1 The Blue Nib Magazine 39 New Poetry, Fiction & Essays

September 2019

ISBN 978-1-9161545-1-3 2 The Blue Nib Magazine 39 New Poetry, Fiction & Essays

September 2019

First published in Ireland in 2019 by The Blue Nib

Copyright © The Blue Nib

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Every effort has been made to reflect each author’s intention Regarding the format and content of their piece, however the default style, which has been applied, is Times New Roman 12, single-spaced, and the formatting reflects The Blue Nib’s own house style

3 Editorial: Dave Kavanagh Managing Editor Welcome to Issue 39 of The Blue Nib 7 Essays Does Poetry Matter? - by Clara Burghelea 9 Poems As Time Machines - by John D. Kelly 13 Absence Eased - by Edward Lee 21 London in July - by Gráinne Daly 24 A Critical Examination of 21st Century Poetry 26 Poetry From Ireland, England & Elsewhere Selected By Clara Burghelea Editorial 37 Featured Poet - J. Taylor Bell 40 Interview with featured poet - J. Taylor Bell 47 Featured Poet - James Finnegan 51 Featured Poet - Rona Fitzgerald 54 Patrick Green 56 Lucy Crispin 58 Brian Rihlmann 59 Sean Smith 60 Mina Moriarty 61 Bojana Stojcic 62 Anne Ballard 65 Ysella Sims 66 Anita Gracey 67 Umit Sener Ta 68 Marilyn Francis 69 Rae O’Dowd 70 Denise O’Hagan 71 Alison Ross 73 4 Maria Pascualy 74 Margaret Pritchard Houston 75 Fiona Sinclair 76 Sue Morgan 77 Dominic Fisher - Fast Food 78 Susan Castillo Street 79 Caoimhe McKeogh 80 Reviews Curated By Emma Lee Reviews Editorial 83 out of emptied cups - Anne Casey 84 How to Wear Grunge - Ruth Stacy 89 Table Manners - Susmita Bhattacharya 92 The Perseverance - Raymond Antrobus 94 Poetry From The US & Canada Selected By Mike Griffith Editorial 97 Featured Poet -Samn Stockwell 98 Featured Poet -Liz Balize 102 Daniel Edward Moore 104 Michael Lewis Beck 105 J.P. Mayer 106 Gary Glauber 107 Jade Riordan 109 Cheryl Caesar 110 William Joel 112 Alec Solomita 114 Karen Petersen 115 Carolyn Martin 116 Isobel Cunningham 118 George Franklin 120 Meghan Purvis 121 5 Bhodi Tims 122 Guinotte Wise 123 P.C. Vandall 124 Carly Heider 126 Short Fiction Selected By Seanín Hughes Editorial 130 Featured Author -Roisin Maguire 131 Featured Author -Kelli Allen 137 Rachael Murphy 140 David Butler 147 Poetry From Australia & New Zealand Selected by Denise O’Hagan Editorial 154 Featured Poet - Peter Bakowski 156 Peter Bakowski -Interview 157 Featured Poet -Anne Casey 159 Peter Rimmer 165 C S Hughes 169 James Walton 173 E.A. Gleeson 178 Ali Whitelock 181 Richard James Allen 187 Back Pages -From Our Contributing Editors. The trick to Writing is -by Melissa Todd 189 Ada Wofford – Dive 192

6 Editorial: Dave Kavanagh Managing Editor

Welcome to Issue 39 of The Blue Nib

September has come around so quickly. Here in the northern hemisphere the days are shortening and the summer is fading towards the sweet decay of autumn, while our friends in the antipodes are moving towards their summer. It reminds us how small the world is and how we are all wonderfully connected.

This is the 39th issue of The Blue Nib but it is also a first in many ways. This issue sees work selected by our new team of editors and what work it is.

I am excited to see some younger poets here. I’m impressed by the work of award-winning young poet Rosie Bogumil and equally so by another young Australian poet, Erin Frances. Rebecca D’Arcy and Rae O’Dowd are among Clara’s selections for this issue, two more young writers with bright futures ahead of them.

Clara interviewed J. Taylor Bell, a promising young poet from Fort Worth, Texas. Taylor Bell is studying an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he is the Seamus Heaney Centre International Scholar of 2018-19.

Denise chose Peter Bakowski as her featured poet. Bakowski is a recipient of The Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry.

Mike Griffith has a wide selection from the US and Canada and presents you with some outstanding poetry. Wiliam Joel brings us 5 sonnets, and winner of the National Poetry Series (USA) Samn Stockwell, treats us to some fine poetry.

In fiction, Seanín Hughes brings us Kelli Allen’s 100 Knots, Rachel Murphy’s, Ruler of The Roost and David Butler’s, Zither Music. But the surprise among this group of stories is the powerful Cacophony by Roisin Maguire which will have you reading and rereading. This is a work full of emotion, nuance and colour.

Emma Lee has selected four reviews for this issue. Susmita Bhattacharya’s Table Manners, Raymond Antrobus The Perseverance, reviewed by Professor Richard Lance Keeble, Ruth Stacey’s How to Wear Grunge, reviewed by James Fountain and finally, Anne Casey’s second collection with Salmon poetry, out of emptied cups.

7 I had the daunting task of selecting essays from quality submissions, a difficult task as space limits us. The simple narrative of Gráinne Daly’s 'London in July,' and the style of John D. Kelly’s 'Poetry as a Time Machine,' make these two impressive essays.

Lastly, I am very pleased to have this opportunity to introduce two of our Contributing Editors. Melissa Todd and Ada Wofford. You will find work from both in the back pages.

8 Essays

Does Poetry Matter? - by Clara Burghelea

Does poetry matter? Is there still an urgency when it comes to reading poetry? Do we thrive on its subtle, elusive presence? Or, can we survive without it? This is an old debate that never loses ground.

Stephanie Burt’s Don’t Read Poetry, Basic Books (May 2019) is a book about how we meet and read poems, discover their joys and preconceptions, from Shakespearean sonnets and other classics, to Instagram poetry and Pokémon characters. It is also a personal journey into the inner workings of poetry and a reframing of its bounty and delight in the eyes of the reader. Like Stephanie Burt, I am a poet, though this is not something that I say loudly to everyone. Poetry is not my daily occupation, but it is my constant preoccupation; still, I refrain from sharing it. It is not that I am ashamed of it, on the contrary, I take great pride in the poems I have written and published. But I am rather uncomfortable mentioning that my poetry comes from a place of grief. Given my resistance and most people’s reaction to poetry, it begs the question: Where does this tendency to omit or overlook poetry in our daily interactions come from? And, why do we think of poetry as either being elitist or cryptic? I am Romanian born but write my poetry in English. I am the first poet in my traditional family and so I am an oddity. In my everyday life, I am a translator and an educator, both more manageable in terms of a suitable job for a woman of my background, where a female poet can often be ignored or jokingly tolerated. Apart from the sexist barriers, there is still something fearful for many in the way any poetry feels or sounds and the way it threatens to displace readers and challenge them in a manner they find unsettling. Many people are put off by the expectation that poetry comes with a set of rules or a level of comprehension that they might naturally lack. When my father first heard me speak of my poetic tribulations—the rejections, the endless revisions and re-editing and the fickleness of the muses -he was confused. It didn’t fit the image he had of me. He candidly asked me where I found the time to tend to such concerns. I was a full-time, working mother and given my domestic duties, I must have been writing at nighttime. He was worried for my health and advised me to give up this ludicrous occupation. On top of that, when he read my poems, he said they were too intellectual for his taste. This is the case for one poet and

9 hardly applicable to all others. But it is perhaps typical of the kinds of challenges that arise on the path for anyone becoming a published poet. What I find intriguing is the perception people have of poetry and its purpose. In the introduction to her book, Stephanie Burt speaks of how easy it is to access poetry – its brevity, its ability to be read aloud, performed, collected, memorised – and yet, few people read it. She sets out to explain why people love or hate it and in doing so, comes up with arguments for liking poetry. She speaks of connecting past poems or poets to contemporary ones and addressing the cultural diversity of the world we live in and its assortment of tastes. Credit is given to the invaluable role translation plays in making the literary world accessible to a versatile, demanding, fast-changing crowd of readers. Poetry is meant to introduce us to other people, make us empathic and willing to connect, open us up to our inner selves, build communities, ignite revolutions, feed hunger, sharpen senses, help us, at least, come to a meaningful purpose for reading it. But the fact is, poetry lacks a definite, absolute purpose. It is often about the journey it takes us on, without any promise, or need of knowing its history or technical terms. Poetry gives readers the freedom to find their own reasons and purposes. To Stephanie Burt, such reasons make up the chapters in her book: feelings, characters, forms, difficulty, wisdom and community, each illustrated and justified with lines of poems and comments on her own poetic tastes. Does it help to look at a poem from these different angles? I believe it might. These entry points are meant to familiarise the reader with the intricacies of poetry and its mechanism of survival and failure alike. In his book, The Hatred of Poetry, Fitzcarraldo Editions (2011) Ben Lerner, poet and novelist, wrote about how poetry failed by not keeping the promise to solve people’s concerns related to love, isolation, death, disappointment or meaning. This speaks precisely against the very purpose of poetry and how it is within each reader to find their own purpose in poems and to fail and succeed at their own pace and taste. No poem is bound to give each reader the same thing. Language, time, personal predilections – all these might shape the perceptions of one reader, while at the same time, delight or mortify another. In Stephanie Burt’s words – “the right poems for you may not make you more like me; they can, however, change you for the better or help you become who you want to be”. Poems carry our own enthusiasm and apprehension, give us room to pause and return, reassess our beliefs. They make us frown, smile at language choices, ponder at lines breaks and allow us to actively inhabit their landscape. A while ago, I started reading poems out loud to my father during our coffee meetings. At first, he seemed embarrassed and laughed them off, pointing to the futility of my gesture. Then, he stopped arguing and just quietly listened. He could not understand my poems, mainly because of the 10 language barrier. Plus, it was a dislocation in the ordinary habits of our encounters. At 65, my father fully enjoyed his coffee routine, the chosen silent moments, his need to see me as something he could wrap his mind around. Poetry didn’t fit in. It made me potent and elusive, much like poetry. In Stephanie Burt’s words, it acutely pointed to “the process of removing something from a box, or of opening a gift.” My father was forced to rename and reframe his daughter. It left him with little that was familiar, and the entire process seemed strange, dislocating. My father’s reaction gave me an inkling of the readers ‘puzzlement towards poetry, and the wish to abandon it because of its unfamiliarity. It compelled them to decide upon meaning, and the more a poem blurred lines between openness and closure, the more the readers experienced a sense of disruption in expectations. My father’s lack of comfort came from gender expectations and a traditional mentality, but he still harbored a dislike towards poetry. While growing up, he read detective stories to me and never once mentioned poems. I tried to lure him into reading Romanian poems, but he refused and called it a dying literary tradition. Could people not live without poems? They offer no significant help in managing life: it is not as if they were a life skill. I could not change my father’s way of thinking, though something in the way I read -intonation, phrasing, musicality, cadence – brought tears to his eyes. I touched his hand and told him poetry had played its little, yet essential part: it had made him ask questions and engaged his curiosity. It had captured something vital: our ability to connect, despite the differences, and cut across the artificial lines we tended to draw around ourselves. My father smiled. Poets are dreamers, he said. In her book, Stephanie Burt speaks of difficulty and the role it plays in the relationship we are trying to build with the poems and poets we read. She references George Steiner, literary critic, who identifies four kinds of difficulty. The second one is called modal and it refers to the literal sense of a sentence that it still hard to grasp because it might be “a joke, a trial balloon, an experiment, a piece of sarcasm”. This is how it feels when we are engaged in a conversation with a person we hardly know, and we find ourselves unable to read them. Modality fails us and we struggle to understand or respond in a sensible manner, fearful of embarrassing ourselves. Likewise, poetry requires a leap of faith into poetic possibility, form and content. A departure from the known self, and into discovering new hidden depths about the unknown self, an attractive kind of difficulty. Take the perplexing words of Chelsey Minnis: “ Sometimes I have to throw up and pass out in order to get to the next set of time increments. Because otherwise time forms into a hard migraine like a gumball, / I want to wear fluted sleeves and become like a darling person with appropriateness all around me…It is rough to be a seafoam wench”. Here, language is a reckoning with the world, a bewildering manner of expressing desire in a visual, active voice that struggles to render emotion. Or anything else your wicked, wrought, innocent, 11 flirting, evasive, attentive, scattered minds can read into these lines. Poetry is here to widen the space. More necessary and immediate than ever, awaiting. At the end of the day, my father is right. Most people will have made do without poetry. The conversation on the importance of poetry has shifted from an abstract argument on form and content toward its function of portraying urgent social issues such as religion, race, immigration. Though poetry cannot heal or provide answers to injustice or atrocities, reading and rereading a poem can be a form of survival in a world where such things are rife. Poetry is a manifestation of the human voice, a promise of resistance. To me, poetry it is a matter of expressing my femininity and beliefs alike, a desire to reach out to a no boundaries community, an attempt to strengthen a personal relationship and mourn loss by connecting to the world. In Stephanie Burt’s words, “ The soul comes out in the poem, and continues to sing ”. So, does poetry matter? Well yes, it matters a lot.

12 Poems As Time Machines - by John D. Kelly

This Petty Pace

If tomorrow is now where did time go

Was I just too slow to catch it?

I thought therefore I was not here in the now of snow as its ‘s’ has already melted into slush, to expose in you the lush roots of a recalled, recoiled Spring where Hopkins’ wheel still shoots its potent bolts and weeds are substitutes for spokes close to the hub of it.

When we write or speak and are fully present ‘with’ the actual process of the words coming in, through . . . and out, we seem to connect somewhere − in some timeless realm − that has a component to it that seems sometimes to have a commonality with everyone/everything beyond us. Perhaps it is more that something of what life is, passes through us at that moment of inspiration — that moment of ‘breathing in’; that moment (within time) before contemplation? Perhaps the action of thinking and writing, which certainly encompasses notions of past, and at least an ‘imagined’ present, also enables us to tilt towards (or even ‘change’) the future; after all, even past memories contain notions of what we imagined and predicted as a future at the time of their first ‘birthing’ − not to mention the subsequent multi-layered palimpsest of ever-changing contemplations of them since then, and since each infused subsequent layer? As soon as we express a thought ‘in words’ however, it is already in the past and instantaneously being reformed in a

13 multifarious mist of memory layers − ever-changing filters. Perhaps Descartes’ words on existence “Cogito Ergo Sum” would read better as follows:

I THOUGHT, THEREFORE I WAS — I THINK, THEREFORE I AM — I WILL THINK, THEREFORE I WILL BE

Is it possible that we can ever be fully alive, or be aware of what we call existence, in only one moment or in any fixed or static notion of time or the ‘nature’ of things? It seems clear at least that we have to admit that we can’t really express existence accurately ‘in the present’ − in words! Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Essay on Nature, said that “Nature is not fixed but fluid” He was talking of the natural world but, in that we are all part of it, aligned to it, or one with it (perhaps we contain it or create it; or it contains or creates us − or both?) then surely it must follow that we too are ever-changing − fluid. Is it thus that we can pour a part (or all) of ourselves into a poem, or creative piece of prose, or any creative act? Is that possible?

Maybe a part of what runs through a poet (an essence that exists on the cusp of ‘pre-thought’ and thinking) just prior to the writing of the words, is poured into, and rests in a poem. For us as writers, or as readers of another’s work, perhaps we just later find, remember, or discover it again? Perhaps, if it is a successful poem or work of literature or of art, it will endure and we will actually be able, at least in part, to see it, live it − experience it . . . again? Perhaps it is possible that we can travel in time not from a static A to a static B but actually through, with and ‘in’ a continuous time-realm; all as a complex but seamless fluid unity of ‘Existence’ with no beginning and no end?

Gaston Bachelard in his wonderful book ‘The Poetics of Space’ quotes poet and philosopher Noel Arnaud:

“I AM THE SPACE WHERE I AM.”

14 This statement, for me, rings and resonates with as much truth and authenticity as can be achieved with the blunt tool of ‘words’; after all ‘all words are ‘at best’ semi-lies: only attempts at a truth. In using words I believe that poetry, of all the literary forms, can hope to at least tilt closest to some notion of that other ‘old chestnut’ − ‘truth’.

‘Time’, like ‘space’, is also, after all, only a word, another concept, another dimension that we naively use to help try to locate ourselves in the vast and complex scheme of things; to try to pinpoint ourselves. We seem to be an ever-moving variable within an immensely greater moving thing we call ‘existence’ which is not only spatial (as our concept of location in 3 dimensional space), but also contains ‘time’ as a 4th Dimension to it all. Perhaps many more dimensions exist not yet comprehendible to the human mind? ‘Time’, and within it ‘memory’, seems to add the kinetic energy that perhaps gives existence its feeling of aliveness. Is it that we can’t fully realise that ‘the time machine’ has travelled, with us in it, or at least ‘some’ of us in it, into the past (or future) . . . until we are there; or until it − the poem/time machine − inspires us, or becomes us, again − in a mutual awareness? Is it that the poem travels into the future (or the past) after it is written or read and, in that way, because we are in or ‘are’ the poem, we too travel?

Can poems possibly be infused with, or naturally contain, a mysterious ‘future implant’− a connection with others, with other links in the whole thing, that we just cannot comprehend or be aware of at the time of writing? How or why for instance did Hopkins and his poem ‘Spring’ appear in my poem ‘This Petty Pace’ after over forty years – the last I heard or read it as a teenage schoolboy? It is fascinating to me that a poem can potentially have such longevity − such power. Do you think Hopkins for one minute thought he could travel in time (through or in his poem) and enter or ‘spring’ himself into my world, from what he probably thought then was his present − at two significant times of my life? Perhaps he did? Perhaps he now does . . . perhaps he will again? Perhaps I travelled back in time in my own ‘time machine’ to meet him?

