store and marches straight to
the glossy counters of Nail It.
She proffers her white, crepe-paper hands,
stretches and flexes her fingers hoping for spindles, or wands or something.
She wiggles the nicked and chipped nails, patched up, hanging together
under four layers of smudged matt Mule.
It’s no problem, there’s enough to work with, they can do gels,
can take her straight away. She sits back, she’s in safe hands,
she doesn’t even ask how much, as I recall

61
Haibun

draw in fresh cut hedge

to replay time after time
joyful encounters

The smell of fresh hedge cuttings took me to a student summer in East Hampton, Long
Island, New York. Some might have called it work, but it was never work to me.
Housekeeper, Chambermaid, serving or cleaning, it was more about gleaning another
point of view. I was winging it really, but when Fred Perry’s assistant, hosting dinner for
a select few, asked who had taught me such skills, I simply replied - my mother. “Don’t
brush the dirt under the mat” - I told that to FP’s assistant, who laughed while
instructing I pat each Lolla Rosa leaf dry, serve on the right, clear away on the left, he
handled the wine. They dined at nine and together we plated asparagus tips in
straight lines. He served Chateaubriand blue, but I hadn’t a clue about
Chateaubriand, never mind the reduced red wine jus. I hadn’t a clue until then. By
ten the guests had gone. I wondered was there anything wrong with the food for only
the salad got pushed around. He boxed and bagged, filled my basket with goodies,
including the Valrhona bar - he told me I’d been a star. And you were the perfect
host I thought, cycling post to post under the warmest, blackest, starriest sky, feasting
on fresh hedge cuttings.

62
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Therese Kieran is a trainee poet living in Belfast. In 2016, with writer, Lucy Beevor, she
conceived and curated Death Box, an exhibition of poetry and prose including
contributions from 25 writers. In October 2016, another collaborative piece, Try Me,
was exhibited in The Free Word Centre, London. In 2015 she was a runner up in the
Poetry Ireland/Trocaire poetry competition. She has been long-listed for the Seamus
Heaney New Writer’s Award in 2015 & 2017. Her work has featured in a variety of
anthologies including those published by Shalom, Community Arts Partnership, Belfast,
Queen’s University, Panning for Poems - Poetry NI, Four X Four, 26 Writer’s group, The
Incubator magazine, The Blue Nib, Arlen House and Tales from the Forest.

63
 JENNY METHVEN

Snow Moon - Sneachta Galleach

The day has been softly silent,as though waiting,

breath held for the coming of the snow moon
but now as I walk in the early evening dusk
the sharp, cracking ice underfoot echoes in stillness
and catches the moonlight like quartz stones.
A biting chill eats into my bones and my breath taken by the cold
freezes my words and thoughts in front of me.
The snow moon is out and I stand beneath it
my eyes searching across the deep sky
Winter still holds sway,a liminal place
between past and future,
then the snow begins to fall softly
flakes flutter down, soundlessly, slowly, twirling,
kissing my face,my eyelashes,
clearing the old and the dark
there is only the present in the white silence.
A new landscape cloaks the ground
beneath the snow moon.

64
Hawthorn

Honed and purified in the fires of Beltaine

the hawthorn blossom spreads its white light,
igniting the summer start.
While, deep inside, hidden
behind a thousand daggers and green leaf shields,
the sidh, whisper
of ancient stories and old feuds.
the scent, at first, seductive,
becomes heavy,
a hint of unease,
a reminder of mortality as our ancestors knew
Soon the petals will tinge with rose,
fading and falling to the ground,
white ash from a fire.

65
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Methven recently published her first book of poems, which she also illustrated.
Following a career in teaching and social work she has returned to her first training in
art is now a full time artist. Jenny focuses on nature as the inspiration for her work. She
has an MA in Education and an MSc in Peace and Conflict studies. Jenny lives in
Fermanagh.

66
 BEVERLY M. COLLINS

Sir Rancid

He regarded the three of us with a gaze that was molded. His sour life announced itself
like a bitterness-tattoo expression on his face, accented by the unruly patches of gray
hair that crowded his cheeks and chin.

He leaned forward just as two Holly Blue butterflies fluttered pass in failed attempt to
improve the view of him.

You need to bounce that ball some place else! he said. I wondered how he
concluded the park an inappropriate place to bounce a ball.

At this point, laughter bubbled from my cousin like a quick vibrato, light and
contagious in how fast it spread to all three of us.

We turned and ran along the wet walkway that had been sprayed by an earlier
afternoon shower.

Gleefully we jumped over puddles as we left him to covet the city’s soiled scented
bench and the lonesome embrace of his own rancid outlook.

67
Defiant

A shimmer surrounded by shadows;

Like millions of eyes with tears spilled,
The dark of space sprays steely lights.

The night sky sparkles like the

Ghost of christmas trees past.
Lessons pointed down to school my

Widened pupils still weary from my day

Like feet in tight shoes and memories
As sharp as the tip of Orion's sword.

The hungry mouths of black holes drool

At a distance while the Kuiper belt sails
Broken dishes from its frozen feast on
Drifting dreams.

As stars glisten, I wonder about the

Deeper story within their twinkle. I sip
A hot drink and recall that on

Earth we burn something true

Everyday...I mean, we turn living
Blue everyday...I mean, we learn
Something new everyday.

68
Luster

Borrowing light from your eyes

is like drawing flight from the
wings of a hummingbird.

In every direction sails;

A glow of unpredictable warmth.

My breath held, hopeful my

face can feel the touch.
It's as if the afternoon grew a
heartbeat like muffled thunder.

My uprooted-stinging soul sabbed

by the medicine in your embrace.
To fall for you-born in my core
as a predisposition.

The stale ink of apprehension, erased

into a blank page of open readiness.

69
Slide

Where there's night sky, one can find

The open arms of a possible storm
Or the frowny-pout of the moon with its
Dark side asleep in the fold and gray-
Black craters that peek.

Much like the human face in calm or

discontent; A display of fixed stare, the intake
of Breath before the eruption of laughter or
argument.

Meanwhile...

The hard challenges of life are swallowed

Back. Ripples of laughter become frozen in
Silhouette, a few good memories chase their
Own tails in a swirl with the anticipation of
Tomorrow's glisten or drudgery.

We proceed...

Like a brimming tear that invisions its future

Of being the salty dry line on a cheek, We
Are brave beetles on life's forest floor who take
Flight in darkness, become quickly eaten by an
Owl and are still proud our wings tasted air.

70
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beverly M Collins is the author of the books, Quiet Observations and Mud in Magic. Her
work has appeared in the California Quarterly, Bits & Pieces Magazine, The Altadena
Poetry Review, Poetry Speaks! Year of Great Poems and Poets, Spectrum, The Journal
of Modern Poetry etc.

71
 LIZ QUIRKE

Housework

In the kitchen, your mother prepares the space for you,

ties rhythm to her movements like a knot in loose apron strings.

Countertop cleared, plates stacked clean, concealed

behind cupboard doors, as if order to the mundane
will tick some unknown box and draw you in.

Taps scald. Her skin pinks as though slapped.

It has been by the lack, the exhaustion
of another calendar leaf delivering absence.

ii

Those long months we searched for a home,

any assembly of someone else's memories,
a vessel to hold our not-yet family.

Worse in the mangle of my recollection,

that rambling shell we nearly bought,
all romance, ivy spidered through walls,

character we couldn't take on.

We’ve talked ourselves back up those stairs
once or twice, to the landing’s turn,

each time deciding silently the bedrooms needed

too much work, our plans couldn’t wait.

72
Waiting Room

There is a room wide as a football pitch

and narrow as a cupboard.

Off to one side, a low table bears lever arch folders

a person can thumb through, photographs of babies,
twins in pink onesies, little navy jumpers,
with some teeth and no teeth,
with newborn down on tops of heads or first wisps.

There is a waiting room wide as a football pitch,

narrow as a cupboard, where people sit quietly,

clutch soft plastic cups of ice cold water,

where chairs are a decent size and spaced
so couples don’t have to touch each other
unless they want to.