15 Did we meet half way; or just align and see and hear one another momentarily on a parallel, or concentric, or overlapping, or . . . on some other ineffable path in our linked existence?

“The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other as fluid, and impresses his being there-on.”

R. W. Emerson

If they were able to have a ‘voice’ or have ‘just one’ opinion on their existence, ‘the senses’ (the pre-word − pre-cognition parts, of us), would probably express that they are inseparably conjoined with Nature and are in fact part of it (or that Nature is in, or part of, them). Within the limitations of their purely sensory existence they certainly would be as authentic as they could be in that expression. If they had the faculty of further thought and reasoning, then they may also be awakened to their inability (just like us) to ever have ‘only one’ opinion in the conscious/thinking world. Consciousness, like subconscious-ness seems to always be fluid − never static. Everything in the universe appears to have its ‘ counter-thing’ or its ‘coloured baggage’ or its possibility of even . . . ‘not being’.

Poets know this:

“. . . all things counter, original, spare, strange; fickle, freckled (who knows how?) . . . “ G.M. Hopkins

“. . . World is crazier and more of it than we think incorrigibly plural. . . “ Louis Mc Niece

The purely sensual being, as in the animal kingdom, seems destined to be . . .

‘at one with Nature’: owning it − or being owned by it. 16 It is considered that a new-born baby may have something of this mode of existence, prior to the secondary (and often traumatic for many) birthing of thought/reason; a transition which is itself brokered through the medium of words and ultimately the limitations of language. At the age of about two or three, psychologists believe that we all begin to come to the realisation (or is it a loss?) that we are not the whole of the universe − or even the hub from which it all extends. We seem to ‘forget’, or are forced to forget, our true essence. This realization is one that is voiced potently in our first rant poems, in the language of ‘tantrum’, commonly entitled ‘The Terrible Twos’! It would seem that most people never finish their poem and continuously rant all of their lives. Many poets simply replace their rattle and baby’s bottle and go through life holding a ‘slammer’s mike’ in one hand and a glass ‘half empty’ . . . in the other. On first impressions, being ‘at one with Nature’ may appear to us, to be a beautiful and simple and desirable way to exist and to live − akin to our ignorant or romantic notions of wanting to live as ‘Sensual Man’ or wrongly seeing the Garden of Eden as a separate entity and not as only the middle panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych − The Garden of Earthly Delights. Unfortunately, nature is not all a bed of roses and, even if it was, we would soon learn that kingdoms have their own dog-eat-dog hierarchies, and that sleeping dogs’ apparently fragrant beds, sometimes give lie to a painful and thorny ‘truth’. All animals and purely sensory beings ultimately live in a Beckettian roundabout of pleasure and pain, with fear being an unavoidable component of their existence.

Reason and thought, and the words that give them voice (most successfully in poetry), are the ‘release agents’ that free us from the confines of the ‘only sensory’ world and the bonded attraction to material things: the bond and burden of ownership that the senses − in isolation − are destined to only ‘enjoy or endure’, as Rilke put it, “. . . the beauty and the terror . . .” of.

The ability to think, releases us from the despotism of the senses which could bind us to a limited notion of experience, an existence that is something that is . . . imposed ‘on’ us. Within thought comes imagination, which then leads (all originating from the senses and memory) to expression of emotions − affection, attraction, repulsion, etc. (all of the myriad of causes & affect); and thus, what we ‘sensed’ initially as very clearly defined objects with sharp outlines and coloured and patterned surfaces, are no longer that; they become less outlined, less solid/concrete; they become blurred − less transparent and clear (and yet in a way also more clear); perhaps more 17 aligned to the notion of spirit − something infused with a value or otherness as in the delicious awakenings in life that sometimes occur after periods of earnest looking or enquiry or . . . pain; or sometimes (just occasionally), they are gifted to us ‘out of the blue’ in a way that seems like coincidence; maybe it is synchronicity orchestrated by some other ‘energy’ outside of our comprehension?

This awakening (whatever it is), can hit us like a time-bomb that shatters all static or reason-able notions of time or existence; such that it, in its new ‘atomised adrift-ness’, is then infused as a value − another living dimension, into everything we encounter.

All of nature is then ‘fluid’ − ever changing. Its existence (and ours) depends on our ability to have an awareness of being ‘within’ time − being able to think (or exist) in past, present and future tenses simultaneously both consciously and unconsciously − or to at least to consciously keep re- contemplating and re- membering that as a possibility.

A flawed reasoning around the concept of time (at worst a static or linear notion of it) and the misconception that it is possible to consciously ‘live in the moment’, is I think, the shadow that prevents us from being able to clearly see or know that we can’t actually have ownership of anything − we can only be part of it all (or is ‘it’ part of us?). It is not possible to own or to be consciously at one with, anyone/anything . . . even our own thoughts, memories or imagination; particularly as these too are destined to always be non-static, retrospective and reflective . . . or at least coloured by experience’s conscious and subconscious imprints. There are always compromised and fluid memories and the feelings that are attached to them. Unlike in the animal kingdom we, as human beings, seem to exist somewhere beyond the natural world but in a way that also includes it.

Nature

It is in his nature to be supernatural; like the time when he first flew in a dream and wrote a poem, and instantly knew that all poetry is non-fiction: that all conscious and unconscious thoughts are real.

18 He says this with the elation that a lark has, singing high in the blue of a summer sky when his spirit flies and he seems as free of friction . . . as a swift; that eats and mates and even sleeps and dreams—on the wing and only comes to rest to nest; to bring about what (maybe) came first—once again: the head- splitting dumb refrain of the chicken-and-egg conundrum, that doesn’t really feature in the earthy, non-down-to-earth nature of his poems.

John D. Kelly

*

Ownership is only another word (a ‘lie’) − a concept that could itself only be possible within the notion of a moment. Conscious living in the moment however is not possible in this wonderfully mercurial world that doesn’t seem to have a beginning or an end, or certainly − like the chicken and egg conundrum − seems to have no extremities we could ever, ‘get our heads around’. Ownership is thus not something to be desired or worth wasting time on. The native Americans had some understanding of this. The Australian native peoples also have some handle on this difficult stuff relating to time, place, perception, memory and existence that ‘purely conscious /rational heads’ will never ever grasp. They have words such as alcheringa, bugari, djugurba, tjukurpa, ungud, and wongar which have been translated (albeit roughly) as meaning − ‘dreamtime’. They themselves now use this word which they in turn ‘understand’ as ‘all-at-once’ time. In this dream world they can travel along ‘song lines’ or ‘dream tracks’ that are at one with past, present and future.

Is this not similar to what happens in the act of writing or reading poetry? Is a poem not also a living song − or part of a song line that enables us to connect into (and perhaps sing with) some notion of an ineffable otherness through and with which we can travel ‘in’ time?

19 Can so-called rational thought and, sometimes seemingly irrational, imagination/dreamtime and creativity be connected and brokered, within a fluid continuum of time (free from notions of ownership or stasis). . . within an ever-changing living ‘past—present—future’− through the ‘alchemic time machine’ that is poetry.

* Recently on Achill Island off the west cost of Mayo, in a pub appropriately called The Annexe, I noticed a small brass plaque on the counter behind the friendly barman. The ‘poem’ on it read:

“FREE PINTS HERE TOMORROW!”

At once − out of the blue − as if by pure magic, I was looking into the mirror above it and my poet’s hat appeared on my already blurred and bald head, and I was able ‘in that moment’ (or so it now seems) to break through − beyond the joke-poem, to be there; to spend the next five minutes as if it was an eternity — surfing on a deliciously and decadently never-ending session of pints and pleasure − the ‘time machine’ having travelled me far into it all; where, in my semi-conscious/sub- conscious state, I met up with Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas and the shadow lifted, and I found true enlightenment . . . and comfort in Brendan’s words − within the syntactical blur of his slur; “John . . . I’m not a poet with a drink problem — I’m a drinker with a writing problem!”

“Me too Brendie — me too. Now it is your round . . . if my memory serves me well . . . or is it to be Mr. Thomas’s?”

Yes, I think that’s what I . . . will say − but not until tomorrow!

THE GIST: John D. Kelly lives in Co. Fermanagh. His work has appeared in various literary publications including Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Skylight 47, Boyne Berries, Crannog, The Honest Ulsterman, O’ Bheal Five Words, The Stony Thursday Book, Galway Review, Fish Anthology, Poetry NI, and others. His manuscript was ‘Highly Commended’ in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2016. He was awarded Silver Medal in the International Dermot Healy Poetry Competition in both 2015 and 2014 and won first prize in Hungry Hill’s, Poets Meet Painters, competition in 2014. He is currently working on a first collection of poetry

20 Absence Eased - by Edward Lee

My daughter lives forty-eight kilometres from me in the house I bought with her mother, the house I still own; the family home, but I have not spent more than thirty minutes in it in over a year. My daughter’s mother, my ex-partner, lives there too. Forty-eight kilometres, not that far. A forty minute drive, if the traffic is good, sixty minutes if it isn’t. Not that far at all. Not a single hour of any day passes without me being aware that she is forty-eight kilometres from me, when once she used to be under the same roof as me and I saw her everyday, that I can not simply walk into a room and see her there. And then there are days when those forty-eight kilometres feel like a thousand kilometres, two thousand, twenty thousand. There are days when it feels as though my daughter lives on another planet, non-traversable within the one lifetime. Those days, coming with no rhyme nor reason, weigh down my heart with a force I imagine equal to the crushing pressures of the deepest parts of the sea, those lightless places where humans cannot thread without sturdily constructed submersibles. Every day I do not see my daughter is a hard day, but those crushing days bring with them a pain sharp and blinding in its ferocity; on those days I barely recognize myself as a human being, so complete and all-consuming is the pain. The only comfort I can find on those days, beyond looking at pictures and videos of her – every electronic device I own full of both – is by speaking to her on the phone, or via Skype, but because of school and the surrounding daycare I have to wait until the late evening before I can make these calls. Even then there is no guarantee that I will get to speak to her, for a variety of reasons, some I understand, some I do not, neither set safe for me to dwell upon too much least I risk a hard anger rising in the centre of my being, coiled tightly around a helix of sadness and bitterness, and if I were to find it within myself to write about either set of reasons it would not take long for my words to disintegrate into jagged shards of vitriol and insults, which is of no use to anyone, myself included, and my daughter especially, who some day may read these words, or words I have already written or will write in the future, and there are things she does not need to know, even when she is old enough to fully process and understand them (nothing sinister, nothing untoward, simply the byproduct of the fragmenting, and subsequent personal and legal dismantling, of a long relationship, with words and finger-pointing guided more by emotions than sense). If I were lucky, these crushing days would descend within the thirty hours I get to see her, contained within every second weekend, but seeing as I am spending that time with her, that is rarely the case. So, with no other avenue of ease available to me – and how I discovered this particular avenue I am not entirely sure, the idea seemingly appearing in my mind one hard day fully formed – I watch one 21 of the many TV programmes she watches, programmes we used to watch together when I was a stay-at-home-dad and my life made sense. With my body shaking with a sadness I cannot endure, tears usually threatening in my eyes, if not already freely flowing, I will switch on the TV or pick up my phone and watch Teen Titans Go, The Amazing World Of Gumball, or Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, and in doing this I find myself feeling closer to my daughter, imaging her beside me, or picturing her reaction to whatever might be happening on the screen, or, if it is an episode we have both seen too get her, recalling what her reaction had been and imagining it new. I understand that this may seem pathetic. I might even conceded that I can imagine that, if I were not a father made absent, and read of some similarly afflicted father doing this to be closer to their child, I would view that man as pathetic, and if not pathetic, then feeble, weak, or even demasculinzed (all accusations, I must admit, I have levelled at myself since this absence was bestowed up me). I would probably have gone as far as telling this half-man to man up and pound on the door of his daughter’s home, demanding, insisting, to see his daughter and refusing to leave until he was able to see her (and again, I have thrown these at myself, simply ignoring the fact that the world is far from a black and white place). But, pathetic or not, it works, it gives me comfort. It eases the harshness of an absence that has effectively become another aspect of my life, an ailment almost, an illness or injury with with I have to come to terms with if I am to have any hope of living a life which is in any way productive. And it is a part of my life, a necessary and unavoidable part. I am a father, like countless fathers across the world, who sees his child far less than he would wish. This is my life, and everything else, be it writing, or try to find my way again in the dating world, or working at a job I don’t want but need so I can pay my bills, or any of the other things which fill out a life, have to revolve around it. These programs she watches, as she gets older, I imagine they will change as they have already changed from Peppa Pig, Ben And Holly, and Barbie: Life In The Dream-house. I enjoy watching these current shows, especially Teen Titans Go, being a card-carrying comic book geek since my early teens, because unlike most of the shows that existed when I was a child, they are well made and not insulting to the intelligence of the child, not some throwaway entertainment created solely to distract a child for ‘x’ amount of minutes. They are funny, and knowing. They are fully aware that there will be adults watching them, and shape many of their jokes accordingly. When she once agains moves onto other shows I do not doubt that I too will move onto those shows, watching them to better endure the distance between us; they may be shows I do not like, like I never liked Peppa Pig or Ben And Holly, but just as I watched them, I will watch these new ones, because my daughter watches them. On the weekends I see my daughter we will invariably do anything she wishes to do, within reason of course, though even then, wrapped so tightly as I am around her little finger, she is easily able to 22 flash her blue puppy eyes at me and get pretty much anything she wants. Sometimes she wishes to go to a play centre or playground, other times she wishes to go to a stationary shop and buy some pens or notebooks and stickers. Occasionally I bring her to art galleries and museums, talking through each painting and piece which engages her interest. Most times we draw or read together. Always she wants to go to a toy store, because what child does not? And sometimes, she simply wishes to watch TV, and that is what we do, she sitting on me, or beside me, her legs thrown across my lap, or sometimes my head, or some such variation, always wanting to have some physical contact with me, speaking of how she herself feels about our distance without using words. We watch and we laugh and we talk and we exist, father and daughter, and my world makes some sense again.

THE GIST: Edward Lee's poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib, and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on a novel. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.

23 London in July - by Gráinne Daly

Eastbound Platform 2 is a swirl of sticky air that smells of hot rubber and old breath. The Piccadilly Line map framed on the tiled wall the far side of the track reads destination Cockfosters. But it’s Gloucester Road for you today, not the end of the line. Nor Ealing Common, in itself a final destination. Cornflower skies spool above the train as it passes through the endless expanse of Hounslow. Passengers get on board dressed in much the same fare as those fresh off flights lugging hard shell suitcases. T-shirts and shorts are uniform. London is upbeat in July. I didn’t notice that on my first trip to Ealing twenty years ago but I can remember what I wore that day: a pair of £7 Dunnes Stores black trousers and a white zip up hoodie, also from Dunnes. And then, just as now, Wimbledon was on. Bars and eateries around the station at Gloucester Road are festooned with tennis ball décor in homage to the tournament underway nearby. The plate glass front of a cocktail bar is embellished with crystal ice buckets brimming with green neon balls. Bottles of Veuve Cliquot placed beside them wear signs offering a ‘watch the tennis with a glass of bubbly only £25’ special. You struggle to see what is so special about £25 for a glass of fizz and a free to air match. In Ealing it had been £25 for the consultation, then £380 for the rest. The rates that Provident had charged on the loan, now they were ‘special’. Queen’s Gate soaks in sunshine; Maseratis and Porsches gleam in all manner of lavish waxes. Great pillars guarding glossy doors add whitewashed brilliance. The broad terraces lined with identical houses are swollen with warmth and wealth. In all this sunshine Imperial College doesn’t have the draw it should. You would much rather pass by and head for a stroll around Hyde Park. But there’s a conference on and that’s why you’re here. A dark haired girl locks eyes with you on the footpath. She wears a lost look, measuring up whether she can approach but you beat her to it. “Are you going to the conference?” you ask. “Yes, is this the place?” she nods towards the red-bricked wall of a building, a limp piece of paper in her hand. “Yes” you say, and you walk in together. It’s your first time having company in London. The last time you travelled alone. Alone to Ealing, with no one to confer with for directions or whatnots. And there was no stopping passersby to query the address – that would have confirmed you as a cliché: Irish girl lost in London seeks help. You found your way like so many before. There had been red bricks in Ealing too, dark red, stained with age and weather. The property was a beautiful Victorian house on Mattock Lane: a leafy street of old worldly houses. Early morning strollers took advantage of the peace of Walpole

24 Park as you passed it that morning. Leisurely and peaceful: the exact opposite of how you felt. The only aspect that demarked the property from the others was a small blue sign affixed beneath one of the upstairs windows. It named the its founder – Marie Stopes. That’s not exactly true, another telling feature was a small group of people huddled on the footpath outside, some holding posters, others turning their heads to fix on anyone who may have been approaching the address. Any women. Any distressed and worried women. Quite the welcoming committee. The things they said to you as you walked towards the gate never registered. You’re not sure you heard them at all, although you remember someone saying a Hail Mary. Good of them really, you needed all the support you could get. Head down, you ignored their gory posters and made your way to the front door. Behind you a mother and daughter came up the path. The daughter turned out to have an appointment at 8:30 also. She was younger than you, mid-teens probably. She spoke to the receptionist in a heavy London accent. Her skin was dark, her hair in a carnival of braids. She wore a pink tank top that showed off her flat stomach. Her Diesel jeans were embellished with pink diamantes to match. You felt fat and rural. You also felt desperately sick as you had done for weeks. Nausea that never left you. Nausea that had meant you had to leave your exams many times to spew yellow bile in the toilets. Nausea that would result in you not having done as well as you had hoped in those exams although you wouldn’t find that out until the results landed on the doormat in August. Results that ultimately weren’t to matter. You are at the conference today and it has all been down to hard work and that inner compass guiding you towards your destination. The Londons of July 1999 and July 2019 are a world apart. Gone are the pale-faced women, worn from their red-eye flights, hiding their Gaelic tongues, pretending they have family in London so they can be discharged and return on the last cheap flight to save themselves the overnight rate in the clinic. Tonight you will stay near Earl’s Court, many miles from Mattock Lane.

THE GIST: Gráinne writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the UCD Maeve Binchy Award 2019 and runner up in the Limnisa Short Story Competition 2019. Her work was highly commended in the Blue Nib Poetry Chapbook Competition 2018 and shortlisted for the Gregory O'Donoghue and Anthony Cronin Poetry Prizes. She has been published in numerous publications such as Southword Magazine, Dodging the Rain, Ogham Stone and Boyne Berries.

25 A Critical Examination of 21st Century Poetry by Ada Wofford

Part One: Understanding Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey

Rupi Kaur is a bestselling author and Instagram star. Her debut book, Milk and Honey has sold 3.5 million copies, making it the best-selling collection of poetry of all time, even out selling

The Odyssey. There has been a lot of discussion both about Kaur and the genre of Insta-poetry. A particularly scathing article titled, “The Cult of the Noble Amateur,” criticizes this emerging medium for its simplicity and shallowness. The author, Rebecca Watts, vents her disdain for this new breed of poet stating, “The reader is dead: long live consumer-driven content and the ‘instant gratification’ this affords.”

It’s difficult not to see this situation as intellectual elitism. Just as a classically trained composer might criticize a Top 40 pop song, writers such as Watts view the work of Kaur as something trite and pedestrian, something with no substance that people may easily consume. But because Kaur’s writing is so simplistic, it begs the question: Is it poetry? A Taylor Swift song might not be intellectually challenging or sonically interesting but there’s no doubting that it is in fact music. Kaur’s writing on the other hand is not so easy to categorize. Kaur markets herself as a poet and maybe people have gone along with that title because they don’t know how else to categorize her. If Kaur’s writing isn’t poetry, what is it? And if it is poetry, why isn’t it taken seriously?

There is hardly any critical or academic writing on Milk and Honey. The one article I found,

“The Technopo(e)litics of Rupi Kaur: (de)Colonial AestheTics and Spatial Narrations in the

DigiFemme Age” by Sasha Kruger, is not a literary paper but an exploration of Kaur’s use of gender, sex, and race in her writings. The paper is a bit superfluous, making easy and obvious connections to various academics such as Judith Butler, Gayatri Gopinath, and Victoria M. Bañales

26 among others. Although it’s not at all a literary analysis, there is still some relevant information.

The article discusses Kaur’s use of images in her work and how they heighten the meaning of the words. Kaur refers to her work as “design poetry,” suggesting two things 1) The accompanying images are integral to the meaning and function of the work. And 2) the function of the line-endings is purely visual. This is supported by the fact that Kaur’s poetry is, “based on the spoken word” and so careful consideration of syllables, stress, rhythm, etc. is ignored (Kruger 21).

Line-endings are essential to poetry. They drive the rhythm and the syntax of the words. In the book, The Art of the Poetic Line, author James Longenbach writes, “More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing” (xi). The line-endings in

Milk and Honey appear to be completely arbitrary. Kaur’s poems often read like a single sentence chopped up to have the appearance of a poem. Take this poem from page 121 for example (many of

Kaur’s poems do not have titles so I will refer to them by page number):

how can i write

if he took my hands

with him

In his discussion of line-endings, Longenbach writes, “But even the arbitrary must be driven by necessity, and necessity can be judged only on a poem by poem basis: what does the language of this particular poem require at this particular juncture?” (63). If we look at the use of syllables in the above poem we get, 4, 5, 2. There’s nothing to suggest this was done purposefully or out of necessity. An examination of the use of stresses tells the same story—Nothing appears deliberate or driven by necessity. The only remaining conclusion is that the line-endings are done purely as a visual component. This is reinforced by Kaur’s deliberate choice to eschew punctuation and capitalization with no apparent meaning behind this choice, save for the previously mentioned visual component. 27 To gain a better understanding of Kaur’s poetry, it’s worthwhile to explore what this poem would look like if we attempted to inject some poetic elements into it, such as attention to syllables and stress. By introducing syllabic-verse the line-endings will become more meaningful:

How can I write

If when he left

My hands he took

It’s still sloppy but at least it has rhythm, purposeful use of syllables, and it no longer has that clunky enjambment at the end. The reason this is better than the alternative, “If when he left/he took my hands” is that now “he” is the second to last syllable in the last two lines. But we can still improve it:

How can I write

If when he left

My hands he kept

Now there is more information in the poem and “left” pairs nicely with “kept”, both having the same vowel sound. All three lines function as pairs of iambs now as well. As for context, it is now made clear that the narrator had given her hands at some point in the past. In the context of the entire book we can infer that she at some point gave her hands to a lover, but in the context of the original poem we are not given enough information.

The big issue with this poem, really with most of Kaur’s poems, is that it goes nowhere. It makes a singular statement, “He took my hands and now I can’t write.” And when I rearrange this to introduce rhythm into the writing it’s like hearing a melody that never resolves itself. Just as the rhythm gets established, the poem is over. It becomes obvious from this exercise that a poem this short actually suffers from the inclusion of classic poetic elements. Now, instead of having a short poem with no rhythm, we have a rhythmic poem that feels incomplete.

28 A few times in Milk and Honey, Kaur forgoes her pseudo-poetry and just writes in rambling prose. The use of language and lack of rhythm results in these sections reading exactly like her poems. Even her use of paragraph-endings is as arbitrary as her use of line-endings. Here is a passage from “how we make up”:

when the entire street is looking out their windows wondering what all the

commotion is. and the fire trucks come rolling in to save us but they can’t distinguish

whether these flames began with our anger or our passion. i will smile. throw my

head back. arch my body like a mountain you want to split in half. baby lick me.

like your mouth has the gift of reading and i’m your favorite book. find your favorite

page in the soft spot between my legs and read it carefully. fluently vividly don’t you

dare leave a single word untouched. and i swear my ending will be so good. the last

few words will come. running to your mouth. and when you’re done. take a seat.

cause it’s my turn to make music with my knees pressed to the ground. (Kaur 77)

The prose sections are interesting because Kaur uses periods. She uses these much more purposely than her line-endings and paragraph-endings. For instance, the lines, “the last few words will come. running to your mouth,” uses the period very purposefully, creating a pun out of the word “come.” Although this wordplay is both obvious and a bit juvenile, it’s a subtle use of wordplay done through the employment of a line-ending; a technique Kaur tends to ignore in her poems.

Despite the introduction of more meaningful line-endings in her prose, these sections are still problematic. Kaur tends to rest on under-developing her ideas and presenting them under the guise of minimalism. When she attempts to flesh out her ideas in prose things tend to fall apart. For instance, the simile in the line, “like your mouth has the gift of reading and I’m your favorite book,” is already quite poor. The action of licking doesn’t visually translate well into the act of reading. In 29 this context, the licking is sexual and the feeling the passage is attempting to evoke is one of passion and lust. But the act of reading is a solitary, methodical process that does not involve touching—the hands may touch the book but the eyes do all the reading from a distance. The comparison doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with and then, to make matters worse, Kaur attempts to expand on it, making the scene less sexy and more baffling with each word. At the end, when her partner has finished, she writes, “it’s my turn to make music.” But this implies that her partner was first making music, if it’s now her turn. Kaur completely derails her own lousy simile.

It’s clear that Kaur’s writing is not attempting to emulate anything that has come before it.

Her prose is rambling and confusing and her poetry eschews pretty much all poetic elements. It might be interesting if this was done deliberately, if this was an attempt at deconstructing our conception of prose and poetry, but nothing in Milk and Honey suggests this. There’s a difference between someone not playing the piano and John Cage’s 4:33. Cage’s composition is deliberate, there is an actual structure to the piece, and there is meaning behind the decisions that went into the final performance. The same can be said about abstract-expressionists. How many times have you heard someone look at a copy of a Pollock and claim that their 4-year old could create a similar painting? To the untrained eye, a Pollock might look like the random scribblings of a child but of course the two are worlds apart. Interestingly, Kaur’s writing seems to function in the opposite sense: To the untrained ear, her poems apparently sound intelligent and deep. Even more so than say

Whitman or T.S. Eliot because no one is buying their books in the numbers they’re buying Kaur’s.

Though more people are interested in Milk and Honey than Leaves of Grass, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are choosing one over the other. Poetry never sold as well as it is now. This fact reinforces the idea that Kaur’s writing isn’t poetry, at least not in the sense that we are accustomed to—Kaur’s writing style lacks the self-awareness and cultural-awareness it would need to be considered a new form of writing; Kaur isn’t the Cage or Pollock of poetry. Regardless, Kaur’s writings resonate with millions of people and so it’s important that we attempt to understand why. 30 In The Art of Reading Poetry, Harold Bloom writes:

As you read a poem, there should be several questions in your mind. What does it

mean, and how is that meaning attained? Can I judge how good it is? Has it

transcended the history of its own time and the events of the poet’s life, or is it now

only a period piece? (41).

These are suggestions; Bloom doesn’t go through and start answering each one but it’s an interesting template for critiquing Kaur’s work. Take the poem above from page 121, we immediately understand its meaning. It attains this meaning by being explicit, which makes for pretty boring poetry. The second question is interesting because you might shrug your shoulders and think, “Why can’t I judge how good it is? I like it or I don’t.” But that’s not what Bloom is asking, he’s asking how good is the poem, not whether or not you like it, nor is he asking whether or not it’s good. Being as it’s difficult to even categorize Kaur’s work as poetry, it seems we can’t judge how good it is—the work doesn’t appear to adhere to any self-imposed standards. The last question is easy to answer because all of Kaur’s work is highly personal, so all of her work is nothing more than a “period piece.”

Furthermore, Kaur’s poems lack variation and purposeful disruption. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line:

What matters within any particular formal decorum is variation: the making of

pattern along with the simultaneous disruption of pattern. [. . .]This kind of

movement—the establishment of a formal decorum in which even the smallest

variation from it feels thrilling—is what makes the act of reading a poem feel like

the act of writing a poem. (114)

If Kaur’s writings are in fact poems, they’re not very good poems. From both a critical examination of the work and a more casual critique of the experience of reading it (via Harold

31 Bloom’s criteria), Kaur’s writing fails to hold up as poetry. The final argument then is that Kaur’s writings are not poems but something else.

I mention above that Kaur considers her work to be “design poetry.” The problem with making up your own genre is that no one else has a basis for judging it. The closest thing we have to

“design poetry” is ekphrasis, which poetryfoundation.org describes as, “‘Description’ in Greek.

[. . .] a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning” (“Ekphrasis”). A paper by Lili Pâquet titled, “Selfie-Help: The Multimodal

Appeal of Instagram Poetry” explores how this relates to Kaur’s style, and Instagram poetry as a whole, at length. While ekphrasis might serve as a decent description of what Kaur is attempting to accomplish in her work, I don’t believe it tells the whole story, as it’s basically just a more formal expression of Kaur’s made-up genre of “design poetry” and one that only partially applies, as it could be argued that it is not Kaur’s words that amplify and expand the meaning of her illustrations but the other way around—It is her illustrations that attempt to amplify and expand the meaning of her words.

We see this in the poem “i have been both,” in which the illustration of a hand flipping a coin heightens the meaning of the poem, which reads, “the abused/and the/abuser” (Kaur 111). The illustration informs the reader that being an abuser and being abused are two sides of the same coin.

The illustration introduces a metaphor, albeit a cliché, into the piece that does not exist in the words alone.

By referring to her work as “design poetry,” Kaur makes a point to distinguish her work from belonging to the genre that is simply poetry. But, it seems she at least considers it to be connected to poetry. Another genre of writing connected to poetry is that of the aphorism. A lot of

Kaur’s writing is essentially a single sentence and almost all of her writing attempts to convey some sort of wisdom or philosophy. This makes it a good contender for the genre of aphorisms. Take this 32 famous aphorism, “Actions speak louder than words.” If you insert a line-ending and add a little illustration you would essentially have a Kaur poem. Classifying something as an aphorism though is a bit tricky. Maybe it’s more of an epigram or a proverb, maybe it’s a platitude—To make things easier, writer James Geary came up with what he calls the 5 laws of the aphorism. They are:

1. It must be brief.

2. It must be personal.

3. It must be definitive.

4. It must be philosophical.

5. It must have a twist.

Geary says that an aphorism being personal is what distinguishes it from a proverb and it

being philosophical is what distinguishes it from a platitude. Let’s analyze the aphorism,

“Actions speak louder than words” using Geary’s laws.

1. Yes, it’s brief. Only five words long.

2. This is a bit ambiguous. If you look at Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms, he doesn’t talk about

himself explicitly, but like the aphorism above, they might function as personal advice or a

personal observation. For instance, “He who stands most remote from his world is he who

mirrors it best.” Not personal in the sense that Wilde is opening himself up to us but it’s still

personal as it speaks to Wilde’s personal experiences and observations. Geary says that a

proverb is an aphorism that’s been used so frequently that its creator has been forgotten so,

it’s more about the fact that the reader knows who is saying it. So, that too contributes to

what makes it personal.

3. Yes, it’s a complete, definitive thought.

4. This is a bit ambiguous but yes, it’s philosophical. It’s essentially presenting a rule to live by

and much of philosophy is focused on how one ought to live.

33 5. The twist is in the use of the word “speak.” This is what makes the phrase interesting. The

phrase, “Actions are more meaningful than words” conveys the same message but loses the

twist, the play on words. It’s not nearly as interesting to hear and therefore it’s rendered

forgettable.

Now, let’s analyze this poem by Kaur from page 156 of Milk and Honey:

if you were born with

the weakness to fall

you were born with

the strength to rise

1. It’s longer than our example but still quite brief. Removing the line-ends, this is a single

sentence.

2. Yes, going by the criteria established above this is personal.

3. It’s a complete and definitive thought.

4. I see this as a philosophic thought. If weakness is an inherent part of our being then so is

strength.

5. Barely. There is the interplay between fall and rise, it’s not really a twist as much as it’s

a chiasmus.

I think this qualifies as an aphorism. It might not be a particularly clever or insightful aphorism but it seems to check off all the boxes. Rupi Kaur’s work, and most Insta-poetry, appear to be attempts at creating aphorisms and then stylizing them as poems. I only analyzed one of Kaur’s poems. Many of her poems do not meet all of Geary’s five laws but it’s obvious they are attempting to, whether or not Kaur is even aware of these laws. Take this one from page 160 for example:

it takes grace

to remain kind

in cruel situations 34 It’s not clever, it’s not particularly insightful, and it doesn’t have a twist, but it has that authoritative cadence to it that attempts to convince the reader that what they are reading is wise and profound.

It makes sense this style of writing would be so popular today. Most of what we read and listen to is delivered in small packages, Tweets, soundbites, text messages. While this writing may not be particularly interesting or challenging, it’s a representation of our times. And for that reason,

Kaur’s work is valuable.

In the next two parts of this series we will further explore the role of technology in 21st

Century poetry. We will look at the genre of alt-lit (alternative literature and no, it has nothing to do with the alt-right) as well as the history of technology influencing literature.

References

Bloom, Harold. The Art of Reading Poetry. Perennial, 2005.

“Ekphrasis” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/ glossary-terms/ekphrasis.

Kaur, Rupi. Milk and Honey. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015.

Kruger, Sasha. “The Technopo(e)Litics of Rupi Kaur: (De)Colonial AestheTics and Spatial

Narrations in the DigiFemme Age.” Ada New Media, 22 May 2017, adanewmedia.org/

2017/05/issue11-kruger/.

Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. Graywolf, 2008.

Waterstones, director. James Geary's Five Laws of the Aphorism. Fora TV, Dailymotion, 1 Feb.

2012, www.dailymotion.com/video/xgl7mn.

35 Watts, Rebecca. “The Cult of the Noble Amateur .” PN Review Print and Online Poetry Magazine

- The Cult of the Noble Amateur - Rebecca Watts - PN Review 239, Jan. 2018, www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10090.

*Note—Much of the opening paragraph is was originally published in the article “Live Laugh Ugh:

Fear and Loathing in the World of Instagram-Poetry” by Ada Wofford. Published in The Blue Nib.

THE GIST: Along with being a Contributing Editor to the Blue Nib, Ada Wofford is bravely avoiding her inevitable 9-5 enslavement by studying library science at UW-Madison. She holds a

BA in English literature and has been published in number of journals.

36 Poetry From Ireland, England & Elsewhere Selected By Clara Burghelea

Editorial

Poetry is worth everything. It makes me feel happy and human and alive. I am fortunate to read as Poetry Editor for UK/Ireland for The Blue Nib, and immerse in the work of such courageous, committed poets. The eclectic, diverse voices of this issue are proof of the way poetry is being reinvented, reclaimed, repossessed- an essential part of our existences. I felt honored and grateful to read young voices like Rebecca D’Arcy, J. Taylor Bell or Rae O’Dowd and also established poets such as Dominic Fisher, Sue Morgan, James Finnegan or Susan Castillo Street.

The poetry included in Issue 39 come from all over the world and the variety of the experiences and emotions are beautifully rendered into these thirty-two poems.