There is a waiting room with a projector screen

at one end, large as a feature window, explaining

through vibrant graphics to the people sitting quietly,

people who have more than likely researched
the building and its occupants
to floorboard detail, what will happen
in treatment rooms they haven’t seen yet.

There is a room, where people sit quietly, wait

in twos or ones as though all conversation led them there

but finished earlier in the carpark, or exhausted itself

the evening before over pots of tea, when talk pushed
into the night about cycles, hormones, injections,
whispers of what they would bargain to know
the feeling of their baby's foot between their fingers.

There is a waiting room, silent

but for shoes shuffling on matte carpet, quiet

but for the hum of the water cooler,

the crisp diction of the volume controlled radio,

73
pop songs by girls promising
something new, crooning with sentiment
about an abstract forever, never to know
how their voice hangs over people who can only wait

for their names to be called

by the woman in scrubs with the clipboard.

74
Nocturne With Bathtime

Cradling your neck in the cup of my fingers,

soft your putty skull, thin in my hand.

Sturdy now, a more conscious mass,

your breaths call time to our steps.
Movement queued with your first cry,
slipping your arms through your vest the first time.
Around you we pad easy,
pass you off to each other,
steady hands.

Cradling your neck in the cup of my fingers,

soft your putty skull, thin in my hand.

This theory makes all sense,

ingrained in our limbs with your arrival.
Mothering you is a sweeping affair,
balmed in camomile, powder light,
a dip to warm water, swing to clean towels,
swoop to finish with a burnishing forehead kiss.

Cradling your neck in the cup of my fingers,

soft your putty skull, thin in my hand

75
Night Vision

Between our tired forms, you stay alert,

eyes wide as our bed
becomes your playground.

Claiming a strip of sheet and quilt

where your small body can collapse,
jump up and collapse.

Your arms stretch out in a backwards flop,

relax supine until sleep comes.

You enjoy these ill-disciplined nights,

free from the confines of your cot,
when teething or some other fever
keeps you close.

Jittering with extra energy, so confident

that we can contain your movements,
trusting implicitly that our shapes will hem you in
when you fall, that our arms will tether you to our earth.

76
A Record Of You

What can I keep of these first months

as you slip from my hands.

You are water I scoop with netted fingers,

words I hold in my mouth until my lips

are forced to open and I release you to the air.

You are information disseminated

and I have no control over your reception.

What do I choose of your facts, your necessities,

daily meals and sleeps,

the intangible cycle of our days together,

what to stack neatly

and what if anything to discard.

I want all of you to keep,

every breath, all your garbled syllables.

but in my cataloguing, I run the risk

of filing you too strictly,

losing you among labels,

rubber banded clusters of paper,

clothes you have outgrown,

socks that once held your tiny feet,

material things that are nothing without you.

77
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz Quirke’s debut collection is scheduled for publication with Salmon Poetry in April 2018. The
collection will be called The Biology of Mothering and explores parenting within a same sex
family and motherhood in a non-biological sense. The "Housework" and "Waiting Room" poems
are poems from the fertility treatment phase of the collection. "Nocturne With Bathtime", "Night
Vision" and "A Record Of You" are snapshots of family life.

78
 FIONA PERRY

Breakers

Before they are born

Breakers swell and loom
In rolls of blown glass
I want to step inside
To be statue-caught
In their crystal corridor
Like an ancient body
Preserved in a glacier.
Then -
I can cut the white
Noise. Reboot. Prepare
For my second coming
As foaming diamonds
Released from saltwater
Ectoplasm. Thrown on
To warm, restorative
Sand. Equipped for Terra
Firma Dwelling.

79
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fiona's short stories and poetry have been published in The Irish Literary Review, Spontaneity
Magazine, Into The Void, Dodging The Rain and Skylight47 amongst others. She grew up in
Ireland but has lived most of her life in England and Australia. She currently lives near a
volcano in New Zealand. Follow her on Twitter @Fionaperry17.

80
 FRANCES BROWNER

Before And After

She was twenty-three

Single and free
Got her Degree and
A job in New Jersey
No time for memory

Years passed, she

Returned, at last
Old friends reeled in
New loves spun out
Her net recast

Each scene stored

This time, to be
Recalled on quiet nights
When she is alone
And again, far from home

81
Great Style

My mother used to love Lisa Perkins

A boutique on the right,
Right inside the shopping centre;
Monica Peters too, out on the Main Street.
“Wear your style,” she’d say to me,
“A woman should always wear her style.”

A powder pink top she made me buy

In Blackrock Mall one time,
Egging me back into the shops
Lisa and Monica chortling with delight.
“Treat yourself,” she said to me,
“Never be afraid to treat yourself.”

The beige cardigan she chose for herself

With pearl buttons like tears
falling down the front
And the ivory beads lacing her fingers.
“She’s so serene,” everybody said.
“And always a great one for the style.”

82
Old Fashioned

Remember when you held my hand

And invited me out to dance
Old-fashioned, as in days of yore
Remember when you held my hand
While waltzing me around the floor
And spoke to me of romance
Remember when you held my hand
And invited me out to dance

83
Magic Moments

That moment when a swirl of dark

Chocolate glides across my lips
Melts onto my tongue like velvet
That moment when a swirl of dark
Coffee – hot - pleasures my palate
Like magic, a total eclipse
That moment when a swirl of dark
Chocolate glides across my lips

84
In My Wheelie Bag

A journal
with classy cover
Pens
A book to read
or write
And then

Leggings, knickers
bed socks,
fleece
Under Armour
runners, eye mask
sleeps

Shorts, sandals
bikini-top
shades
Sunscreen, sexy dress
in case the weather’s
ablaze

Cleanser, toner
bags of cotton
balls
Moisturizer, Mac
Touch lipstick
BB cream, skin
perfector

Frizzeaze, phone
glasses. Clairol
touch-up,
Gmail, Facebook
WhatsApp
What’s up?

Toothbrush, toothpaste
invisible Invisaline
braces
For a smile
that can change

85
everything

And, for
fear of the
night
An angel stone
to press in
my palm

86
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frances Browner was born in Cork; grew up in Dublin; spent twenty years in America,
and now resides in Wicklow. Her short fiction & memoir pieces have appeared in
magazines and short story anthologies, been short-listed for competitions and
broadcast on radio. Poems have been published in the Ogham Stone, Tales from the
Forest, Poems on the Edge, the Limerick Poetry Trail and Skylight 47.

87
 VICKI MULLAN

Fear Of Flying

When I was small I could fly.

I hovered deliciously above the ground
Senses heightened, viewing in detail :
Stones glowed like jewels
Amber,crystal, ruby-rich.
I saw every scale on a beetle’s wing,
Every spider’s eye,
The spikes of pollen on the hairy legs of bees,
Jumping cats’ fleas,
Swarms of red mites.
I could smell the sweet and musky scents
Of animals and flowers.
In winter snowflakes became stars,
Frost glittered like the Milky Way,
The universe unfolded under me;
But I never flew away.

Too satisfied with what I saw

Now I can’t hover anymore.

88
Damascene

Oh, how I longed to be loved.

It wasn’t sex that sent me flitting butterfly-gaudy from bed to bed,
But the desire
To be desired.

It didn’t work of course.

They loved and left me to the sadness and loneliness
Of my own
Self-loathing.

Now maybe I have felt a higher hand

That touches me with love more real than passionate excess.
It turns me out
From myself.

And I have seen a light—

Not a Saul-blinding flash on a barren road,
But a faint, grey glimmer
In the tunnel of my soul.

89
Extinction On Wings

Ghost bird flowing white,

Slicing soundlessly through night air,
Cutting a haunting swathe through shadow
With spectral wings.
Sweeping past on a whispered breath,
Suddenly, soundlessly gone.
Were you ever there?
How long did your haunting last?
How can we possess the possessed?

90
Goldcrest

We set it on the windowsill gently

Sole survivor of the fledgling butchery.
Chirruping feather-ball trilling with might,
Desperately delaying the dying light,

Harbouring beneath its downy breast

A wound to silence a lone goldcrest.
We willed it to soar again in flight;
It sent its soul-song to the pine tree height.

Gashed to the heart by a cat’s callous claw,

Sounding a death trill, it sang no more.

91
The Murderer

Meanwhile the murderer unmoved

Stretched languorously,
Lips licked,
Fur fluffed
Belly full
Goldcrest-stuffed;
Self-absorbed,
Self-satisfied.

92
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vicki Mullan has scribbled on and off for years and has had a poem accepted for
publication in The Scottish National Poetry Competition anthology many years ago.
Vicki recently had a poem selected for the Bangor Poetry Competition

93
 ELLIE ROSE MCKEE

Detachment

Most young people want nothing more than independence; freedom to be wild, and
free, and… well, young. To make mistakes and discover the world for themselves. To
not be limited by what other people thought best. To make friends with whoever they
wanted and not be limited at the end of each day by homework and a curfew.

Kerry Hamilton, on the other hand, had never much understood the impulse.

“But why?” she asked her father when he suggested she start looking at colleges
further afield.

He paused before answering, setting his mouth as if physically chewing over his words
before releasing them.

“Because we live in the ass-crack of nowhere,” said Kerry’s brother, Kit, while their
father was still musing on a more diplomatic way of delivering the same sentiment.

“So?” said Kerry. “I happen to like this ass-crack.” Her eyes went almost as wide as Kit’s
grin when she realized what she’d said and she swiftly added that he should shut up
and stay out of it.

“The schools around here aren’t so great,” her dad said, finally. “You’d have better
opportunities closer to the big city.”

“Which city?”

“Any of them.”

Kerry groaned, her head falling back to gently thud the headrest of the old, battered
recliner she was sitting on. A moment after that, she sat up again – her back straight
and a glint in her eye. Her dad gave her a wary look.

“I could go,” she said, “Get into a really good school. Do really well and get a good
job…” There was a pause as she judged her father’s expression, but he was set on not
responding until she’d gotten to the crux of her brainwave. Huffing out a breath, Kerry
finished, “You could come with me.”

Kit rolled his eyes but she ignored him, too busy still giving her dad the hard sell
complete with toothpaste commercial smile.

Their dad sighed and folded his paper in his lap, raising a hand for silence when Kit

94
went to speak again. “Will you give us a moment, Sport?”

Shoulders slumped, Kit left the room, closing the door behind him quietly on his way
out. Neither he nor Kerry could deny their father anything.

Their dad was the strong yet gentle type. Wholesome, Kerry would describe him, if only
to herself. Stalwart. How he treated people and the way he made them feel was what
she loved most about him, and his guiding influence was she feared losing from her
life.

If things were great and they worked, why change and risk ruining them? It just made
no sense.

Turning to her, he asked, “What’s this really about, Sport?” He called everyone sport,
whether they were a little girl or an old, old man; a dog, goldfish, or someone he saw
on TV.

Kerry worried the hem of her shirt, taking a leaf out of his book for once and pausing to
think before answering. This was important, she wanted to say it right.

“Don’t make me go away,” she said, several long minutes later.

It took her even more time than that before she dared to look up at her dad again,
but she saw that he had worried eyes when she finally did peak. Her insides twisted
and the thread of her shirt made a creaking sound under her fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes moistening. She never wanted to worry him. Hell, she
never wanted to cause her dad any negative emotion. Ever. It hurt too much to see it
etched across his expressive face.

Again, she saw that he was waiting for her to speak. To explain.

Again, it took a while for Kerry to find the words.

“When mom left,” she said, her voice cracking. “You were here for us. For both of us.
You- you’re safe, don’t you see?”

He shook his head and Kerry had the urge to reach out and shake him until he
understood. Why couldn’t he just get it? He always did before, and it seemed so
obvious to her. With horror, she wondered if it was happening already – the
detachment kids have from their parents when they grow up and aren’t kids anymore.

“I’m not safe.”

Kerry blinked. “What?”

“Sport, I’m a human. Human’s ain’t safe.”

Mouth opening and closing like a fish, Kerry was only able to say, “Umm.” She didn’t
have the first clue where to go from there.

95
Her dad reached out and put his arm around her, pulling her in for one of his famous
bear hugs. “Listen,” he said. “Growing up is scary, I’ll grant you that.”

“No,” said Kerry. “I mean, yes, it is – of course. I just mean, that’s not what I’m scared
of.” Her dad raised his eyebrows, which she took as an invitation to continue.
“Growing up’s not optional, right?” she said, and he nodded. “Right, so there’s no
point in worrying about that. I just don’t want to…” she paused, then added, “Grow
apart.”

Her dad’s lips turned into a frown but remained closed, whereas Kerry forced a smile
again, even though it had nowhere near the same shine as before.

“This is the part where you tell me you’ll always be here for me,” she prompted. “You
know how, even if I go away, I can always come back, right?”

“Wrong.”

“What?” she almost yelled the word, it was pulled out of her with such sudden
brutality. What was wrong was the entire conversation? They never spoke like this. Her
dad had always understood before. And now – now it seemed like he almost didn’t
care, except that couldn't be right, either. “Dad,” she pleaded. “That’s not–” she
wrung her hands, not knowing how to finish.

“I wish I could tell you I’ll always be here,” said her dad, “But that’s not how life works.
Life ends.”

After a sharp intake of breath that Kerry was sure had shredded her lungs on the way
out, she petitioned her father again. “Don’t say that!” she cried.

“Why?” he said, evenly. “It’s true.”

Kerry began to sob and her dad held her tighter still. “Don’t,” he said, his tone turning
gentle. “It’s no bad thing.”

Through blurry eyes, she looked at him, completely blind to what he was saying. “I
don’t understand.”

He gave a small, reassuring smile. “It’s just life. It’s the way it goes.”

“It ends,” Kerry echoed, feeling completely wretched.

“That it does,” her dad agreed. “But it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. In fact,
it shouldn’t be. Not if you’ve done it right.

“If I kept you close – never let you learn to fly and live in the world for yourself – one
day, when I’m not here anymore, you won’t survive. It’s a father’s job to equip his kids
for life, not hide them away from it.”

Kerry pouted, starting to recognize the wisdom in his words even if she still didn't fully
understand or accept it. “So,” she said, forcing her voice to be steady, “You want me
to go away so that when you die I won’t be upset?” she summarized. It definitely

96
didn’t sound right when she put it like that. How come he’d made it sound rational?

Her dad chuckled and said, “You can stay or go as you please, Sport. As long as
you’re not only here for me, like I’m some kind of salvation.”

“Wait,” said Kerry. “I can stay?” she was so thrilled by the prospect that she almost
forgave the verbal torture that preceded it and stood up to declare her dad the best
man ever to live. “But, wait,” she said again, “What’s the catch?”

With a wry expression, her dad said, “There’s no catch,” but Kerry still looked skeptical.
“There’s no permission needed, either,” he continued. “What you do is up to you. It’s
not the decisions you make that matter so much as the fact that you make them.”

Huh, thought Kerry, feeling like she finally understood. Maybe he wasn’t the one who
didn’t see after all.

“You’re a great girl,” her dad told her, making pride swell in her heart. “I just can’t wait
to see what kind of woman you turn into.”

She gave him a bear hug in reply.

97
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ellie has been writing poetry and short stories since primary school and blog posts for
ten years, since attending university in Lincoln. She lives in Belfast with her husband and
spends her non-writing time enjoying art, photography, and animals.

98
 EILEEN SHEEHAN

Sexing the Eggs

As she had no use for a glut of cocks

she filched the new-laid eggs from underneath
the squawking fuss of hen. Slipped from her pocket
a wooden peg, threaded through with string.

She held it still, above each egg in turn,

until it told, through movement, what she
was there to learn. Clockwise circles marked an egg
as female, a straight line back and forth condemned

an egg as male; if the peg held firm,

unmoving in the air, the egg was dead.
She tossed the cocks and gluggers to the brace
of hounds that waited eagerly outside:

their glossy coats and sparkling eyes

were admired the parish wide.