The poems of Issue 39 encompass the breath of the human experience from troubled relationships to nature delights, from loss to the anxiety that comes with old age, from rebirth to the decay of the body, from the joys of food to haunting memories. There is an assortment of form – free verse, sestina, ghazal - and the unfolding of the personal journey, an honest display of what makes us vulnerable and eager to crumble or stand tall.

In some respect, these poems are in conversation with one another. Rae O’Dowd’s ‘Junk’ and Anne Ballard’s ‘Declutter Time’ measure the way we humanly define ourselves by the things we choose to discard or keep. In ‘Sly’, Maria Pascualy says ‘beauty is accidental” and it falls upon us in the most mundane instances. Beauty is also a glimpse away; the way Denise O’Hagan’s eyes softly capture it “with the day’s bruise already on it”. It is also stepping out of the skin to inhabit

37 the surroundings, only to be reminded the surroundings are beautifully inhabiting you. In Brian

Rihlmann’s words: “and when the clouds drift away/ a shadow appears/ on a sparkling canvas/of spring snow/ a long shadow of a man/ walking alone/ the shadow raises a hand/ and waves/ I think it’s me”.

The featured poets of this issue are J. Taylor Bell, James Finnegan and Rona Fitzgerald. J.

Taylor Bell is a promising young poet from Fort Worth, Texas. He is studying an MA in Poetry at

Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he is the Seamus Heaney Centre

International Scholar of 2018-19. He has a fresh, vulnerable voice that comes on page as funny and serious, at the same time. His poems are immersed in the mundane, like a metronome that punctures the mechanics of the day, from random thoughts to meaningful encounters, the music and movies that move us, our intrinsic fabric.

J. Taylor was kind enough to answer a few questions about himself and his craft, allowing any emerging poets out there to find an echo or an answer in the way he feels and thinks about poetry. I am always happy for new recommendations of young, innovative poetic voices such as

Hera Lindsay Bird, Susannah Dickey or Jake Hawkey. Poetry is once again community and gives us the chance to grow and thrive together, by sharing and reading one another. This issue is to remind us poetry is simultaneously rooted and pressing forward.

Shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Award 2018 and highly commended in the Patrick

Kavanagh Poetry Competition (2016, 2018) James Finnegan is an established poet whose work is witty and vulnerable, at the same time. There is a shred of humor that blends with film references and the suggested playfulness of a children’s rhyme. Underneath the shield of words, there is some uncanny humanity permeating the lines. In ‘Thinking of August’, he lightheartedly talks to a month or woman, take your pick, with the same softness and the dainty lines flow right down your veins.

An experienced poet, Rona Fitzgerald writes about the perils that threaten the woman’s body. Whether it is the invasion of a mammography or the incarceration and death of 155 women, 38 supposedly under the care of nuns. Her spirited poems acknowledge those dangers by summoning the strength to speak up. She rightfully fits the other feminine voices of the issue, by giving it a daring, graceful voice.

Thank you for making time to read and engage with these poets and their work.

Clare Burghelea.

39 Featured Poet - J. Taylor Bell

J. Taylor Bell is from Fort Worth, Texas. He is studying an MA in Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he is the Seamus Heaney Center International Scholar of 2018-19. His work was shortlisted for the Mairtín Crawford as well as the Overland Fair Australia Poetry Prize and has appeared in The Tangerine, Honest Ulsterman, A3 Review, Sixfold and other publications.

Poetry

TO BELIEVE THAT HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS IS TO UNDERSTAND THAT IT COULD FLY AWAY AT ANY MOMENT the suburban backyard is the bardo of western civilization any soul may loose itself like an arrow there and wander freely with no danger of ever encountering any sort of target

i was baptized while riding a pool noodle & taught the dog from experience not to howl at the back door i learned a lot from the lazily mown lawn like how to question the value of straight lines

one day back there we went to plant a tree in the corner by the braided, sun-crusty hammock and even from a young age i was beginning to see how those branches & their lack of symmetry

40 reinforced this lesson in perception every crooked finger they ever pointed seemed to gesture towards un-knowing things

mom would walk out with a watering can and i’d point at the tree saying don’t worry i already pissed on it

then she’d sigh and bend down to pluck a feather out from among some unbagged grass clippings and pointing it absentmindedly at the sapling said that thing may not be big enough to hold a nest yet but one day it’ll be filled with divine music

then she turned to let it go and as i watched it being lifted away by the wind, i thought look at how the plume shines

41 PERFORMANCE REVIEW in case you had forgotten, it is the 21st century and your identity may once again be appraised though how we got to this point is a mystery

it shouldn’t take any skill or specialty to see every boss that ever got asked for a raise said in case you had forgotten, it is the 21st century

why on earth would we supplement your salary when your labor is as expendable as blank space how we got to this point is a mystery

nothing repeats itself like employment history we drag our tails through a considerable number of days because in case you had forgotten, it is the 21st century

and it is guaranteed by social media standing sentry over-qualified qualifies you for minimum wage how we got to this point is a mystery

bygone aspidistras wither above the kitchen sink dreams die in the corners to which they were chased and in case you had forgotten it is the 21st century though how we got to this point is a mystery

42 BEDTIME READING when i was a kid mom said books were just long lists of wishful thinking & every night by milky moonlight she’d read me one about the ancient city of texcoco where in a farewell song emperor nezahualcoyotl once declared the earth is one long grave and nothing may escape it

wishful thinking indeed she used to say closing the book & drawing the blinds leaving me to consider the strange idea of a grave since nowadays it may not extend solely to the earth since this was written roughly 566 years before humanity could be observed swinging golf clubs on the moon and since it was 646 years before the first permanent housing establishment was erected there

this second statistic is another example of wishful thinking

what’s more is it’s nothing new to say you’re afraid since such modes of thought might still be necessary since nezahualcoyotl didn’t live to see the other day when my senator quoted mussolini on twitter since nobody minds dynamiting canyons anymore between themselves & the people they care about since for all the good it has done being there for one another we may as well be golfing on the moon

since all this & since i was already in a volatile state of questioning reality since i’d just been eating an ice cream i bought 43 for 2 bucks from the 99 cent van and since i was so disillusioned i sought a bench since too many prepositions can follow walking since i needed a while to make sense of things since i was thinking of a message i wanted to send to my one true love who didn’t know any of this since they are living so far away

since the contents were instead one long sentence about 15,000 bikes in amsterdam every year since they’re fished from shallow canal graves being hauled away & melted down like abandoned ice creams into scrap metal since what i really wished to say was something more like i love you help

44 ETERNITY-BUDDHA IN NIRVANA after Xu Zhen i always enjoyed all the math problems which arrived at their conclusions by means of subtraction……………… a certain lucidity a lack, a clarity like a vagrant stumbling into the divine. white light shining on sinews & cleaved genitals; skin & body so immaculate you’d think no way they ever knew eating disorders or the chords a knife strikes on the body and its piano keys……………….but now i see what drives some people deeply down inside their own disease; relentless misgivings imply the hardest part isn’t simply living, it’s knowing when to stop the chiselling.

45 THE DAY THAT I ALMOST LOST MY VIRGINITY

i was firmly mixed up in my fifteenth year taking the bus to school every day sending texts from under my desk breaking my back trying to diagram a clandestine plan to buy a condom and somehow i decided the best way would be 7-11 with a big gulp & flaming hot cheetos you know how it goes one opens up the bag pumps in the processed cheese then slides it across the counter beside the 3 pack purple box with a sheepish nod you smoked newports on the porch which your mom bought for you i got a ride from my brother after cross country practice since we only had high school english in terms of courtship you sang boyfriend by avril lavigne to me and i thought wait is she trying to tell me something but then we were in your bed blinds drawn over big ideas and i stuck my fingers through the burns in the twisted sheets trying to concentrate on prosaic things like john lennon for example flashing the peace sign in front of the eiffel tower the dog barking in the backyard the opened wrapper on the carpet floor last high score on super smash brothers but then there was a sudden buzzing down below the sound of the slowly opening garage door AHHHHHHHMMMMMMMM a great wave of panic swallowing everything where sometimes there is no time to pause and reflect and when people ask me about my greatest fear i refer to when we heard your mother starting up the steps as i struggled to stretch my jeans around my legs but as far as most things not working out goes it could have turned out worse do you remember how she was surprisingly cool about the whole thing after all she was the one who bought you cigarettes peeled the parental advisory sticker off all your favorite CDs rented us jackie brown and said nothing out loud about the tooth-marks on your neck she gave a courtesy knock and waited outside the door with her hands on her hips then she promised she wouldn’t tell my parents i said thank you but then with the moment long over we made fingerpaint pictures in the empty guest room until mom arrived to pick me up

46 Interview with featured poet - J. Taylor Bell

Poetry Editor Clara Burghelea was so impressed with the work of J. Taylor Bell that she was determined to interview him. The meeting was not physical but the resultant interview is none-the-less for that.

Clara Burghelea: So, tell me a little bit about how you started writing and what drew you to poetry.

J. Taylor Bell: As both of us may painfully realize before this interview concludes, brevity has never really been my strong suit. I think that I have a terrible and bizarre fear of being misunderstood, so I tend to over-explain everything. A wonder then that I’m so drawn to poetry, notorious for being the breath mint after the long steak buffet of…literature… But when you think about it more, it kind of makes sense, because there is a real clarity to good poetry — a deep conveyance of emotions and understanding that otherwise doesn’t really seem to get translated in everyday language and other mediums. Or if there is some aspect of emotionality and understanding to it, it’s abstracted, which requires a bit of imagination, which is work that I don’t always want to do when I’m experiencing art. In terms of when I started writing, my earliest memories of writing are when I was 11 years old. I used to print out short stories about a sentient chicken nugget from McDonald’s and then take them to school the next day, distributing them surreptitiously to my fifth grade classmates at recess. I don’t know what’s happened since then. Clearly somewhere along the way I ran out of good ideas.

Clara Burghelea: How would you describe your poetic style?

J. Taylor Bell: Like a really great massage after a long day of work, but work is where you actually just mostly sit at a desk and listen to podcasts, and the massage is like the ones that they give to people in the middle of the mall in front of Auntie Anne’s and Forever 21, and it goes on for way too long until you’re both really uncomfortable with it.

47 Clara Burghelea: How do you begin a poem?

J. Taylor Bell: The first step is usually to sit at a table or a desk with your head in your hands staring vacantly into walls for about 30 minutes, trying to think of something to say. Then once you’ve figured out that you don’t know how to say it, go for something smaller, and then figure out how to say it interestingly. And for me this usually manifests itself as a kind of absurd proposition or a declaration. I don’t know why. I’ve always liked poems that begin this way. Mary Ruefle’s poem/essay about shrunken heads: “It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays any interest in the art of shrunken heads.” or John Berryman when he said: “Life, friends, is boring.” Something to argue with, but something that is also arresting. Half the time, after editing, the propositions end up dissolving out of the poem anyways, but they’re always there serving as the sort of nucleus of the thing. You can usually sense them, even if you can’t see them.

Clara Burghelea: Do you have a writing routine?

J. Taylor Bell: For a while I was going to General Merchants on Ormeau Road every morning and trying to write a sonnet, but then I kept running into Marcella Prince there, and I felt like I was crossing a territorial boundary, so I switched over to the 367 cafe. But I don’t know. I feel too guilty taking up space in all of these public places for so long when I’m only drinking a coffee. Plus if we’re being honest I’m probably living somewhat above my means dropping 3.50 every day on iced lattes. So now I’m dividing my time between my room, where the sound of my roommates going to and from the bathroom tends to disrupt any sort of….flow…. and the desks in the university library, which are mercifully quiet, yet sometimes painfully far away on rainy days. Hemingway wrote standing up in the early mornings, one of my friends can’t write anything before midnight, and I’d say about the only limitation I impose on myself is this: never write while eating. That would be a shame and a disservice to the meal. Plus, if you are like me, you’re very susceptible to sauce mishaps, and I often get distracted by particular flavors anyways.

Clara Burghelea: So, tell me a bit about your editing/reviewing process.

J. Taylor Bell: Like I said before, that proposition that I often use to begin a poem usually dissolves slowly through the process of editing. Otherwise, if it’s a narrative-driven poem, then I’m always looking for a more interesting place to start than the beginning. Ever since taking a workshop class with Leontia Flynn, where she spent the whole semester suggesting that all of my poems could be shorter (which is entirely fair, let’s be honest), I’ve looked for fat that can be trimmed wherever 48 possible. Getting friends to tell you what they don’t think is necessary is also a really beneficial thing to have in life.

Clara Burghelea: What poets have influenced you and your work the most?

J. Taylor Bell: There are lots of ways to answer this question which seem disingenuous, so in my best attempt at an objective answer, I’d say that Hera Lindsay Bird and Frank O’Hara are the two poets who I most often find myself reading and re-reading and (sub)consciously plagiarizing. Anybody like Susannah Dickey or Jake Hawkey that is good at subverting the arrangement of a poem is bound to have an influence on this stuff as well, since they are good at it, and it’s always something that I’m attempting to do.

Clara Burghelea: What types of poems do you find yourself writing most? Do you have a recurring type?

J. Taylor Bell: Like the scene in The Big Lebowski when they’re scattering Donny’s remains in the ocean, but the wind is blowing the wrong way, so Jeff Bridges just ends up covered in ashes, I’m always trying to write something that is the right combination of funny and sad. No idea how that comes off though.

Clara Burghelea: What projects do you have going on right now?

J. Taylor Bell: As maybe evidenced by that last response, I’m more interested in the way that poetry can respond to film than the way that it responds to things like oil paintings, Greek Mythology, or other poems and traditional fine arts. Remember when Paxman said that poetry has “connived at its own irrelevance?” I suppose I’ve always really taken that to heart. So I’m working on a collection of poems titled “MOVIES I’VE CRIED AT”, which is almost entirely autobiographical and, based off the title, should be probably be pretty self-explanatory, ha.

Clara Burghelea: What are you currently reading?

J. Taylor Bell: Last week I finished hiking for 35 days on the Scottish National Trail. I found a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in a hostel in Durness and read the whole thing on the bus rides back to civilization, and reading it now at 28 has been so much different than the required reading as a teenager in high school. It’s a seriously brilliant book, and so much of it went over my head when I 49 was younger, which feels now like an experience that I missed and I’ll never be able to fully recover. I’d recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it again as an adult. Other than that, I’m also enjoying Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematograph”, Ruefle’s “My Private Property” (thank you Susie again for lending it to me), and eagerly anticipating Ocean Vuong’s new novel.

Clara Burghelea: Advice for aspiring writers out there?

J. Taylor Bell: When I was 21 I had what you might call a “formative” and pretty bad heartbreak. It felt so inexplicable, and I was so sad all of the time. So one day I sat myself down, or maybe stood in front of a mirror or something, and said okay Taylor, seriously you’ve got to stop eating Chipotle burritos for lunch every day. It can’t be good for you. The other part of that self-reinvention was that I started keeping a journal. But instead of simply writing prosaically about what I’d encountered that day, I tried to make every journal entry a type of poem. Rhyme, form, feet, meter, imposing some sort of constraints on myself to spurn a bit of imagination in how I reflected on my day and my life. That discipline has sort of carried over into the present tense, and I’m really glad that I started doing it, however late in the game I might’ve been. So yeah, don’t eat Chipotle every day.

Clara Burghelea: What is next for J. Taylor Bell?

J. Taylor Bell: I’m excited to finish this collection of poems about movies I cried at, and to continue watching and crying at more movies. Exploring the boundaries ekphrastic poetry, and how the emphasis that poetry places on fine art is often a class issue, is something that I’ll hopefully be pursuing more in the future. Other than that, I’m considering getting a haircut finally. And I’ve got to run to the store to pick up some salad tomatoes to go with the frozen falafel balls I’m about to put in the oven. I’ll probably eat those while finishing Braveheart tonight. Happy Tuesday.

50 Featured Poet - James Finnegan

STYX AND STONES

a Clare born priest-poet first where Juba in The Gladiator says and philosopher advises to Maximus Decimus Meridius that one be consoled by I will see you again but not yet not yet and sure about one’s own death second where Denholm Elliott as Mister Emerson in A Room as I walk along Ballyraine Road with a View tells Lucy our springer and I in stride he wishes his son to understand that I think about the difference alongside the why between dying and falling asleep there is a yes and a yes and a yes and think it has something to do with waking up in different places or waking up in the same place third where I say to the hearse and not waking up at all thank you for not sneaking up behind me just then an empty hearse full of light on a sunny mid-June day comes towards me on the other side of the road and a few things come to mind

51 WACCHEN CLOCCA the clock’s lips are thin and grim as quarter after nine and eerily your six o’clock kiss runs the length of your face and where is the eye of Under the Eye is your soul business to keep alert and where is your bell as you can’t yawn I take it you never tire are you conscious of every tick every tock or are you immersed in this room watching me watching you in the pure presence of eternity

FEAST DAY OF SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST

a lot of people know the joke about the difference between a hedgehog and a Mercedes filled with five guys wearing sunglasses the hedgehog has the pricks on the outside which is fine and well we may laugh but today on the way to Lough Barra I came across a hedgehog who’d made it most of the way across the road a soft spiky hemispherical hump with a pool of blood by her head

52

CALLED BY NAME

the celibate priest lives in part of the college called Private Quarters

THINKING OF AUGUST

but June stops by lays her hands on my shoulders and says

it’s June all that light aren’t you happy

it’s not the end of the world if you die soon

THE GIST: James Finnegan was shortlisted for Hennessy Literary Award 2018, highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Competition (2016, 2018), published in New Hibernia Review (April 2019), Poetry Ireland Review (Jul 2018), CYPHERS, Skylight 47, North West Words, and The Best New British & Irish Poets 2018 - first full collection of poems Half-Open Door (Eyewear Publishing, 2018).