*First published in The Enchanting Verses: Irish Issue (editor Patrick Cotter)
The Tuesday Poem The Irish Examiner (poetry editor Patrick Cotter)

99
Say Nothing

It seemed like the heat drove him mad,

that unbearable summer.

He was seen in the pub all hours.

His animals were heard crying

in the evenings, the lonesome sound

carrying across the fields.

Nobody said anything, until two cows

died in the hill field. They were found

with their mouths half open,

their long tongues lolling to one side.

After that, the evenings grew quiet.

Things settled back to the old pattern;

the exchange of small-talk

with the neighbour they had know all their lives.

100
Playing Shops

The lean-to shed with the clunky door

and grey, felt roof was where
the two girls set up shop.

They filled empty packets from the kitchen

with sand, turf dust and small stones,
adding extra weight to the game.

They built shelves from old boards

and fruit crates. Arranged the merchandise
in neat rows with the labels facing out.

Their endeavour prompted by a plastic till

that they had found. When you pressed the blue button
it made a dinging sound and the drawer shot open.

The boys refused to play at being customers,

mocked such a silly game, ran off up the field
playing cops and robbers with sticks for guns.

The shopkeepers begged an old scale from their mother,

with a white scoop and a plastic bowl
they weighed things up, weighed things out.

When they went home for tea the robbers came

and slashed the packets, shot the boxes open,
pilfered the brown pennies from the till.

Working in quiet unison the two girls

dumped what was unfixable, saved what could be saved,
nailed a new sign on the clunky door, opened for business.

101
What of the Heart?

so, the heart found

a calm cave to retreat to,

so, it was a home of sorts,

a haven, if you will,

so, there was a certain comfort

in the song of insects, the predictable wind,

so, there were tasks to complete,

a daily round, some small achievements,

so, heart learnt to make-do,

expected nothing, was not disappointed,

so, tiny creatures succumbed to the night,

she counted bones, furred corpses,

so, when he tracked her there,

she had forgotten his face, his darkening features,

so, she ran towards him,

kissed him, full on the mouth,

so not what she thought

she was about to do.

*First published in Sixty Poems for Haiti (editors Ian Dieffenthaller & Maggie Harris/ Cane
Arrow Press)

102
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eileen Sheehan: is from Scartaglin, County Kerry, she now lives in Killarney. Anthology
publications include Best Loved Poems: Favourite Poems from the South of Ireland
(editor Gabriel Fitzmaurice with photographs by John Reidy/ Curragh Press); The Deep
Heart's Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem (editors Eugene O'Connell & Pat
Boran/ Dedalus Press) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (editor Niall
MacMonagle/ The Celtic Press).Her work features on Poetry International Web. Her
third collection, The Narrow Way of Souls, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.

103
 MARGARET O’DRISCOLL

Picking Up The Pieces

Picking up the pieces of plate

shattered on the kitchen floor
picking up the splattered dinner
like she did the week before
mopping up the residue
wiping the ceiling clean -
later he'll lament doing it
that's how it's always been

Picking up the pieces of people

damaged in it's wake
picking up the broken spirits -
she sadly stayed for their sake
Patching up a partnership
plastering over every crack
in her head she left so many times
vowing never to go back

104
Symbols Of Escape

There should be anniversaries for escaping abusive relationships

the symbol for the first year -
a lion for courage, to mark the giant leap

For year two it should be steel -

to reflect the steel within
each step of the ladder
should be marked on the way up

105
Take No Shit

She's no longer that vulnerable woman

kicked down on the floor
Now she's got her courage back
she'll take no shit no more!

106
Warrior Woman

I've known years and years of deepest pain

I've been forged in many a fire
tempered like steel I now stand
the flames were high but I rose higher
now I'm on a vantage point
never backing down
I'm a warrior woman
courage is my crown!

107
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret O'Driscoll is a writer, editor and curator and is a mother of seven and
grandmother to eleven who lives in Co' Cork, Ireland. She is a Social Care Worker and
has been a full time carer for many years. Her poetry has appeared in various
magazines and anthologies worldwide. She published her first poetry collection on
Bloomsday, 2016, 'The Best Things In Life Are Free' - it has received star reviews. She was
awarded a full bursary to attend The John Hewitt Summer School in 2016. Her work has
been translated and published internationally in many languages.

108
 CHRIS MURRAY

[There is space] beneath the [dark]tower

[Dwelling] beneath the tower

Beneath the Tower

Alongside [it a babel-brook] a river there is [sings of her silks and silver, many tongued
she is

[Her song] A river does not ‘sing’ is of salmon, of hazelnut(s) [a visual image omitted, Editor’s
Note].

Boann The River Boyne flows between two ancient towers at Trim, Co. Meath. [two
ancient towers shot through, blasted into ruination]at Trim, Co.Meath, Ireland.
Alongside [Boann] the river there are the remnants of an extensive settlement which
consists of a curtain wall, gate tower remnants, including the Barbican Gate, a great
standing tower, a ruined great hall, and other. architectural curiosities which have
become known collectively as ‘Trim Castle’. [*We will concern ourselves only with one
of the towers, Editor’s Note]

Boann / The River Boyne.

Boann There is no need to endow the river with a colloquial name!

The River Boyne flows between two ancient towers at Trim in Co. Meath, Ireland. [Shot
through / blasted into ruination], [T]he ruins present a stark picture to the walker poet.

Boann/ The River Boyne

It is time for us to infuse Boann with song, with images. It is time to let the past lie down
in its wreckage. We must begin to listen to her notes, illuminant, discordant; the babel
of the female poet singer. The woman poet takes her language from Boann.

The dark shape of the river passes us. It is silver and brown, its deep blue is endlessly lit
from above. Boann is asking us for music and for light. It is time to question tower’s
austere note. Its commission of dark wordless functionality. It is time to fill the valley with
the sound of our singing.

109
The Tower

The tower is a physical entity, lock-gripped and tenaciously clinging to the landscape
from where it arose. Yet it can be changed into a useful metaphor for the purposes of
this essay. We can examine the tower metaphor as the ’weight’ of male poetic
‘authority’, the type of poetic language that dominates a canon that has relentlessly
excluded women poets. The Irish woman poet should not take on the burden of the
tower, which is in fact an unattainable linguistic remnant of the past. An austere shape
that intimidates us and refuses to beguile us with its plain blank note, it's simple
austerity.

An internally buttressed tower, a ruination that is invisibly reinforced by those women

writers too lazy to challenge the ideology of the cultural industry, the literary market. It
could just be a tower in a field, but where is the harm in that ?

Women poets wear multiple corsets. They are the best self-editors, doing anything to
achieve critical recognition in an Irish canon dominated by the male poet’s voice,
including writing a poetry that fits into their idea of the austere, the heroic, the
conquering.

We are never allowed to forget the dark tower. The structured language, the idiom of
false praxis. It dominates the dreaming lives of those of us who cling to the literary
landscape. ‘Tower’ is alwayspresent, a colossus,

an ancient sand crack

sounds,

unsound,

it cannot

upbuild

its wall.

There is space to walk beneath the tower. A huge mostly dry and cavernous space. It
feels light beneath it because the arches are doing the work carrying that fearful
weight of poetry tradition. Small trickles of water run down the old walls nourishing blue
flowers, daisies, maybe there are some forget-me-nots.

Small and quite insignificant flowers dwell beneath this dark austerity. The run-off
makes its way to an underground drainage system, eventually it emptying into the
adjacent river,

110
Alongside tower the babel-brook sings out her silks and silver, many-tongued she is.
Her song is of salmon, of hazel nuts, of night and men. Boann shrugs off the
impertinence of the tower in the great schema of things.

The rulers, those king-worshippers, idolaters, leave no space in their making for light, for
the shallow play of water, for a sliver of coloured glass to carry the multiplicit y ies of
her reflection(s) There is in fact nothing to blunt the edge of the austerity in their
conception of ‘tower’. It is not a burden due to us, nor ours to carry.

The corbelled stonework in the archway under the tower allows air to drive through
while keeping the rain off. Of course the supporting arches are of low roman design.
These huge arches have the ability to carry great architectural weight.

Tower

Tower’s unquestioned authority is set in the language of stone, of austerity, a music of

heroic manhood, of conquest, of collapse and ruination. It only takes a second to turn
away from that anomalus ruin, and face the river that survived the shaping of the
tower,

Alongside Tower the babel-brook sings out her silks and silver, many-tongued she is. Her
song is of salmon, of hazel nuts, of night and men. Boann shrugs off the impertinence
of tower in the great schema of things.

Boann- her language is a babel brook, containing both dark and light. Her language,
the language of river is an eternal thing. Boann flows between the ruins of two towers,
that one with the fabulous curtain walls, down-fastened, fixed, creeled in by the
language of stone. That old tributary alongside it was a much disputed redirection.
Heaving with rushes now, it is a mirage, the ground looks solid enough to the unwary.
That tower opposite might well be the end wall of some castle.

Boann passes darkly and rapidly, giving not a thought to these ancient ruins. Her
waters are alive with silk and silver. ‘Tower’ was an episode, an ancient and tawdry
memory. The tower-makers neglected her, there were no places of shallow and light
for her waters to play. There was no place for her to capture their hearts of stone, their
worldliness. They built no place for a chapel, or for her lights to play out their mischief.
There would be no ease for the dead of that house. She passes the old curtain wall,
shrugs off the memory now, an aberration.

We must examine the ruin of tower in order to understand how it has colonised our
imaginations for thousands of years. It Is not externally buttressed, so its foundation
must strike deep into the bedrock and soil that it is built upon. Kids can run around it,
this rain-blackened tower. They can climb and jump over what was the cess pit and
its sliding garde robe. Festooned now with blue spotlights edging its ancient clinging to
the landscape- we are not allowed forget it, even at night,

Its ancient sand crack

111
 sounds,

unsound,

it cannot

upbuild

its wall.

If we investigate closer, we can see that tower is buttressed internally with a never
ending series of internal scaffoldings, rigorous shunting of metals into walls has
occurred. Rust bleeds down onto the exposed sills. New wooden doors hang dark-
oakly from its lintels and other more ancient architectural extrusions. We can see that
tower is an image of austerity, with its weird militaristic ringing.

There is no decoration evident here. Gargoyles are fashioned from strict limestone, no
grinning monsters or weird beasts relieve its upward sweep. Music and merry making
happened in the roofless hall that is set at a distance from the business of tower. Its
windows are always slits for arrows, for defence.

There were picture windows made up of tiny panels, mullioned and closed in. There
were no wide open windows here. No vistas, maybe the sun once made a play with
the glass panels in their plain whiteness, unrelieved by stain of blue or deep orange.

Tower clutched onto the landscape that it arose from. A sister tower across the river is
without interest, a gutted needlelike structure, flimsy walled, raided by farmers for out-
buildings, for old stone walls. It's weird music only heard by sheep and wild animals
now.

Tower appears to be impenetrable, but it is not a babel tower. It is not the queen's
rook, the richly interpreted, the feathered by music and song tower. It is an austerity, a
precise note on the poetry landscape, a darkness of function and direct language.
Here, you are aware that you stand outside of it. An alienated being.

It is good to find one’s feet, to know that they can take you away from the austerity of
‘tower’ back to the river. Back to Boann, back to her eternal song.

112
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Murray is an Irish poet. Her chapbook Three Red Things was published by
Smithereens Press in June 2013. A small collection of interrelated poems in series and
sequence, Cycles, was published by Lapwing Press in autumn 2013. A book-length
poem, The Blind, was published by Oneiros Books in 2013. Her second book-length
poem, She, was published by Oneiros in spring 2014. A chapbook, Signature, was
published by Bone Orchard Press in March 2014. “A Modern Encounter with ‘Foebus
abierat’: On Eavan Boland’s ‘Phoebus Was Gone, all Gone, His Journey Over’ ” was
published in Eavan Boland: Inside History(Editors: Nessa O’Mahony and Siobhán
Campbell) by Arlen House in 2016.

113
 MOYRA DONALDSON

We were Speaking and then the Bright Half-moon and Jupiter.

A black volcanic bowl

with one blue stream across
and a jug that holds no water.

Architect drawings are fading

and each morning now the house
has rearranged itself.
Through which window
will the sun rise today?
On what will it set?

The word is written on the wall

by a mysterious hand.
See how it shines above your head,
as if it was the word of god,
as if the word was out that you can hate
as well as you can love, or better;
yes word is out, word is on the street.
Kneel down for it and do not blink.

114
Black Dream Bird

It was yesterday
that I was a crow
with horse hair in my beak
and my nest half built
and my black feathers
shining through the early mist
of belonging to the world
of knowing how to balance
on the air of the world
and my shadow
the same colour as myself.

Even when the farmer

tied my body lifeless
to the wire in warning
and my bones poked out
still I flapped in the wind
and raised my wings
to the call of the air
my beak hinged open
in constant caw.

115
Glory and Tragedy at Cheltenham
BBC Sport Online 28th January 2017
A found poem

Press
After lowering the colours of hot favourite, Thistlecrack
in a sensational battle, in the best race of his career,
better even than his win in the 2015 Grand National -
Many Clouds collapsed moments after crossing the line.

Gallops Jockey
What was great about him
but was also his downfall,
was that he didn’t know
when to quit, that’s our sport
and it makes us love it
and makes us hate it.

Trainer
I’ve had two large vodkas and tonics,
basically IV vodka just to be able to speak to you,
he was the horse of a lifetime,
I always said he’d die for you and he died
for me and the team today, doing what he loved.

Veterinarian
On behalf of the owner and trainer and with their permission, the BEVA can confirm
that Many Clouds was found to have suffered from a severe pulmonary haemorrhage
which was the cause of his death after the race. No significant underlying health issues
were discovered in the autopsy. Our thoughts remain with everyone connected to the
horse.

Groom
I regret not patting him – I just went away too upset
and I wish I’d said goodbye; I didn’t go down
to the yard this morning; it hit me last night
when I saw his box and knew
it was never going to be used by him again.
It broke my heart, you never get over it.
I’m sixty-two and I’ve been in the sport
since I was fifteen, but you never get used
to losing them, if you do you shouldn’t

116
be working with horses.
I’m due to retire in two years
when he’d have been twelve,
I was hoping we could have gone out together.
He wasn’t a good horse, he was a great horse.

117
Return

Why are the horses so long without coming,

And let me suffer so much
Kasper Hauser – the Child of Europe

Like the viola d’amore, our heart strings lie

below the heart strings of the horse
so that we harmonise through resonance,

and there is truth that lives outside of time

in vivid dream; the thin little sorrel beast,
the boy who kissed her dying eyes and lips,

memory perhaps, of when we were not the centre

of the universe, the locus of its consciousness,
not master, owner: we could yet set down the axe.

Vaslav Nijinsky dances the war in Saint Moritz

in front of the aristocrats; he dances frightening things.
Finished, he declares – the little horse is tired.

Nietzsche, weeping in the Piazzo in Turin, weeps

for the beaten horse, the beaten self – sing me a new song.
If I could remember where the bones were buried,

I would dig them up, the wings of scapulas, the skulls of air,
the golden saddle cloths; reconstruct the horses,
the black horse and the white horse and the horse of fire.

118
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Poet, creative writing facilitator, editor. Experienced mentor for those working towards
a first collection. Moyra’s publishers are Lagan Press, Belfast and Liberties Press, who
published her Selected Poems in 2012 and her most recent collection, The Goose Tree
in June 2014

119
 MAEVE MCGARRITY

Churston Cove

The pink-pebbled shore is deserted but for a boy and his tattooed father
Skimming stones out to sea.
Backs arched, wrists flicking, stones low-leaping.
The sea will thrust them forward again,
Their smooth forms nudged to the foreshore.
Wave by wave, tide by tide,
Ground to gravel, to sand,
A red salty coarseness cut with bone and glass.