53 Featured Poet - Rona Fitzgerald

Unmarked

From 1966 until 1972, I cycled to school in Drumcondra passing the High Park laundry. In 1993 the nuns who had run the laundry applied for a licence to exhume 133 women who died while incarcerated there, in order to sell the site to a developer. They could provide death certificates for only 75 women. During the exhumation the remains of another 22 nameless Magdalene women were unearthed.

When I allow myself, I can still feel her new born fingers as she clasped mine. I never wanted to let go.

But what life could I have given her enclosed in a laundry where my name has been changed and nobody knows me?

‘There is no saint called Maebh, we will call you Mary, after the mother of God.’

Mammogram

Despite the chill of a February morning, a man with waxy orange skin is outside the clinic hooked up to a mobile drip, smoking.

Can you put on the gown please? Not catwalk style but dry like wax paper or butterfly ash. Then three rounds of the harsh machine.

On the way home, purple crocuses, alive in crusty snow-blanched soil. And I wondered what kind of flower would I choose, in the end.

54 Womankind

In my Irish childhood, men were at work. Children and women had the run of the house.

Street life flourished. Women could drink tea, congregate in kitchens and gardens. Even in the special parlour.

We never said ‘rape’.

Family, church, the Irish people gave us phrases – ‘frightened, interfered with a bit of bother’

When they asked me, aged seven, what happened, I didn’t know the words. At eleven, I still couldn’t say.

Men were protected from other men’s actions; Girls and women were exposed, shamed.

THE GIST: Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin and now lives in Glasgow. Her poetry is published in UK, Scottish, Irish and US, in print and online. Highlights include featured poet in the Stinging Fly 2011, Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry 2016, Oxford Poetry XVI.iii Winter 2016-17. Resurrection of a Sunflower, Pski’s Porch 2017. The Passage Between, Issue 1 Spring 2018. Recent publications are Poems for Grenfell Tower, Onslaught Press 2018, #Me Too, Fair Acre Press, 2018. Ramingo’s Porch magazine 2019, Nothing Substantial Literary magazine Spring 2019, Anthology for James Watt, ‘HORSEPOWER’ forthcoming New Voices Press, 2019.

55 Patrick Green

A Letter to You

3 A.M. in the kitchen Shooting chips under the white light

Hitting our heads on your door, A kiss missed

The smell of beer and smoke and sweat, The screeches and giggles and clouded sight

Kept us young, we thought Spurred on wildly.

But through it all I have to say I have listened, kept separate by thin boards

From the nervous glances and stammers Glinting in half-lit rooms of revelry

Staring up, caressed by the globing noise of it all Wishing Dreaming Of the same

But the shine is duller; Teeth wrapped with pink and drawn tight, The fuss hides the quiet moments With the strips, bottles, hushed shouts

The same Is you, lying beside me As the sea keeps its calms Like a tear Unshed.

56

A Garden on Kimberley Park Rd.

Right now – With green around me and blue above, concrete below and beside the drone of midges life mute and blurred over there – This may be the best, these moments I see may now be visions of life to tempt me through the bleakness of the everyday.

If I never did anything noble or otherwise what would that mean If I rested forgotten my name blown Away.

THE GIST: Patrick Green has just graduated from the University of Exeter and will be studying an MA in Creative Writing Poetry at UEA. Work published by a publisher based in Falmouth in an anthology as part of a cultural initiative in collaboration with the University - 'Ope: An Anthology' and a monthly literary Zine (the publisher was Sea Post Press). Patrick was Deputy Editor for his University paper and collated a creative writing section in a special print edition of The Falmouth Anchor. His work tends to deal with place and identity and how the two interact with each other and inform one another.

57 Lucy Crispin

NOVEMBER SENDS ME A POSTCARD

Across the wan November sky a lone heron is ferrying the slack bag of his body, slung beneath the neat-tucked neck. Not high nor hurriedly he goes, but slow, under a dough of cloud thin-stretched and risen over fields; he’s fetched from here to there by something known in arrow-beak, and steady wings, and sinew. Wide, diffused, the light slants like a skimmed stone, and the night sits, ready, inside day. Air brings, all leaf-rot-rich, the smell of rest: though not yet fierce with coming cold it’s promise-pricked, and says What’s old may be surrendered, and what’s next will come. Inside me, something yields and drops its gold, like leaves released. The far crows caw in bared, black trees, and tupped sheep wait in ochre fields.

THE GIST: Lucy Crispin is a former Poet Laureate of South Cumbria. Her work has appeared in Envoi, Eildon Tree, Allegro, Literary Oxygen, Poetry Cornwall, The Quiet Feather, The Selkie and Iceberg Tales as well as in other anthologies. She works freelance for the Wordsworth Trust and as a person-centred counsellor and facilitator.

58 Brian Rihlmann

I think it’s me in the mountains at dawn a sunbeam the edge of summer pierces a cloud huddles under ten foot drifts shines on the valley below a glass tower blazes a crow’s wings a pillar of light brush the silence and a chickadee sings and when the clouds drift away in a tree beautifully broken a shadow appears and twisted on a sparkling canvas by a hundred winters of spring snow gnarled, stripped a long shadow of a man and left for dead walking alone but it will grow on it will sink roots deeper reach branches higher the shadow raises a hand and waves I think it’s me

THE GIST: Brian Rihlmann was born in NJ, and currently lives in Reno, NV. He writes mostly semi autobiographical, confessional free verse. He has been published in Constellate Magazine, Poppy Road Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Red Eft, Mad Swirl and has an upcoming piece in The American Journal Of Poetry.

59 Sean Smith

Hawk (for Sean McSweeney) We gathered in the stove-warmed kitchen after chasing down laneways, picking frockens and blackberries, that left us purple tongued, our skin stained with indigo like some wild colonial tribe.

You gave us blank sheets of paper, whiter than fresh cow’s milk and tried to teach us to draw. We’ll start with birds, you said, A few lines for belly, beak and back. Mine took on the form of some grotesque, a distorted form that could never fly. But when you sketched the hawk in swift brushstrokes, delineated against an infinite sky I saw it hovering, gimlet eyed, as it soared over the hedgerows traced in the fields far below.

I see you now, hawk-still, keen-eyed, gliding over your Sligo bogs. Swooping down on the deep blues, greens and blacks hidden in the reeds to spear them, ink pricked, onto the cloud-white of your canvas, brushed with a feathered hand. Your fingers delivering each stroke with a raptors skill.

THE GIST: Sean Smith is a 56 year old poet, civil servant, husband and father but not necessarily in that order. He has been published in journals such as Firewords, The Poetry Bus, Boyne Berries and Skylight 47 along with a number of anthologies. Along with his poetry ambitions, someday he hopes to hit the perfect cover drive. 60 Mina Moriarty

Monster do not wake him when he is sleeping i slither from room to room on delicate scales my skin peels off when it is not ready it leaves flakes of me on a dirty carpet on 11.am. mornings when dry Tesco pancakes & BBC news cover the sounds of him ssshhh he must be exhausted from cannabis & switched off lamps & switched on genes don’t wake the monster for fear of not being seen when he does not see you anyway you are the daughter who fills her belly with answers to questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire as i pace the living room in my nightgown i wear my mother’s earrings and my ten year old frame bleeds for the first time through the rattle of his snores i do not know what to do with the blood i am scared so i stuff clots into the ceiling it will be years before i let them drip on me again

THE GIST: Mina Moriarty writes poetry and short stories and is fascinated by the imaginary worlds of myth and legend.

61 Bojana Stojcic

WOMEN OF THE SEA

Every year films take place on the French Riviera Hookers stroll in and out of the big hotels Lo sceicco bianco jerks off in the shower picturing putes de luxes, well-dressed and well-mannered bombshells for Arabs in white when the Sun goes out. Smiling contentedly groping, growing, probing, rolling, exploding into girls who keep their mouths shut and legs open.

It’s been going on for 60 years, movies under the glare of the spotlights and sex in the world with polarized sunglasses, protection against prying eyes denying the redundant stare hand in hand in Cannes. Yacht girls on the alluring Cote d’Azur a balmy playground of the rich and famous. Sun-soaked sophistication. The chain clanks as the anchor falls through the water cars pull into the bay to unload fresh meat classy mesdemoiselles like ships make headway against the gale a gateway to success. Professional prostitutes, B- and C-list Hollywood actresses, beauty queens and whimsical models dreaming of a world at peace when needed kept close at hand, nude and half nude, always in the mood despite remarks made in bad taste. 62 Combination boilers providing hot water on demand.

Winemakers babble about the wine production. The murmur of the waves. Grape selection, cultivation, pressing, aging, bottling, tasting wine and girls with perky breasts who smile at men willing to spend a fortune to relish the bubbly taste of diamonds, Armand de Brignac and Dom Pérignon Prisoners finally taste freedom. A sparkling taste of attainability.

Orphaned children. Street children sleeping rough. Malnourished mothers giving birth to underweight babies on TV. Scraggy children choke themselves awake on flies swarming inside their mouths. Squawking birds fly low. Switch it off, the craggy voice is heard his words slurred tucking into lobster stew harbored in the big blue.

White Pearl Caviar, white truffles, white moose cheese made in limited quantities for men in white. The fish bite every day. Good fortune.

A fragrant pine-clad coastline at sundown dreaming in colors. A recurrent dream about falling from great heights. A wife dreams of going back to school. A single mom of a two-year old dreams of going to America daycare and neckwear at the back of her mind. A girl leans against the headboard fantasizing about a life outside of rent hotel rooms. 63 A dream vacation, a dream car, a dream house in the country A dream hub and a couple of rugrats A golden retriever in the basket A recurring dream about happily ever after.

A gift for elderly men’s eyes they were the most beautiful mermaids with a rare talent for grinning, loving and making good use of their talents. Nature gifted them with a fine body and a strong stomach, so they thought, a little piece of heaven bought and brought sealed in an envelope their aching legs gave way, and they almost fell. 50 grand worth happiness.

THE GIST: Bojana Stojcic teaches, bitches, writes, bites and tries to breathe in between. Her poems and flash pieces are published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Down in the Dirt, Mojave Heart Review, Dodging the Rain, The Stray Branch, Tuck magazine, X-R-A-Y Lit Magazine and Visual Verse. She blogs regularly at Bojana’s coffee.

64 Anne Ballard

DECLUTTER TIME

Well-intentioned magazines still in the plastic Expired passports Status-declaring books, unread or struggled Shoes that hurt my feet through once Comfortable shoes curled up with age Yellowed old-friend-paperbacks Any clothes I could wear to an office Recipes – what’s the Internet for? small clothes Last century’s IT leads, going nowhere Slimming-club optimism ditto relationships Pipe-dreams Unloved presents from ex-friends and all the ashtrays Kitchen gadgets for posh dinner parties Almost everything stowed under the sink All the odd cutlery The skeletons in both cupboards Singletons; earrings, gloves, one-eyed Guilt for not wanting to back-pack round India sunglasses mother’s voice saying not you Photos of people I can’t remember Worn-out failed friendships or want to forget My dead who refuse to lie down Underwear in the deepest shade of grey The fear that comes at four in the morning Colour slides from somewhere-or-other- all to be thrown out mountains some day.

THE GIST: Anne Ballard’s poems have appeared in various magazines including Acumen, Orbis, Magma, The Interpreter’s House, and Artemis, and in several anthologies, most recently the Federation of Writers (Scotland) 2018 Anthology 'Spindrift'. She has been placed or shortlisted in a number of competitions, and won first prize in the Poetry on the Lake Competition 2015 and 2018. Her pamphlet Family Division, based on her working life as a family and child care lawyer. was published by Rafael Q Publishers.

65 Ysella Sims

Echo

They watch the screen, punch-pleased, as the sonographer traces slow circles on her belly and the room dulls Outside, a morning of crows, to a thick, cloistered hush. bare-branched, murdering the brumal air with clatter and chaws, In another room, smaller, colder, the carnival flash of parakeets the world rends, roils at the Richmond window. beneath the blue plastic sofa while they wait for the midwife to tell them, it doesn’t look good. The scent of crab apples mustering on the Octobered heath as they reach home in the dark; In the weeks between, they lean the jolt of her keening against the cool bark of the witching tree when the door was closed. on the heath, whisper pleas into its tessellations, stick stray feathers into the sand, Sun breaking through dank to arrange their wishes, just so. in the gorse-crowned fields to colour the sky sugared pink starling egg blue; And when it is time, she lies still, the sweet heft oh-so-still on the table of a pear-sized ghost in her arms. holds her breath, behaves.

THE GIST: Ysella Sims produced her first pamphlet, You are Here, in 2018 and is hard at work on her first collection. She has recently completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Plymouth University and lives in Exeter.

66 Anita Gracey

GHAZAL

Church bells presiding clear at mass parishioners appear at mass

meek in life with strong footsteps prayers hum you’ll hear at mass focus adjusts a myriad light streams historical images dance years at mass

bow at the body of His name rosary beads shield fears at mass

incense waves, priest nets sin you left walking free at mass atheist Anita, when her mum died derived tranquil comfort and cheer at mass.

THE GIST: Anita Gracey has written poetry for books ‘Washing Windows? Irish Women Write Poetry’, Edited by Alan Hayes, published by Arlen House and ‘Where My River Flows’, published by Lagan Navigation Trust, ‘Resonance’ and ‘Find’ published by Community Arts Partnership and will be in Poetry Ireland Review, May 2019.

67 Umit Sener Ta

Pebble Palace

The king of puppets carries his slave on his shoulder Are your feet happy in the bucket of loneliness? Don’t your clowns make you laugh? Don’t you get tired of sweat when you laugh? There is an island on the ocean and there is a palace on it A king entertaining himself with clowns coming with boats Can you trade the chair of loneliness with pebbles?

The moon that you hide at night enlarges shadows of the palace.

THE GIST: Umit Sener Ta is the editor of Miletus international Literature Magazine.

68 Marilyn Francis

LOST POEM

It’s a Monday morning in November sliding the silver paper, tapping out one fag and I’m in a coffee shop named from a snug row, the firework-night tang after a character from Moby-Dick of a scraped match outside, a young kid with wet hair smokes a cigarette in the rain and the names he flicks ash with his thumb Sweet Afton, Passing Clouds, Sobranie Black flick, flick. Russian I’d buy them for the poetry. I haven’t smoked cigarettes since I stopped being Juliette Greco and gave up Gitanes, and the cigarillos I remember my first time from G Smith & Sons tobacconist ten Gold Flake from the machine on the Charing Cross Road between three. but today, while sipping espresso at the window of an American coffee bar in this English tourist town I thought I remember my last time how much I’d been missing them watching the empty packet not just the smoking, but the whole of Camel burn in the fireplace. paraphernalia, slipping off the cellophane

THE GIST: Marilyn Francis has had poems published in The Broadsheet, Smeuze, Prole, South Bank Poetry and some other places. Circaidy Gregory published a book of poems, red silk slippers, a few years ago.

69 Rae O’Dowd

Junk

This is a graveyard for broken things.

Scratched-up cassette tapes and punctured tyres and dulled rainbow shards of stained glass from moss-covered God-forsaken cathedrals; Unspooled rusted wire and torn cotton quilts from empty cribs and seared flea-ridden fabric- shrouded seats out of burnt-up worn-down trucks; Ivy-blanketed Ferris wheels and dust-claimed sepia photographs or long-dead men, and cracked- skull faded-paisley-wearing one-legged china dolls left behind from picnics in the grass of the banks downstream.

Eerie nostalgia and weather-beaten fragments of days gone by are not shadowed by polished new primary-coloured cars or drowned out by laughing children’s shiny echoing bicycle bells in this place.

It is quiet here.

THE GIST: Rae O’Dowd is a young spoken word poet from Ireland, specialising in weaving powerful tales of love, heartbreak, and the madness and beauty of the mind. She has performed her work as a competitor in national events such as the All-Ireland Poetry Slam Final 2017, and she has been a featured performer for intimate local readings in both Ireland and Hampshire, where she is currently studying for a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and is a regular fixture at open mic nights. She is working on her first full-length poetry collection, “Love and Early Hours.”

70 Denise O’Hagan

MY TAPESTRY

Over how many ways with words And turns of phrase, and scribbles and scrawls Have my fingers lingered?

In getting a feeling For the spirit that moves The outward, literal, form We step into the writer’s mind To follow the contours of their thoughts, Only then can we dare To shape their material Reinforcing the fabric of expressions Trimming away the frills, removing padding And shreds of ambiguity folded into phrases Stretching sentences until they’re taut with meaning One following on one from another Until they all hang perfectly, pleasingly With no loose threads, Seamless.

For we editors are tailors, (Seamstresses of old Working in the back room of history, Heads bowed, diligently, invisibly) We cut and paste and nip and tuck, Sewing it all together Until the point is clear.

Here, at this work, My pen’s my needle. I stitch in words: This is my tapestry.

71 BETWEEN BEAUTY AND DECADENCE

Like a shred of satin Crumpled and creamy It caught my eye Lying there, near a clothes peg Against the brick red patio.

Luminous, exposed Halfway between beauty and decadence With the day’s bruise already on it: The world’s aches Perfectly expressed In the throwaway gift Of a fallen petal.

THE GIST: Denise is an editor by trade. Born in Italy, she lived in the UK before emigrating to Australia. She holds an MA in Bibliography and Textual Criticism and works in publishing. Her poetry is published in various literary journals including New Reader Magazine, Other Terrain Journal, Pink Cover Zine, Literary Yard, Backstory, Other Terrain Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, Poet’s Corner/InDaily and The Blue Nib. She was commended in the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize (2018), shortlisted for the Robert Graves Poetry Prize (2018), and received a special mention in the Pangolin Poetry Prize (2018). Denise was the recipient of the Adelaide Plains Poetry Competition 'Poetic Plains' 2019,

72 Alison Ross

Spring

Wild hare field whispers, lustrous rimed peeping moon sips Hawthorn scented stars

Leaving

There is a heaviness in the air that smells of sorrow and speaks of leaving.

Ashes drift in flurries across my heart and the dust of departure lies heavy on my tongue.

The light of your presence dies as the world shifts from technicolour into darkness.

THE GIST Alison came to Northern Ireland over 20 years ago, after leaving her birth place in Africa. Published in “Poetry in Motion Anthology 2017/18. Poetry NI’s Panning for Poems and by the John Muir Trust. Her first solo exhibition was held in 2015. Entitled Reflections, this featured a selection of her poetry and digital images. (Alison holds licentiate distinctions in both the Irish Photographic Federation and Royal Photographic Society).

73 Maria Pascualy

Sly sheer white curtains slap the bay window a long willow branch slowly scrapes the old cylinder glass a black dildo rests next to a cup of tea on grandmother’s bedside table beauty is accidental

Breakfast a tall lady with a milky eye sits at my table her necklace comes undone and sinks into her cereal pretending not to see I cough unfold the ferry schedule as her manly hand plucks out the string of beads from the bowl of Cheerios

THE GIST: Maria Pascualy grew up in Bogotá, Colombia and now lives and writes in a little white house in Tacoma, Washington. Pascualy has been published in Thimble Magazine, Hobo Camp Review, Pulp, Columbia Magazine, Bull&Cross, Panoplyzine, Nine Muses Magazine and Mulberry Fork Review.

74 Margaret Pritchard Houston

Birthday

The other women here are older, walking, between grave and trough, half bent with watering cans, their knees slow and stiff. Their hands, tidying grass, with the same assured sweep that once pushed hair off husbands’ foreheads. They pat the earth, backs bent, broad soft backs, the lines of practical bras under Marks and Spencer shirts, fleshy and reassuring, like memories of grandmothers, their elbows, as they kneel and plant and weed, hanging loose, soft and wrinkled as tissue paper.

I am young, in this place. Firm-fleshed. Straight-backed. Conspicuous, as I perform the same motions, the ritual genuflection of weeding, a novitiate of grief among the practiced sisters, carrying my offering of your dirty plastic toy truck to the fountain, where I plunge it into the water, and scrub.

THE GIST: Margaret Pritchard Houston is a London-based writer and educator - work has appeared in Interrobang, On Earth As It Is, The Mom Egg, The Monarch Review, and elsewhere. Her verse play based on the life of Alexander the Great received four-star reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe. Fraternite, her novel was serialised by Pigeonhole in 2015. As part of her work for the Church of England, she has written for The Church Times and Youth and Childrenswork magazine. She has a non-fiction book out with SPCK and another forthcoming with Church House Publishing in 2020.

75 Fiona Sinclair

Second Wind

Retiring at 65, you get a second wind. Your mornings are tinkering. Your afternoons are feet up watching classic 90s TV. At Aintree, your black Crombie with a flash of red shirt, draws You look cool man tributes from booted and suited lads; and your trade mark hair, splendid as a crest, has older men, smoothing bald-pates and sighing Nice cut mate.

At 59, I am winded by five months repeating revision litany to private pupils at vespers hour; bingeing in the car on Snickers for sugar spike to keep my eyes open; carrying my weight gain with the shame of a 1950s unmarried mother. At the Grand National, all I can throw together is beige shift dress, dun coat, grey hat, a pheasant hen’s dowdy plumage.

Whilst you glide on the current of such compliments, I flap behind, trying with wing-clipped confidence, to keep up with you.

THE GIST: Fiona Sinclair's second full collection Time Traveller's picnic was published in March 2019. She is the editor of the on line poetry magazine From The Edge.

76 Sue Morgan

Happiness We never gave much thought; (after Carver) that it could simply vanish like sand through open fingers. We write often of it now. Nature and substance, *** its longevity, or otherwise. Unhappiness

Pulling pieces from the Times You don’t normally write about this and internet, speeches by the Dalai Lama, but you remember it anyway. latest reckonings from neuroscience. How when you were twelve you looked after a friend’s dog And still we know nothing except and it ran into the mealie field somewhere there’s the smile of a child across the ditch to where the sheep and his distant antics, were kept as they waited to lamb. The farmer saw the dog running or memories of days took aim and shot it right there. when walks along cliff tops You tried to collect the carcass but were still possible, it was too heavy for those puny/too slight arms. And then you had to tell the friend the sound of goat bells on the wind how the pet that kept her warm your hand in mine at night, who listened to her as I smooth creases from your palm. in the dark, wasn’t coming back.

THE GIST: Sue Morgan lives in the north of Ireland. In 2013 she was awarded the Venture Poetry Prize and in subsequent years she had work shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and was runner up in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Her work can be found in magazines such as Abridged, Crannog and Southward. Her third Pamphlet, A Quickening Star is due soon.

77 Dominic Fisher - Fast Food

A pear is one green gold weight two owls side by side next four slick white boats or incomplete lutes Then it’s one wet plate pips, stalk, the wet knife and slack strings of fruit

Porridge Made with milk scooped into bowls like blue half worlds A sea of cream encircles a soft brown sugar island The terrible power of a spoon

THE GIST: Dominic Fisher has been published in a wide variety of magazines in the UK, Ireland, and elsewhere. The winner of the International Bristol Poetry Prize 2018, his debut collection The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Dead was published by The Blue Nib in March 2019.

78 Susan Castillo Street

APOCALYPSE PALMA

The day the world ends The sun pours down like honey, I get up early, go downstairs, flows off golden walls while swear at cats, stroke cats. people eddy. From a window, I put on a jacket, walk down to the gate, guitar chords ripple, cascade. pick up the papers. I read about the disasters politicians have inflicted on us, tut over celebrity misbehavior, In the square, an olive tree check email, eat breakfast, drink many cups stands solid, flamenco dancer of coffee. I make a list for the supermarket, of a certain age. Her bark swirls. walk out to the car, put the key in the ignition, Her traje de volantes spirals in the wind. look up at the sky, note that it’s turned a weird dark sepia shade. And then I No fragile sapling, but solid, weathered, infinitely lovely. Wind shimmers in silver leaf hair. Olives rain down, castanets clattering on stones.

THE GIST: Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita, King’s College London. She has published three collections of poems, The Candlewoman's Trade (2003), Abiding Chemistry, (2015), The Gun-Runner’s Daughter, (2018) and a pamphlet, Constellations ( 2016). Her poem ‘Bird of God’ won first place in the 2018 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition.

79 Caoimhe McKeogh

IT IS NOT THE TELEPHONE it’s five to ten minutes since you last heard her speak surely only seconds until you hear her again it is not the telephone but the beeping fills your head it is the stove and you wonder with its timer beeping in that never-ending way whether there’s something wrong with you most importantly it is your wife standing limply unaware or maybe the affliction affects everyone that anything is breaking the silence the way a smell will bring back of this cold day’s middle-age all the emotions of a forgotten memory but memory can never quite bring back a smell for some reason it occurs to you that you can’t remember the sound of her voice it seems impossible that you could ever forget – when you imagine her talking this incessant beeping it sounds the same as all the other or your wife’s eerie mid-June stillness talking in your head but soon new moments will pile on top of this one and perhaps one day you will smell scones this is no emergency cut in half, just beginning to burn and you’ll feel suddenly cold and alone.

80 SUMMER SESTINA And after a while, she starts spinning slowly. The cat can no longer circle her ankle, but never stops The telephone is ringing and the woman is turning, they’re spinning together crying, underneath half of the washing the sounds refusing to mix together and a sky that seems to say, “No more crying as she holds the phone in her hand until it ‘til Autumn comes, and I get cloudy too.” stops. When the ringing is over, the woman goes silent too, The woman remembers that the planet is then breathes in deeply, breathes out slowly, turning too – and starts to hang up the washing. so slowly that this piece of sky had time to notice her There are not enough pegs for all this washing crying. and around her ankle the kitten is crying It’s a spinning that never stops out for attention, circling slowly even if you haven’t done all of your washing, so his nose and his tail come together even if you and a kitten are spinning together, at her heel. His eyes look wet too – she notices this and stops. dancing together, crying together. The washing on the line is dancing too. She’s not sure why she stops, She watches as the washing maybe it’s because there aren’t enough pegs for slowly the washing, stops or because she wonders whether the kitten is crying. sad too. She stands still – not pegging, not crying, not stroking the cat whose tail and nose are still They finish dancing together. The sun is together slowly at the ankle he’s circling slowly. setting because the planet’s turning too. The cat stops and the woman stops. The washing is still. Nobody is crying.

81 RUN(A)WAY

where aeroplanes sit heavy on the ground heavy is a sound a clumsy sound a heaving a heavy heaving into the clouds clumsy nose heavy pushing through instead of going around through the cloud through the blue through the sky still heavy above everything

heavy nose down down toward the ground the whine the wheels the wings don’t flap they have flaps that open wide the wheels come out they whine down the aeroplane pushes down heavy to the runway

THE GIST: Caoimhe McKeogh lives in Wellington, New Zealand and works as a Graduate Policy Analyst. Caoimhe has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Victoria University's IIML. Her poetry and prose has been widely published in Australian and New Zealand journals, including Landfall, Overland, Turbine, Starling, Cordite, Meniscus, and Mimicry. She is a member of Headland Journal’s editorial panel.

82 Reviews Curated By Emma Lee

Reviews Editorial

Does a poem’s medium matter? It is better to read a poem from a page or listen to it from stage or a podcast? It is less of a poem because it’s presented as lyrics in a song or printed on or alongside an image online? Arguably, a poem that can stand alone from its extras – the music accompanying a song, the image or a brilliant reading – is still a poem. But a piece of work reliant and inseparable from its performance, its accompanying image or music, has failed.

The reviews in this issue are of writing very much concerned with craft. Anne Casey is both a lyricist and poet. “out of emptied cups” (Salmon Poetry) has a broad eye, looking at contemporary concerns with #MeToo and the climate crisis on its radar, and explores what it means to leave a birth country to settle in another country and the resulting limbo of being not entirely at home in a new country but not belonging to the country of one’s birth either.

James Fountain finds Ruth Stacey’s “How to Wear Grunge” (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) connected with echoes linking the poems narrated by a tragic anti-heroine but nonetheless enticing and playful with forms to examine a cracked world through inquiring observation. “How to Wear Grunge” was runner-up in the 2019 Saboteur Award for Best pamphlet.

Susmita Bhattacharya’s “Table Manners and other stories” (Dahlia Publishing) won the 2019 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection. The stories’ main theme is of home, particularly making a new home in a new country, and the nurturing, comforting power of food. Although the main setting appears to be domestic on the surface, the stories journey from Wales to India and elsewhere. Food becomes a substitute for language in the title story where an English widower, who doesn’t speak Chinese, joins a Chinese immigrant, who doesn’t speak English, for a meal; communication is shared through food and manners.

Richard Lance Keeble looks at Raymond Antrobus’s Ted Hughes Prize-winning “Perseverance” which dares to use one of Ted Hughes’ poems as an erasure. Within it, Antrobus explores the D/deaf world, compounded by racial discrimination and some tender, lyrical poems about his father. His poems also convincingly take on the voices of others.

In addition there are reviews on The Blue Nib’s website ranging from debut collections from new UK poetry press, Yaffle, Penny Sharman’s “Fair Ground”, a second collection from a nonagenarian, Valerie Lynch’s “In a Time of Rabbits”, Chrissie Gittins’ “Sharp Hills” with poems inspired by her father’s photographs from India, Kevin Higgins’ “Sex and Death in Merlin Park Hospital” which manages to be upbeat about serious illness, Diane Simmons flash fiction exploration of the effects of grief on a family in “Finding My Way”, humour in Ali Whitelock’s “my heart is a crumpled coke can”, a crafted journey from the West of Ireland to the UK and other travels through arts in David Cooke’s “Reel to Reel”, an experiment to prove writers’ block doesn’t exist in Alan Corkish’s “a- BIRTH-a-DAY”, and intergenerational influences in Esther Morgan’s “The Wound Register” amongst others.

83 out of emptied cups - Anne Casey

Emma Lee reviews Anne Casey's out of emptied cups. As well as her position of Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib. Emma Lee writes regular reviews for The Journal, The High Window Journal, London Grip and Sabotage and ad hoc reviews for other publications. Her collection “Ghosts in the Desert” is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing. A pamphlet “Mimicking a Snowdrop” was published by Thynks Press in 2014 and her full-length collection, “Yellow Torchlight and the Blues” has been published by Original Plus.

(Salmon Poetry) ISBN 9781912561742, 10pp, €12

“Anne Casey’s out of emptied cups” has a broad sweep ranging from personal relationships, #MeToo, climate change and leaving a home country to make home in a new country giving rise to that awkward limbo of not quite belonging to either. It starts with the personal, “if i were to tell you” ends

“when i smell your neck to fall again over the handrail of our romantic balcony landing in the toy-scattered couch of our reality that is where when i tumble on a crumpled butterfly ensnared once more by that man-boy-man who tore my wings 84 (never mind i put them back together in time) on dark days you can still see scars but on bright ones that is where

i would tell you that is where the light shines through the strongest.”

Finding those small moments where love is found; love for a partner and love between a mother and son where reality intrudes on the romantic. Although romance is allowed in “nothing happens in the burbs” where “we lay in bed talking about nothing” but get up to get cider, “making an occasion out of nothing” and returning to bed unhurried because “we had nothing on// and there is nothing, absolutely nothing/ i would change.”

The mood changes in a group of poems about sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse. “final offensive” is direct, complete poem below:

“the nuclear weapon of the sexual predator no-one will believe you.”

“If wallets were skirts” substitutes the disbelief sexual assault complainants meet into questions given to a man reporting a stolen wallet. The man’s reaction is left for readers to imagine.

A tender note, “Dear son”, explores the difficulty of bringing up a son to respect women to counter an environment of toxic masculinity. The poem starts,

85 “It’s not about the trail of breadcrumbs across the floor that I just vacuumed and washed”

and ends

“It is about being the kind of man who makes your Mama want to weep with pride.”

Anne Casey moved from Ireland to Australia, and reflects on being no longer at home in Ireland but not quiet accepted in her new home, “‘You’re not from here?’ [*politely]” ends, i am: not from-here, no – longer: of there where i come from has disappeared risen into the mists that visit the places that where i come from had been and where i came to yet remain herein halfbeen halfbeing

i coexist: in the nowhere between.

The fragmented layout reflects the fragmented sense of what home means.

“Thank you for shopping with us” is a till receipt for 250g beef steaks that cost,

86 “15.455 litres of water 26 kilograms of carbon dioxide 330 square metres of land 6.5 kilograms of grain

Sundry other costs

Deforestation (weekend special) rainforest going at 1-2 acres per second

Greenhouse gas emissions & global warming…”

It’s intended to make readers think about the costs of seemingly every day items. There are also poems about the war Syria, “Lament for Aleppo” and “Category Four” is about hurricane Irma.

The final poem, “All Souls”, gives the collection its title looking at the healing power of nature

“A kookaburra laughing carries me home through the clearing where the wattles are bursting their golden crowns dancing against a brooding backdrop and rainbow lorikeets will swoop in later lifting our hearts out of emptied cups away with them into the heavens.”

Anne Casey’s poems often pull in two directions: their delicate construction often contrasts with the 87 subject. They don’t shy away from tackling harsh realities yet still retain a sensitivity towards trauma. These poems don’t preach but record and describe showing tenderness towards victims and are persuasive towards readers. Anne Casey uses form to support meaning: poems fragment when victims’ stories are often punctuated by gaps, by struggles to find the right words or, in the case of child victims, struggles to find understanding of what’s happened to them and what was done by someone they should be able to trust. “out of emptied cups” shows a strong awareness of craft and rhythm which makes these poems linger in memory long after reading.

Emma Lee

88 How to Wear Grunge - Ruth Stacy

Ruth Stacy's How to Wear Grunge is reviewed by James Fountain. James is a regular contributor to The Blue Nib. He was Born 1979 in Hartlepool, UK, his published works include — Glaciation (Poetry International, 2010) and The Last Stop (original plus, 2018, Runner-Up at Ilkley Literature Festival Pamphlet Competition 2018. James has had individual poems published in The Journal, The Recusant. Dream Catcher and others. He is based in Leeds as a teacher and freelance journalist.

Ruth Stacey’s How to Wear Grunge (Merseyside: Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018)

The speaker in Ruth Stacy’s How to Wear Grunge (2018) is a struggling female poet who is heavy, hung-over and coming down. The poems have an intensity driven by the speaker’s emotional problems and alcoholic fixation upon a world made dreary through substance and alcohol dependence.

‘Her Name’, a prose-poem/character outline which reads like an exaggeratedly eccentric Tinder description, ends with world-weary, foot-dragging advice for any pursuers of this kind of dating app: ‘Was any of that true? (Be cynical, doubt the stories.)’ Without wishing to simplify the collection, this could be its mantra. The key word is ‘doubt’. The persona is a deeply regretful female, bemoaning the wasted time, money, relationships – which have all gone into the blender for the sake of another cocktail or drug-fuelled evening.

The book is connected by echoes. ‘Be Cynical, Doubt the Stories’ is the title of the third poem along from ‘Her Name’. This gives the sense of repeated mistakes, of a pattern which the persona 89 perceives emerging from the carnage of her free time, in which she is not free.