The boy enjoys a sudden moment of triumph,

One; two; three; four jumps
The stone sinks without a splash.
He raises his nimble, young fists, as yet, a blank, uninked canvas.
Prances wildly around the empty amphitheatre,
Silky shingle bunching under his feet.
Gleeful shrieks ricochet off rocks and trees and cliffs.

His father’s tattoo of a bearskin soldier,

Proudly etched on the side of his right shin,
Cracks into a sly smile behind a glinting, gold chain.

The day is marked. The guard has changed. The tide has turned.

Seagulls make figures of eight,

As they circle a rowdy school of mackerel coming to the boil.
A silver rush of slapping and smarting.

Further out, a seal quietly relishes its blubbery immersion,

Oily skin sparkling.
It raises its round, shiny head up to the blue, cloud-streaked heavens.
Carefully balancing the forces of nature on the tip of its nose.

120
Squeeze tight; let go

I made you a perfect 5 ‘o clock cuppa - force of habit I guess!

Lovely loose, leaves unfurling their oriental goodness.
I added just enough milk to round out the bitter tang of tannin and gave it a good stir-
you’ll be pleased to know- sugar really isn’t necessary:
You were right all along, my Darjeeling!
Especially if you have it with a biscuit, as you always did! Amazingly, you never gained
one ounce despite polishing off sweet, crunchy roundels at every opportunity! You
should be the size of a house and yet I can’t remember a time when you ever refused
a Jaffa Cake or a Jammy Dodger or even a Rich Tea! Count yourself lucky and enjoy it
while it lasts!
Apparently, taller people have more surface area to spread around the ‘hardening’
in their arteries so put that in your pipe and smoke it! But think of your teeth, never
mind your arteries - I didn’t take you to the orthodontist in Crouch End for years for
them to rot into stumps like an Elizabethan trollop!
What about my father in Mid-Ulster? Still shaving every single morning without fail - you
could set your clock by him. It takes him forever, not because he’s 83 and that’s the
time he takes, but rather because he takes his time. That plug doesn’t get pulled; that
chain doesn’t clink and rattle around the neck of the tap until his skin is as smooth as a
perfectly-dimpled baby’s bottom!
I drank my cup down in a few hasty swigs- well somewhere between a gulp and a
long sip. It really hit the tingling, yearning spot on the back of my throat. Only a good
old-fashioned cup of tea can do that!
Tea must be up there with soda bread and fluffy mash and a good trifle and cricket
commentary on the radio. Nice little succulent, rambling tete a tetes to pass the time
at the crease, all the way up to the tea break.
Jammed scones and lemon drizzle cake knocked up by dutiful wives and mothers. A
sea of gleaming white teacups rising and falling from stubbled jaws all around the
grassy pavilion.

Remember how I used to hold your hand towards the end, in the last few weeks? I’d
squeeze tight, then let go. I do that now but with my fists pumped to stop the pain
from rising in my chest. It was ages since I’d actually held your hand like that. I used to
have to hold to keep you safe and stop you falling over.
Like when you used to walk along the top of that old stone wall in the park in Islington
where we used to live, squishing the trailing rosebuds in a pair of soft, pink leather
sandals, your hair a bouncing ball of yellow fuzz in the morning light.
I’ve had rabbit eyes for weeks now - feel about a hundred years old!
Listen to me spouting on - I suppose I shouldn’t pour my heart out like this. HaHa!
I could go with the flow and get a smaller teapot, but then I’ll have to buy a smaller
tea cosy too, so maybe I’ll just go to Sainsbury’s and buy some decent strong teabags
and be done with it!

Squeeze tight and let go eh!

121
You see all the problems I’ve got all because you passed a few exams!

Freshers week will be in full swing by now!

Think I’ll put the kettle on, that tingling is back again!

122
The Hair of the Dog

One fitted jacket, M&S, size 14,

With a soft alluring sheen,
Heavy black cotton.
Hangs forgotten,
On a coat peg in a caravan in Torbay.
Something of the Highway
Man or New Romantic in its looks,
In the steel eyes and hand-finished hooks.

No time for goodbyes

The row was devastatingly quick,
Pompeii, AD79,
Insults leapt like molten lava,
Sparked by crossed wires over a smart telly,
Innocent goods, lent, not given,
Words taken the wrong way.

Caught in the crossfire, women plead, children go quiet,

Dog whimpers, bulging brown eyes averted.

Half-eatenThai takeaway ( set menu 3)

Abandoned in tin foil cases,
On chipped, formica table with a bad wobble.
Congealed fingerprints on glasses of beer,
Unctuous grease from spring rolls,
Transferring almost perfectly.

Brothers successfully parted.

Cane, mortally offended,
Driven away at high speed in a second-hand,
Metallic green Mazda,
Dog cowering in the back seat.
Voice cracking, ash flying up from his cigarette,
A red glow in the fading light.

Wounded, Abel goes to watch the rabbits frolicking at dusk.

Walks past the live entertainment,
Thankful for the garish, drunken Karioke.

123
Days later, the jacket is discovered.
One crinkled, rough, yellow hair of the dog clings to the
inside of the cotton lining.
The rightful owner is established.

Text messages about ‘the hair of the dog’ are exchanged.

Beers cooling in the fridge.
They will come round to collect it later.

124
Heron Landing

Alone, a heron stands still,

Surveying the scene upon landing.
Motionless. Emotionless.

A conductor before a performance.

Awaiting the acquiescence of the ornithological orchestra,
Perched on the upper branches of Ash and Rowan trees on the pond island.
Tuneless crows caw over the low cooing of bloated pigeons.
Gulls eye-up rafts of floating bread scraps,
Their shrieking pierces the full-throttled din:
They will not be disciplined.

The heron has set them off.

It wastes no more time on their cacophony and looks to feed itself.

Head stretched forward, leading a sharp line of inquiry,
From long toes clawing the pond bed all the way to beak,
Two razors ready to sever, in a well-timed second, the green grubby slime.
It sees movement and stabs the unsuspecting prey in its surgical shadow.

Old stamping ground is the best.

125
 AMY BARRY

The Goddesses at Uisneach

In this sun-shower morning,

A chain-link friendship,
We wade barefoot,
A total immersion,
Documenting words
fished from Lough Lugh —
The birth of fertilised lines!

The goddess Aine flares

Sun-spangled passion
in our spirits,
We rapture
into a dervish-like dance.

Then, we listen to her singing

And the violin pours…

We, not moving,

Holding our breath,
In the Hill of Uisneach —

We persist.

126
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Barry writes poems and short stories. She has worked in the Media, Hotel and Oil &
Gas industries. Her poems have been published in anthologies, journals, and e-zines, in
Ireland and abroad. Her poems have been read and shared on the radio in Australia,
Canada and Ireland. She loves traveling and trips to India, Nepal, China, Bali, Paris,
Berlin, have all inspired her work. When not inspired she plays Table Tennis.

127
 GAYNOR KANE

Domestic Help 1916

Come on! Come on! Cumann na mBan

girls, give birth to a new nation
proclaim beauty in your child’s eyes;
her pupils refract freedom. Train her
quickly in rifles, rounds and revival
and teach her to be alert, brave and
cunning in preparation for a rebellion.
Come on! Come on! Cumann na mBan

Come on! Come on! Cumann na mBan

Throw poetry, prose, plays and pistols
into a pot and let the women
serve a revolutionary banquet.
Be radical with hotel larders
and factory biscuits, to create
rations for the regiments.
Come on! Come on! Cumann na mBan

Sacrifice your safety, sideboard

and sofas, to barricade the streets.
Dance dangerously with the men
from last week’s ceilidh, then take
orders, tapping keys to the tune
of the rebel’s refrain, hear the music
of the Mauser’s bodhrán beat.
Come on! Come on! Cumann na mBan

Spread your wings and fly across the

scarlet skyline, unruffled by scorching
cinder confetti. Or scurry through streets
and alleys, under the disguise of
your sex, moving arms and ammo unseen.
Weave underground networks, in a city
divided by more than the Liffey.
Come on! Come on! Cumann na mBan

128
Bandage the bullet wounds and dress
the damage done by imperial oppression;
these scars will mark you forever.
Raise the blood-stained sheet, and mourn
the child that fought for life
for six days. Don’t wear black;
say ‘I do’ under the shadow of death
and against the executioner’s ticking clock.