It is no surprise that this volume was shortlisted for the recent Saboteur Poetry Prize. Cunning and daring are on obvious display, two crucial qualities a poet must have to reach a reader. The dedication is morbid: ‘In Memoriam to….(blank for you to fill in)’ – which fits the material. The persona is by turns outrageous, lethargic and self-loathing.

Stacy experiments with form in an attempt to portray this – sometimes writing in stilted free verse, interspersed with prose poems which often take the form of sorrowful, drunken rambles. Here, internal narrative is characterised by a use of italics, allowing inner truth to surface, such as the final line of ‘Don’t Pry’: ‘I want to know something new, something fresh.’

Yet the collection is uneven. Occasionally, Stacey’s message is heavy-handed, as in ‘Fresh Meat’, where the ‘show but not tell’ rule, vital to poetic authenticity, is discarded. The ranting nature of some of these pieces detracts from an otherwise ingenious conception. Edgar Allan Poe’s famous words: ‘music, combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry’ – is absent in ‘Lecture to Myself’ as it is a lecture: a rant. Those on the receiving seldom find the experience pleasurable: a thing of beauty is a joy…etc. Keats knew the power of an unrequited thing & you could say this is second-hand electric love yes, you fall in love with people

Although this collection is a portrayal of a tragic anti-heroine, at times we feel as though our noses are being rubbed in the decay. Not enough is made of the romantic macabre and the lure of the darkness enveloping her. What remains is unipolar darkness, with beauty sacrificed. But this poem ends with the most devastating lines of the collection: truth she reminds you/me of a period of time hippy wall hangings & live bands smokes, pills, music when nothing/everything hurt drinking morning red wine into limb-splayed openness wanting to screw her, him, them, everyone dressing her up twisting her cut-out paper doll compress me again 90

This is when Stacey’s poetry is at its most powerful – showing us the ‘cut-out/paper doll’ figure, the ‘morning red wine’ having hollowed out her personality to the point where it is throw-away. ‘Not that, not Vague, a Real Quote, a Real Story’ is also enticing, since it sees Stacey revert back to a concentration on showing the reader the persona’s world: ‘She had a habit of flashing her small tits at anyone […] just to see the flash of surprise in their eyes.’ This use of internal rhyme reinforces the speaker’s commitment to self-degradation and destruction.

With ‘Royalty’, a Rimbaud translation ending with drunken commentary from the speaker, we return to the heavy-handed, the self-pitying. Stacey’s writing is strongest is when the speaker is less self-conscious, the writing is not so stilted, as in the cleverly-titled ‘It’s When the Punctuation Goes, You Know You’re High’:

&words/words are my everything &these can’t be genuine: who would write that? just to melt my mind/*

The experimentation with punctuation and metaphor is a welcome return to invention, though immediately followed by poems lacking this: the title poem begins ‘with big inside pockets for wine’. ‘Give Me Another List’ consists of eight random words the persona has fixated upon.

‘Describe a Picture No-one Else Has Seen’ is another return to form: ‘her slim/arm held up as if celebrating. Scars.’ Showing, not telling. ‘The Worst Thing’ – included in the #MeToo anthology – is Stacy at her best, the tragic entrapment of a young rape victim who: ‘is lonely but dare not wake him up.’

This collection is strongest when the poet uses lighter brush strokes. There are two voices at work, that of the intoxicated persona, and the persona en route to intoxication. The intoxicated passages contain spent, overused phrases. Though this mirrors the persona, we want to access her world and mind. The most powerful of these poems examine the cracked world through her inquiring eyes, rather than preach of her error.

James Fountain

91 Table Manners - Susmita Bhattacharya

Susmita Bhattacharya Table Manners

Available from the publisher Dahlia Publishing £10.00 ISBN 9780995634466

These stories are rich in detail and nuance. Distilling their plots only gives a vague idea of the journeys readers take. They show that, despite varied locations, there are universal aspects to the human condition and a wry humour surfaces, lending each story a poignancy.

Each story is about far more than its basic plots. Some of those plots can be summarised. In India a housekeeper observes two marriages, condemning one but failing to see abuse in the second. In Singapore, a wife’s me-time is interrupted by her husband asking her to attend a business dinner and she finds a way to restore the equilibrium. A parrot mimics a late husband’s voice. A second wife in Cardiff learns to tend her garden. A husband in Wales writes letters to the wife he plans to bring to the UK against the background of the London bombings in 2005. An Indian widow fantasises about the newly-wed husband in a neighbouring house to the extent of sympathising with him when his wife fails to buy rum or gets the wrong mixer drink. A grandmother grieves a lost baby when her granddaughter faces a decision about an unintended pregnancy. A young Indian woman scratches

92 her and her love’s initials on a tile in the Taj Mahal, however, when her parents refuse permission to marry, she stays in India and he moves to England not long before the Brexit referendum. An Indian man takes his British wife and daughter to meet his parents and extended family. A couple with a baby, used to home comforts, try a camping holiday. A daughter deals with the effects of a sibling’s cot death on their parents. A girl finds an astonishing secret hidden in her late grandmother’s gloves which were found tucked under bedding.

In the title story, a British widower reduced to microwaved meals wolfed down in seconds find himself invited to a meal with a Chinese grandmother who does not speak English. She invites him after he attempts to rescue the family’s cat. Both talk, through habit, but understanding comes from the use of food to heal and nourish and the small transactions of giving and receiving food.

The characters feel fully rounded and dialogue throughout feels natural. Dialogue isn’t the only means of communication between characters and to readers. Readers are invited to engage with each story, consider the situation and actions of characters. Themes and issues are explored organically through the story and don’t feel like plot devices or a trick to provoke a specific response in the reader. Story details guide and build images for the reader to complete. The craft in shaping and creating believable worlds and situations is worn lightly. Serious issues of grief, loss, poverty or injustice are lightened by a dry humour so the reader doesn’t feel the situation is beyond rescue.

A motif throughout the stories is the concept of home and family. Some characters remain at home, others move countries, others have mixed race heritage; all have to consider what sustains and nurtures them. Some families allow members to choose their partners while others face arranged, but not forced, marriages. Neither approach is favoured and there are some long term loves amongst the unhappy and abused. The success in “Table Manners” is Susmita Bhattacharya’s compassion in humanising characters, whatever their nationality or religion, and poignantly crafted stories.

Emma Lee

93 The Perseverance - Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus, The Perseverance reviewed by Richard Lance Keeble for The Blue Nib. Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln and Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University. He has written and edited 40 books on a wide range of media-related subjects. The chair of the Orwell Society, he is the joint editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and George Orwell Studies. In 2011, he gained a National Teaching Fellowship, the highest award for teachers in Higher Education in the UK and in 2014 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Journalism Education. In 2020, Routledge are to publish a collection of his essays under the title, Journalism Beyond Orwell.

Raymond Antrobus The Perseverance

Available from the Publisher Penned in The Margins

In this remarkable debut collection, the recent winner of the prestigious Ted Hughes Prize, Raymond Antrobus, actually dares to ‘silence’ Hughes’ poem ‘Deaf School’ in quite a shocking way. Over two pages, he simply erases it with 34 thick black lines – and then comes his own poem (of just 17 lines) titled ‘After Reading “Deaf School” by the Mississippi River’. Here, Antrobus cleverly appropriates some of Hughes’ demeaning phrases (such as ‘lacks a dimension’, ‘removed from the vibration of air’), critiques ‘Ted’ (who ‘lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound/and responses to Sound’) and goes on to celebrate Black history (‘Mississippi means Big River, named

94 by French colonisers./The natives laughed at their arrogant maps,/conquering wind and marking mist.)

Throughout this collection, Antrobus draws from his experiences as a 33-year-old British Jamaican deaf spoken-word poet in compelling ways – capturing the rhythms and spirit of so many different voices. In ‘Aunt Beryl Meets Castro’, he plays with the sounds of Jamaican argot (‘listen listen, you know I/met Castro in Jamaica in/’77 mi work with/government under/Manley yessir you’); in ‘My Mother Remembers’ there’s raw, conversational vernacular (‘serving Robert, cheeky bugger/tried to haggle my prices down./I didn’t care about velvet nothing.); in the poem that gives the collection its title, the mood is sadly nostalgic (‘There is no such thing as too much laughter/my father says, drinking in THE PERSEVERANCE/until everything disappears) or in ‘To Sweeten Bitter’, there’s the rural and strangely urban lyrical (‘past the flaked white wall/of plantation houses/past canefield and coconut trees/past the new crystal sugar factories).

The soundworld of the deaf person is explored deftly. In ‘Echo’, ‘Gaudi believed in holy sound/and built a cathedral to contain it’. Yet Antrobus responds with this celebration: ‘Even though I have not heard/the golden decibel of angels,/I have been living in a noiseless/place where the doorbell is pulsating/light and I am able to answer.’ In ‘What Samantha Said’ he writes bluntly: ‘I know the deaf are not lost/but they are certainly abandoned.’ And in ‘Miami Airport’, he imagines the sharp, staccato, aggressive questions of a customs official: ‘you don’t look deaf?/can you prove it? … how much dope will I find in your bag?/why isn’t there dope in your bag?’

Elsewhere, Antrobus faces up to the double discrimination he has suffered – as both a British Jamaican and deaf person. For instance, in ‘After Being Called a Fucking Foreigner in London Fields’, he writes: ‘I keep my father’s words, violence/is always a failure, so I don’t/swing into the man’s pale/bag-face when he throws/his arms up to fight me.’ In contrast, there is anger in the profoundly personal ‘Dear Hearing World’ where he returns to the discrimination faced at school before his diagnosis: ‘You taught me I was inferior to standard English expression … It took years to talk with a straight spine/and mute red marks on the coursework you assigned.’

Some of the most moving, tender, lyrical and revelatory poems are about his father. In ‘Happy Birthday Moon’, he remembers his childhood: ‘Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page./Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space./He makes the moon say something new every night/to his deaf son who slurs his speech.’ He even dares to write with 95 surprising intimacy and openness about his father’s penis. ‘Thinking of Dad’s Dick’ opens on: ‘The way it slipped out his trousers/like a horse’s tongue, the way he’d shake it/after pissing, how wide/ and long it was.’

At the end, a series of notes illuminates the background to the poems – or directs us to other information sources to expand our appreciation of them. For instance, on ‘Echo’, we are told there is an essay about it on poetryfoundation.org; parts of ‘Dear Hearing World’ are ‘riffs and remixes’ of lines from Dear White America by Danez Smith (Chatto/Greywolf, 2012). In ‘Dementia’, he writes: ‘When his sleeping face/was a scrunched tissue,/wet with babbling’ and explains in the notes: ‘I cared for my father for two years while he was dying. Seriously, big up the carers of the world. Thanks also to the NHS nurses and to Halima; I couldn’t have pushed through without you.’

There is even a ‘Further Reading’ section right at the end – including When The Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf, by Harlan Lane (1994). Indeed, one of the most wonderful and original aspects of this collection is the way in which Antrobus invites us to explore both his poems – and his world beyond the poems.

Richard Lance Keeble

96 Poetry From The US & Canada Selected By Mike Griffith

Editorial

The reading period for issue 39 began on 6/16 and ended on 8/1. In that seven weeks I received no less than 250 poems to read and consider with care. Themes dealing with aspects of life and death, love, nature, weather, geography, cars, travel, philosophical and political issues, Trump, immigration, faith, and sex were in the submissions I read.

Some poems were virtually repeats of poems I read for consideration in issue 38, in other editorial capacities I’ve held in the past, and in the writing of my students. The jaded eye sees such repetition as proof that there are no new ideas. The more balanced eye sees such repetition as timeless ideas shining on the vast beach that is a writer’s imagination.

Whereas I could not pick a poem for issue 39 that was like one I’d picked for issue 38, I can feel secure that poems I was not able to accept will either find homes in other publications and on other websites or, at the very least, serve as stepping stones to lead to continued growth for the poet.

I am excited that issue 39 features a group of sonnets, as form-based poetry doesn’t draw much attention circa 2019. I am also happy that we are featuring a mix of new and emerging talent with poems from seasoned educators and multi-book authors.

Plans are already underway for issue 40 and, before long, The Blue Nib will be at work on projects for 2020 and beyond.

Creative growth is always exciting. I am gladdened by the growth I see in writers who submit their work to us.

Mike Griffith Poetry Editor, USA & Canada

97 Featured Poet -Samn Stockwell

She was blonde I could never scream it wouldn’t come back out – broke like that, yawning, numb. I walked with her on the lawn I was a poor handmaiden of the campus because to madness, familiar but ahe said she needed to scream. not encouraging. You know how you see a mistaken assumption You remember how Canal Street feels stroking its broken heart? like the backstage for an idea of a city? The ambulance arrived for her dizzy Forbidden: only the creators wander here, head, one screaming, one shrieking. not the creations in spandex and jokes stuttering under streetlights.

Bolton Flats

I was skiing across the fields outside the condominiums, the dogs run like new arrivals in heaven though it’s every day we’re here.

I watched a small car deliver a brown bag of rolls, the baker with his imagination trapped in the present while his future is read constantly by salesmen – it’s crowded.

I was thinking of you, how your hands shake.

98 Nothing by Mouth

She tapped the tracheal plug into his neck and spooned cold spaghetti into his empty mouth. He choked, spaghetti and plug scattering. He was almost 3 with a wheelchair so armored it didn’t fit in the hall of their trailer. Head strap, neck brace, trunk vest – all the way down.

Each time he was resuscitated some other part of him left – accretion of tubes, decretion of sensibility. Deaf, blind, then no response to touch – did something hurt?

It was like holding a large starfish draped over your arms.

99 Posthumous

Finch’s Bar Here is where the dog sat and does this is the glass dog spooned his beer from and does this is where Jack spanned his tedious trade and sank his dry creaking voice into his gamy shirt scraping until not a fingernail was left.

Pine Tree Under the branches of the pine the dog steps in his pee, his feet scratched by ice. The branches are twined in white sifting on him. Whenever a bird stretches a wing through gray we think straining but maybe cradling.

Ohio I had driven through Columbus, icicles hanging off the nose of the city, and I was coughing, a medieval ticking sound, a cart on cobblestones, and the dog sick, piled against the window, the fluff of a long journey, the closed car smell of last week?

Perhaps I can answer this question correctly as though I was moored for this life in Ohio, an iron belt around my neck, and only able to reach the dog with one hand.

100 Breakfast

We were in the cafeteria of the hospital picking granola and dried fruit out of small bins and we were not hoping as we clumped the silverware on a plastic tray, squiring the tray along the rails, my phone quavering. We were watching TV on the wall – not ironically, as though we were saturated by snags of news – not like that, but as though we were escaping to a war zone, armed.

THE GIST: Samn Stockwell has published in Agni, Ploughshares, and the New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Poetry Series (USA) and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in Poet-Lore, The Literary Review, and forthcoming in Gargoyle, Plume, and others.

101 Featured Poet -Liz Balize

Jazz Virgin

Susan, with her china-white skin stutter-hush over cymbal and the snare relaxed Crackling over scratches down to lace bra and panties— We are barely there “Have you ever heard this?” she asks Susan exhales … sets the album, drops the needle fog, to a frail moon in the groove Only her sultry voice still holds me tethered We wait till bass fills in the room sending time and silence empty-handed, down a hallway Have you ever heard anything— like this?”

Susan lights a joint Miles flows settles on the bed around me ample legs begging apart Smoking She sucks in deeply on the floor of Susan’s room impounding clouds lying clothed and drunk Head thrown back Soaked Thick glossy hair— with the chords and wonder loses gravity Eyes half-closed, shadow-heavy I never hear him coming clear and blue like piano The walls of muted trumpet Miles takes his time

102 Moon Metal

She rises above the bay tingling light of limbs so spread on her wake—on a Tenebrae of carbon to her lover! Then bolts back careening cross blue-black— Close him in— through her lucent clouds of hair a pewter path of trembling touches from which on radii spray a diaspora of stars that ends in the small of her back Mistress of Metallurgy tempered, tampering Men so wooed, still shudder Darkness forged to alloy with light “How anything so tender…?”

Men have always wondered… could expose such stone! how anything could be so round? She eclipses the sun! To arouse a sullen tide She commands the sky! her fingers palpate night-water’s lead …to hone his steel on that!

THE GIST: Liz Balize is a long-time resident of Scranton Pennsylvania who grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, spending several years in Lowell, MA and also Portland, Maine. Most of her working life has been devoted to human services and to teaching secondary English in public schools. He real love of poetry grew from a relationships with her high school English teacher, Mabel Moril and her Marywood College professor and mentor, Barbara Hoffman.

103 Daniel Edward Moore

Home in the Dirt of Light

Conversationally, L is a short season bloom.

Even the sun is saddened by her tongues quick strokes of color on thorns, the way her voice’s sabbatical screech stops you like the rest of her does, ear to the ground, deaf to the sky, the next leaf breaking through unannounced growing you like hunger does, a home in the dirt of light.

THE GIST: Daniel Edward Moore poems have been in Spoon River Poetry Review, Columbia Journal, Cream City Review, Western Humanities Review, and others. His chapbook "Boys," is forthcoming from Duck Lake Books in February 2020. His first book, 'Waxing the Dents,' was a finalist for the Brick Road Poetry Book Prize and will be released in April 2020. His work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. 104 Michael Lewis Beck

GRANDPA’S BIB OVERALLS

I poke in his pockets—bits of straw, a bandana— a Barlow to cut twine and salve in a tin to heal the milk cows’ teats. He washed his own long johns, ate at the Home Café, had a herd of ten Holsteins, used one-hole of a two-holer outhouse and belonged to the Evangelical United Brethren Church.