129
Abraxas

Oh, dark one!

I see shadows staring back
reflected in an ebony pond,
a black iris
smooth and shining.

Do we see differently?
Is your world in sepia,
or monochrome,
or technicolour?
Have you lost hope in humanity?

I stroll through the golden field,

seeded grass
swishes against skin.
You follow,
echoing my gait.

Under a shaft of sunlight

we stop – still.
Feel
our breathing
become synchronised.

Taste the mist of

our exhalation
merging in the stillness
of us
muzzles almost nuzzling.

But you are looking

down on me
and I wonder
if your power
will be my undoing.

I reach to touch your cheek.

The spell is broken
you rear up whinnying;
gallop off like a thunderbolt
leaving me in a cloud of humility.

130
Winter Self-help

Fold
your blank page
in half,
bend from top to bottom
smooth with finger nail
fold each hoary edge
back on yourself.
Trim off a border in zigzags or curves
depending on your mood.
Or if you need help use this as a template,
cut out
of the emptiness -
angles, anger and bubbles are good.
Under foot
a flurry of flakes,
the trimmings
of excess.
Tenderly unfold your new page
reveal your creation,
beautiful in your uniqueness.
Sometimes you have to cut
things out
to make
the perfect
snow
f
l
a
k
e

131
After birth

“When one door closes another door opens, but we so often look so long and so
regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”
Alexander Graham Bell

At first, there was the heady rush of relief,

at wrinkles, pink skin and the right number
of fingers and toes. Delivered, like a gift

the day before Grandmother’s birthday

baby was a welcome distraction for a
family still mourning her passing.

Baby’s first suckle was stress-free but afterwards,

like sour milk, latching on was distasteful
to both of us. Baby blues came and stayed.

Visitors cooed, asked how I was coping

‘I’m fine’, I lied; for a toxic cocktail of
stress and hormones had gone to my head.

My irrational self took over; I was to blame for

Gran’s death and no amount of internal conversation
could convince me it was the Cancer’s fault.

As punishment, I confined myself to a ceramic cell;

this kept baby safe as well. When I looked
in the mirror, a saw a murderer blinking back.

132
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gaynor Kane is a graduate of the Open University, with a BA (Hons) Humanities with
Literature. She has had poetry published in the Community Arts Partnership’s ‘Poetry in
Motion’ anthology Matter and in online journals, such as: Atrium Poetry, The Galway
Review and The Blue Nib. In 2016, Gaynor was a finalist in the annual Funeral Services
NI poetry competition. In June 2017, she was appointed as a member of the Executive
Board for Women Aloud NI.

133
 EITHNE LANNON

Companion

There is a moon inside every human being.

Learn to be companions with it.
Rumi

Take the river’s curl, the ocean’s wave,

the never ending trees, the sway of a meadow,
the roll of the sun, the scattered stepping stars.

And take last month’s silver bud of moon

now come full to the sky, her mouth
is wide and open, white lips brimming

with a soft wet light; month by month,

she gives her widening emptiness to the earth,
holds the planet in her orbit, washes ocean

after ocean over sandI stretch out my arms

and reach for her, hold hands with her rhythm,
climb into her open wound; my blood

is lapping at her constant pull, I sleep

in the mantle of her tidal pulse, slip
the ring of her light onto my finger.

At the last hour of fullness, I stay up

till dawn; lost inside wholeness, carved
into the darkening spine, I stop

for a full-moon moment inside

this wild interiorthe silent luminosity,
the bittersweet abundance.

134
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eithne Lannon is a native of Dublin. She’s had poems published in The Ogham Stone,
Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, FLARE, Stanzas and The Limerick Magazine. On-line she’s
published with Sheila-na-Gig, Headstuff, Bare Hands, Tales from the Forest, The Galway
Review and A New Ulster. She had poems long listed for the Dermot Healy competition
this year and was short listed for the Galway Arts competition last year. Eithne is
involved in the open mic scene around Dublin and was Artist in Residence in
Loughshinny Boathouse in summer 2016.

135
 YVONNE BOYLE

My Grandmother and the Panama Canal

She told me 'not to bother my father

as he was busy ..... working'.
I learnt what 'cross' meant.
I did not know
she crossed seas
to see her son
in New Zealand
in the fifties.
For six months?
'Well, the voyage itself took six weeks'.
It was said that she did not speak to my mother
for a year after I was born
after Uncle Jim left.
'Her favourite son.'
The ship squeezes through the canal.
Not much room on either side.
A fifties grandmother in a sun hat
on deck
alone
between oceans.

136
Writers' Group Day Out

The shaky hand of the writer

pours milk in my cup.

We walk hesitantly
into the literary landscape.

137
Remembering being in love with Tony Jaques at Cambridge

That time, years later, walking on Dorset beach

you said your wife had asked
‘Did she take long to get over you?’
and I
couldn’t really recall.
As it was, that illusive certainty of imagined security
was of no comfort to her.
I do not yearn
that things might have been different,
but you are still the best dancer
I ever met.
Even at nineteen
when it came to the slow dance at Homerton College
you said ‘all these couples dancing slowly,
some not even wanting to be together
‘trapped’ on the dance floor
- we don’t have to follow them’.
Off you went, gliding around the whole floor
and me sweeping after you.
I do not yearn
to be with you
but in this world of couples going through their paces
I would still follow your wild and free path
circling around conformity.

138
Pink Towerblocks

Pink towerblocks
against a grey Belfast autumn skyline
as I drive down the MI
from a visit to my mother’s Lisburn Nursing Home.

In her room
catching sight us both in a mirror
I notice how alike our face shapes are;
I a reflection of her.

Now in my rear view mirror

I see the whole sky luminous rose pink
over Lagan Valley.

I the tower block

and my mother the setting sun light.

139
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yvonne Boyle is a retired social worker and poet.

140
 MARGARET SAINE

TODAY I ATE MY MUSE

Male poets have always

needed a Muse [Musa]
the female angel inspiring
and guarding their work
Men have not told us
how the women
while inspiring kept busy
knitting or reading?
lovely singing to the harp?
staring into space?
Women poets have a
dilemma
they can take
a female Muse
and be two women
taking turns
inspiring each other
or have a male Muso
to fall in love with
Today
I ate my Muse:
she had 105 calories

P.S. Musa is the botanical name of the banana.

141
PREGNANT

Inside me
there is movement
an incomplete compass
striking capricious and tender
the beat of a second heart
In my bowels
Inside me
there is a voice
speaking
unfinished vowels
hushed consonants
I will never throw away
my tale as begun
though it promised
only ashes
and sorrows
There is still
inside me
this new voice
that softly
moves to rule me
and win me regardless
of consequence
Softly touching
my breast
in a farewell
to myself alone
Inside me
this creature is
the nearest I've felt
to myself
in my life

142
JUST ASKING

How can it be
there’s never been
a pregnant saint
[un saint enceint]
--une sainte enceinte
if you insist--
No saint was ever pregnant
though pregnancy is a miracle
--life’s greatest mystery--

A pregnant male saint

would be a double miracle
and the Church could certainly
achieve such a miracle
to be performed

Thee is one female saint

with her breasts cut off
Saint Agatha

According to Catholic Online

the patron of pregnant women
is a male saint
Saint Gerard Majella
who once gave a handkerchief
to a pregnant woman

And you pregnant women out there

can shop for his medal at
Catholic Shopping dot com

143
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Saine is a poet who lives near Los Angeles. She writes and translates in
different languages and writes one haiku daily since 2008. Her last book is “Lit Angels”
Moonrise Press, Tujunga-Sunland CA, 2017

144
 ANNE MCMASTER

Light: the old farm

These are the days when the light moves slowly on.
When summer, wrapped up gently as any precious gift,
ebbs slowly - and in leaving us seems sweeter than before.
I search for beauty in the fields around the farm
and find berry-clustered hedges, limned in leaf of gold,
glowing brightly, still-life like, rich with colour,
holding the weight - if not the heat - of the lowering sun.
For autumn light brings with it a fading memory of warmth
and falls in layers of stillness now - a slow retreat -
pressing more lightly in against the shortening day.
These days I carry close to me - as something treasured -
my memories of this farm on a clear summer's day.
Dawn brought with it, then, rich promises of toil.
Unwrapped in soft blue mornings, filigreed with mist,
thick swathes of grass, falling freshly-mown behind my father's blades,
dried, crisp and fragrant, under a golden sun.
We carried light within us - in childish voices and in laughter -
from fields to kitchen, then racing back outdoors:
each voice, a note of busy happiness we did not know we sang.
Later, in the room we shared, folded and tucked in tight,
summer light pooling in golden shadows at the foot of each small bed,
mist softening, again, the edges of the glorious day,
roads, hedges, cattle, cats still warm with the memory of sun,
and a waterfall of birdsong echoing through the falling dusk.
The fading light of autumn, now, is a different, sombre thing.
The yard is stilled: old houses empty, tractors gone.
The choir of birds is silenced too: some have already flown.
Those remaining have withdrawn from the immediacy of the day.
Leaves are weighted now and still: caught on the cusp of colour, waiting to fall.
Only shadows fill the quiet, lonely byres.
The pale light of winter will be a barren gift - something to yearn for and yet lose too
soon.
Such meagre light will prove a mere echo of the generous summer sun
and will not fill the faltering heart or thaw the frozen soil.

145
The frosted light draws out, instead, the scents and sounds of the fading year:
the sweetened smoke of peat fires fragrance the still, cool air,
and in the icy, lowering darkness a fox's bark echoes harshly across the empty, frozen
fields
while glittering stars burn cold
and the old farm lies quiet and still.

146
End of Year

From here, you can see the fabric of the year

scuffed raw and worn thin
around the grey horizon’s fine and unforgiving rim.
Today the sun is light and empty; nothing more.
Sudden gusts of desolate, bitter wind
busy themselves along the weakening edges of the moment
delving in - seeking to loosen - then to pry
all that holds them from the remnants of the day.
These desiccated husks of time
are borne up - gossamer-thin, translucent -
rising loose and wild in tattered fragments
towards an abandoned sky.

147
Dereliction

The job in hand is more than lifting stones

though that itself is task enough, I’ve heard them say;
the years bring gentle slippage with them.
Old farmyard byres still stand – but out of focus now –
a gradual shifting from the original
a blurring and softening at the edges.
A loss of focus.
Strange that stone should soften somehow.
Strange and sad that dereliction should be so beautiful,
so patient, so steady,
and so complete.

148
Autumn Manuscript

Minims and crotchets

of hungry black crows
on shorn autumn fields.
Rewriting the music of the season
as they rise and swoop and fall.

149
Relay

October races towards November, still like a child at play.

November reaches slowly down and takes its toy away.

150
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne McMaster’s work is shaped and informed by nature, by the seasons and by both the history and
landscape of the old farm where she lives.

151
 CSILLA TOLDY

Late

Hers was deep, she knew it in her guts -

the aching desire that could not be
suppressed with shrugging, or fist-clenching
or just defensively pulling up
the drawn-out corners of her mouth.

After fighting it too long, she

realised that her mother had been
a child; just as she was, abandoned.
Alone, in a world that rejected
babies of shame, regardless.

And she, ached for her touch and the act

of forgiveness - reflected. To tell
her that it was ok - she grew up
in comfort with loving parents, but.
When she arrived, all she could find

were photographs of a young girl

- looking back at her - through a mirror
of time. The message from her mother
tele-transported, through a wall of
tears released: With reckless abandon - love yourself.

152
Meta-strategies

Two boys in a canoe.

A river. A waterfall. Rocky Mountain.
A community in panic.
The search.
Sleepless anguish, silent prayers.
Endless hours of waning hope.
Helicopters hovering in the wind,

tv announcements.
Two rangers saw
two boys and a canoe
on the way up-up, playing
Rock-paper-scissors.
They were warned,
what else could you do.

Terry and Johnny,

random brothers
dancing around the fire,
running with kites memoryless.
Our babies’
wind-chime laughter,
Rock-paper-scissors.

Johnny was reckless

the seeker of danger, so restless
faster than the wind.
We dubbed him “The Rocket”.
Our Terry was wise,
talking of nature he smiled
at the empty air over our heads.

Rock-paper-scissors
carried by the wind.
Two tree trunk bodies
tossed around the river’s algorithm
awe-trapped totems of never-end.

153
Shakti

I don’t feel poetic today, I just want some peace – you cannot give me, no more -
We struggle on the waves of acceptance, of our new life together - or apart
I want to move you want to stay – we bury our romance
Duty, dharma - yours is light mine is dark – but there is a need for
Darkness, otherwise, how could anyone see your light? And the shape of things.
The depth of dark is your doom - intense not knowing – the reptile brain of religion
Sex, sacred trance – woman’s instinct holding your point in the dance
The smallest phase, the non-manifest being of all that was and is and will be:
Light.

154
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Csilla Toldy’s poems appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, in the
UK, Ireland and Canada. Her awards include the Katapult Prize, The Hartley-Merrill Prize
and The Special Prize of the Motion Pictures Association of America. Her poetry
collection Red Roots - Orange Sky was published by Lapwing Publications Belfast in
2013, followed by an anthology of short fiction, poetry and memoir with the title “The
Emigrant Woman’s Tale” in 2015. Her poems were long and short listed for the Fish,
Oxford Brookes and Bridport poetry prizes.

155
 LIST OF IRISH AND NORTHERN IRISH WOMEN WRITERS PUBLISHED BY
LAPWING PUBLICATIONS

Lapwing Female Writers 2016-2017

2016 978-1-910855-14-0 Up on the Hills and All at Sea x Rosy Wilson 31-Mar-16 Irish
978-1-910855-22-5 Blue Moon Rising x Vivienne Hannah-Artt 31-July -16 Irish
978-1-910855-25-6 Confluence of Wakes x Jean Folan 31-July-16 Irish
978-1-910855-27-0 Years Ago You Coloured Me x J.S. Watts 31-Aug-16
978-1-910855-33-1 The Phantom Fundamental x Ruby Turok-Squire 31-Oct-16
978-1-910855-34-8 Disappearing Tracks: A Story in Verse x Geraldine Paine 30-Nov-16
978-1-910855-35-5 The Meadow of the Spell x Rose Moran RSM 30-Nov-16 Irish
978-1-910855-36-2 Loose Leaves: A life in Vignette x Sue Norton 30-Nov-16 USA-Irish
978-1-910855-38-6 The Shadow Behind Me x Paula Matthews 30-Nov-16 Irish 2017
978-1-910855-39-3 Keeping Watch x Katherine Noone 31-Jan-17 Irish
978-1-910855-41-6 Obsession x Valerie Masters 31-Jan-17 Irish
978-1-910855-42-3 Imperatives x Pat Farrington 31-Mar-17 English
978-1-910855-43-0 Foxes Don't Wear Watches x Belinda Singleton 28-Feb-17 English
978-1-910855-44-7 As I Go In The Dark x Sally Wheeler 30-Apr-17 Irish
978-1-910855-45-4 Lilac & Gooseberries x Aoife Reilly 31-Mar-17 Irish
978-1-910855-46-1 Pages of Travel x Silvia Baron Supervielle trs Peter Schulman 31-Mar-17 Argentina
978-1-910855-48-5 Voices in the Garden x Julie-ann Rowell 31-Mar-17 English
978-1-910855-52-2 Roots and Wings x Rose Moran 30-June-17 Irish
978-1-910855-54-6 Going West x Rosy Wilson 31-July-17 Irish
978-1-910855-56-0 Everyday Islands x Julie Fuster 31-Sept French
978-1-910855-58-4 Ancestral Bones x Judy Russell 31-Aug-17 Irish
978-1-910855-61-4 Lifespun x Pat Farrington 31-Sept-17 English

156
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