Sometimes when I wake at midnight I think I’ve turned into him and get up to go to the barn.

His bibs hang in the hall by the back stairs, ready but useless next to my tweeds. Sometimes I slip into them, put on muck boots and go dig up dirt in the back yard. What am I doing? I say to myself. The bibs say: Get your pencils, your pad, your banjo—

THE GIST: Michael Lewis Beck works and writes in Iowa City. He has pieces in Alexandria Quarterly, Apalachee Review, Big Windows Review, Cortland Review, Chariton Review, Guesthouse, Pure Slush, Pilgrimage, Rootstalk, Seminary Ridge Review, and others.

105 J.P. Mayer

EROS sitting in a window seat I hear ocean’s daughter across the café breaking me with her song her shhh to know Sigh the way the reeds bend to water first chord guitar strung with wheat low strums shhh just just my Sigh my my love for you second chord, third chord all askew find the key the key the key— just steam no key, my love floats

THE GIST: JP Mayer is an emerging writer and a current senior at Brown University, where he studies classics and literary arts. JP works as an editor for the Brown Classical Journal, a student- run publication based at Brown University, and he has also worked as a writing tutor for high school students. He is from Boston, Massachusetts.

106 Gary Glauber

Checkup

Remember these words, these images, these chaotic string theory times. Once disobedience called itself civil, and even dissent involved a certain decorum. Now anger is scattershot, a spray of bullets lacking scope or focus, and even Catullus would have been appalled. Chasms widen daily, fueled by rumbles of petty vindictive indifference, a poison disbursed at will by cornered breed of heartless elite, pride without compassion, touting accomplishments unachieved, running wild and untethered at 6 and 11. Not even promise of compromise is kept, and progress undone trips up players entangled in their own promotion. Show me alleged brick road, lion. Instead I see yellow gulfs, runnels of divisive vitriol pooling in corners of captured video, bandaids for contusions to sound bite the hand that feeds the illusion. Count backwards from twenty and rest assured, reflexes still work. Somehow on a scale of hope and determination, all is fine, couldn’t be better.

107 Battle

Each night the night loses. Orange fireball rising east, smug in pallid victory marching across sky, ghostly moon witness to quiet capitulation. New light’s hunger for renewed chances ravenous as waffle house special, eating to forget dreams already forgotten, dissipating into distance, sentiment hard as sediment steeling self against timeworn expectation to have the best day.

THE GIST: Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog alongside melodic rhythms of obscure power pop. His two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press), are available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly from the publishers. He is hard at work on his next collection.

108 Jade Riordan

FIELD GUIDE TO THE FUTURE DARKLY NOW

: one foot forward, antler velvet , in dew-soaked thoughts & dawn of callouses. Again, step forward, -spun patience, I silhouette the echo tree bark papering the tongue of yesterday against this tired sky. and prospective words like panning Nightly now, I practice the quiet guess for gold. O fogged apocalypse -work of disappointment, the slender exhale, fogged crystal ball breath. -poising of disappearance. Saintly now, O praise the habit of winter, the clouds’ flight of snow obscures of shiver and thaw. Praise the belief & un-stars the view. Blue again, I in changes to come. cauterize the horizon with the rising warmth of patience. I think myself a small forgotten … birth, a dream fastened only to the eyelids, a sunshot rain speaking over its own echo. Kindly, carefully, slowly, truly now, I practice joy: I silhouette the scarce-wakened loveliness of today against the wild hyacinth grow -th of this (tired, tender) self.

***The title of this poem and words in italics are

quotations from the poem “In Memory” by Robin Hyde

(1906-1939).

THE GIST: Jade Riordan is an Irish-Canadian poet, an undergraduate student, and a selection committee member (poetry reader) with Bywords. Her poetry has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2; Cordite Poetry Review; The Malahat Review; Yes, Poetry; and elsewhere.

109 Cheryl Caesar

Amphibian

Post-MS, my legs are clumsy, half-numb. Dumb to earth’s unevenness, I stumble to the shore. Half-in the water is hardest. Currents pull, seaweed sways, leads me this way and that. I trudge through unseen mud. But then the feet lift, turn to fins. My movements grow smooth. Cool fingers of water stroke my limbs. Now all is calm. Swallows swoop; dragonflies hover. I’m a slow-moving head, no threat. Fish pass oblivious. …………………………………………………… Coming out, my legs have forgotten to be legs. Thigh muscles cry weakness. I stay horizontal almost to the shore. When I stand, my knees tremble. Birds take flight. Bent over, I wait to regain my vertical life. And I wonder what the whales thought, returning to water. Abandoning legs, letting paws revert to fins. Did they weigh what they were losing? Irredentists, what was the call they heard that brought them home?

Author’s note on “irredentists”: For this metaphor I am indebted to John Noble Wilford, and his delightful New York

Times article, “How the Whale Lost Its Legs And Returned To the Sea” (May 3, 1994).

110 To my husband on his retirement Do you remember the Rotor, my dear? The Rotor at Cedar Point? Fifteen strangers in t-shirts and sneakers evenly spaced around the perimeter of that iron-grey Twilight Zone cylinder. Then it began to spin. The carny barking, obscure as a subway announcement. Accordion music. And we, stranded starfish, were flattened like the accordion bellows, and pulled into the wall’s greedy embrace. And then the floor dropped. We screamed, but had no choice but to trust the walls for floor, the centripetal force, gravity gone sideways. For the length of one carousel song, it was all we had. Changes are spinning you now, my starfish. Your work life has fallen away. Take my hand; trust to the walls that we have, the cat-feeding, lawn-mowing round. Wait out the muffled words and the song. A floor will rise to your feet, I promise: untried, untrodden, your own.

THE GIST: Cheryl Caesar teaches writing at Michigan State University. She gives frequent readings locally. Since January, she has published political protest poems in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Cream and Crimson, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk, The Stay Project What Rough Beast, and Nationalism, a Zimbabwean anthology; and other poetry in Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review and others.

111 William Joel

Sonnet for a gloomy day

What else could one brand a day like this than gloomy? Ever-present clouds hang low and gray, and filter all the warmth as if the sun did not exist. And even though the winds have not the force of weeks gone by, we still pull tightly on our coats to keep the damp at bay, yet not away, for try as we might try the chill still seems to seep into our bones, and then into our souls. All hope we thought we’d stored inside has fled to somewhere, fallen into massive holes much deeper than the ones we use for dead, who in their state of permanent repose avoid the worst that weather can dispose.

112 Sonnet for a morning glory

It’s not the sky, the blue you see when clouds have walked away, a blue of water, clean and clear. It’s not the blue of eyes, so proud, that stare into your soul, to see the mean- ing hidden there, for there’s no hiding from true love. And not the color of the sea, a darker blue, well mixed with green and foam and bits of sand. Nor could it ever be the blue of pain, a purple blue, that blush- es deep from wounds inflicted by our hands. This blue is something other, more a hush that whispers greetings from an earthen stand. Then just before the sun has set, it shifts magenta, curling tight, as daylight lifts.

THE GIST: William Joel believes all things are connected. That's the premise of what he does. Each of his interests informs each other. William Joel has been teaching computer science since 1983 and has been a writer even longer. His works have appeared in Aliens, Common Ground Review, DASH Literary Journal, and The Blend.

113 Alec Solomita

LUNCH POEM

Here’s kind of a weird thing. about the growing dearth (if dearth can I was reading a poem by Charles strictly Simic called “Boredom” speaking grow [of course it can]) in an older man’s A workshop instructor I had once not brain so much as sensibility or [why the italic? why that line break?] something else. said that Frank O’Hara didn’t revise. (Pretty sure that’s the common wisdom I don’t get bored anymore. (Start with that but I have my doubts. Might be wrong, says the instructor, get rid of all the self- and the last thing I want to do is look serving [why a hyphen? why this line it up.) So this poem of Simic’s made me break?] think about boredom. And it occurred shit that precedes it. Listen to the sentence! to me after a couple of eye-blinks, Christ! Simple, intriguing: I don’t get bored I’m not bored anymore. Ever. anymore.)

And that, my friend, is not brag, just fact. I don’t get bored anymore. Not at all brag, maybe some kind of I get everything else admission but not bored. I know that that’s significant to those who think things are significant (and I’m not saying things aren’t significant, some things don’t need saying)

THE GIST: Alec Solomita was shortlisted by the Bridgeport Prize and Southword Journal, and named a finalist by the Noctua Review. His poetry has appeared in Algebra of Owls, The Galway Review, Mocking Heart Review, Driftwood Press, Poetica, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. He lives in Massachusetts.

114 Karen Petersen

Ordinary Things

What’s in a house left behind but the tenacity of objects: a torn bedspread put away like an admonition, a post card from Paris behind the dresser, the dried beetle on the windowsill.

These things speak softly, not like the robin’s relentless warbling, leaves on a steep bank –a cascade of gold coins, or the gilt-winged dragonfly skittering across the clotted mud: the other side of a dusty window.

Past, present, future, in doing the mundane tasks of daily life we discover its deepest secrets. The wisteria cracked the door frame, and all I know of yearnings and the weight of the world comes in like sunlight through the glass.

THE GIST: Karen Petersen’s recent poems, flash, and short stories have been published in the Peacock Journal and KYSO in the USA, The Bosphorus Review in Istanbul, Antiphon in the UK, and A New Ulster in Northern Ireland.

115 Carolyn Martin

DEAR BILLY COLLINS If I told you I have four collections of my own, you would politely nod and act impressed – you with your fifteen, reams of awards, and videos on well-lit platforms where you never need to adjust the mic because its height is designed for you – as is the lectern and semi-comfortable chair where you sit with a practiced host who asks questions I’ve memorized the answers to.

That’s because I’ve tracked your You-Tube clips repeatedly for insights, inspirations or, if Truth nudges me hard enough, excuses to avoid Googling great cities of the world for images to upscale a mediocre poem that refuses to say where it wants to go.

You, on the other hand, never fail to disappoint – like the feral cat who strolls across the patio and swats the sliding door or the flicker who delights in my suet cake.

I count on certain things: that noncommittal pet, an orange feather lying in the grass, and your glasses that may – or not – stay on your nose while you read from The Rain in Portugal or from Sailing Alone Around a Room – a nautical activity, I’m not ashamed to admit, I practice when no one’s home.

116 TO MY ABOUT-TO-BE-EX THERAPIST

About our session this afternoon, I’m confused: you diagnosed my ergophobia with sadness in your voice. No offense, but after 40 years of Type-A overdrive, I’ve earned this new paradigm. Put this in your notes: I’ve replaced chronic threats of nothing-to-do with perfected laziness. My fear of boredom? Relieved by mindfulness. From my ergonomic chair, I spend hours tracing the texture of walls and studying slight tilts of Chinese serigraphs. I’m happy to report the woman side-saddling the panther’s back hasn’t slipped off yet and the lotus pond hasn’t flooded our family room. As for the cobwebs swaying behind the étagère? They haven’t ceased to captivate. Anyway, thanks for helping me define work as what I say it is. My business suits and black pumps are up for grabs at Goodwill; my office files free of contracts, flight plans, and syllabi. I’m noodling with a blog about the joys of nothing much. Maybe you’ll subscribe.

THE GIST: Carolyn Martin has journeyed from New Jersey to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout North America and the UK including “Stirring,” “Naugatuck River Review,” “CALYX,” “The Curlew,” and “Antiphon.” Her fourth collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, was released in February, 2019 by Unsolicited Press. She is currently the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.

117 Isobel Cunningham

SUMMER ON THE CANADIAN SHIELD

Broad rock beneath your house fragrant with hay, high pale grasses. the reclining body of a woman. In the shadows of a few oaks How many eons tiny blue butterflies flutter. of heat and pressure formed her raised veins? They tremble as I do when your hand Here and there tufts of wild grasses touches have taken root. my arm. Soft patches of moss, dark green jade On the white bed, in the room, cool for our and silvery grey lichen rest, sit as jewels on her skin. under your hand my body is shaped, formed to fit your palm, Grass around the house the tips of your fingers. yellow after many scorching days. Your face, eyes still closed, seeks my scent. Countless rustling birch leaves Sweat at my hairline, whisper a quick pulse where the coral bracelet clasps. with the hot breeze of afternoon. The sap of my body In the ditch sloping down from the farmer’s A delight under your tongue. field green grass and small blossoms thrive, safe in the moisture of a hidden spring. The silted, shadowy stream, silent, constant, in a parched world.

The quiet, undulating land stretches out to the far meadow,

118 MOUNTAINS OF SPAIN Folded paper, folded fabric undulating like a mantilla. Mountains of Andalusia, mountains of White villages cling to your barren breasts. Almeria. You recoiled when Africa crept close. You rose up when she nudged and nuzzled you into row upon row of dinosaur spines Cone peaks covered in winter now eroding into a thousand fingers wth green clumps of scrub bushes, that clutch at dried-up river beds. yellow broom and purple thyme. Whole slopes of winter almond blossoms Mountains of Andalusia, mountains of Almeria white or swooning pink. Sharp silhouettes cut out and pasted flat against your brilliant sky. Range upon range Or hazy in dust blown from the South snow-covered, tree-covered, brush-covered, over the storied sea, bare rock, crags. blown far from an African desert Limestone, volcanic black and brown, to soften your rocky geometry. sedimentary rock, dead coral. Calderas, ramblas, down down to sea pebbles. The silent car speeds through fifty million years of geology for a week at the beach.

THE GIST Isobel Cunningham lives in Montreal but spends summers in the Muskoka Lake District of Ontario. She writes short fiction and poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Rat's Ass Review, The Lake and Silver Birch Literary Review. Her stories have been published in Passager, Dime Show Review, Agnes and True and Montreal Writes.

119 George Franklin

Hiding

Under the bed is a good place. Outside In the bushes, it’s too hot, and there’re bugs.

Behind the coat rack in the closet it’s Cool and dark. The jackets smell of the dry

Cleaners. Often, the plastic covering Is still on. You can sit on the floor and

Listen to the noise the walls make, the fan On the air conditioner. But, the best

Part about hiding is the voices you Can barely hear, sometimes irritated,

Sometimes joking, sometimes you can’t tell which. From under the door, a crack of light makes

The plastic covers shiny. Children aren’t Supposed to pull them down over their heads,

But they make your face weird in the mirror. When do you think they’re going to find you?

THE GIST: George Franklin has two poetry collections: Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018) and a bilingual collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas, translated by Ximena Gómez (Katakana Editores).

120 Meghan Purvis

GOD DAMN THE GOD OF CLAWS

Bless all sharp things, the teeth, bless the child pulling legs off mayflies, bless the paper shreds she tries to tape back on bless the stubbed and unmoving body. Bless mandibles grown large and pointed, claws snipped off in the vet offices and left in bins, rank medical waste, bless the stubs gone red and weeping with rage. Bless the fire and the carbonised splinters it leaves, bless the flock of cockatoos shredding a girl's playhouse in Western Australia bite by bite bless their sharpened beaks. Bless the stretch of insides between the sting planted in flesh and the bee, bless that final death-flight, bless the hand and the gnat beneath it. Bless the mouth foaming at deathscap mushroom, bless fishbone and burr. Bless the glass shard and splinter, bless rack and ruin. For all this, we pray.

THE GIST: Meghan Purvis received an MA and PhD from the University of East Anglia, and an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2013 and won the 2011 Times Stephen Spender Prize for literary translation. Her poetry has appeared, among other places, in Magma, The Rialto, and The Interpreter's House. She is currently working on her first novel.

121 Bhodi Tims

In Search Of Blue

The first sound we made emanated from high rock walls – called the world into existence, perhaps a chance to give simple black and white ourselves over at the beginning. to ideas we’d never understand, names we had yet to hear. Swallows danced over the rain drenched cove, tracing Even as we stood where dark water flowed into uncertain of how columns of light. to name this thing, What had we longed to find time curved from that sky’s into gravitational bewildering presence? fields with the precision The redemptive of small atoms, power of yellow? found everything Or higher still, that lay just beyond our senses, the shamanic drift at threshold frequencies of hawk flight? approaching the speed of light Some larger hope and silence held blue gently against the pulsing sphere of earth.

THE GIST: Finishing Line Press published Bhodi Tim’s The Acoustic Properties of Ancient People. Recent poems appear in Syzygy Poetry Journal and the Broadkill Review. In 2019 he was invited to present a workshop at the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference, Mining the World of Science for Ideas and Language to Expand Your Poetry.

122 Guinotte Wise

The Last Horse

She made it through an awful winter suffers heat or cold or flies or fear Lay down to take the sun, lay down Amy joins Harley, Lopez, Mighty on Harley’s grave, a favorite graze Mouse on the south side of the trees

Hours later, she was still there so I where they all gathered to graze on walked to her and checked up on her windy days, protected by the pines she raised her head, lay it down again Jeremy brought his big tracked loader

Dusk was coming night falling fast and laid her gently in her portal to I tried to get her up with rope and the place she’ll never hunger, where halter but she was too weak and so pain is nonexistent and the grass is winter-spent, too damn tired to do truly greener than it ever was before more than chuff and roll her eyes Amy is the last horse and we wish her grunt once and sigh, I dialed the vet well, godspeed sweet and gentle girl. and by lantern-light he gave her rest to last all winters and join Harley once again in a place where nothing

THE GIST Guinotte Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in Resume Speed, Kansas. His short story collection (Night Train, Cold Beer) won publication by a university press and enough money to fix the soffits. Five more books since. A 5- time Pushcart nominee, his fiction and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals including Atticus, The MacGuffin, Southern Humanities Review, Rattle and The American Journal of Poetry. His wife has an honest job in the city and drives 100 miles a day to keep it.

123 P. C . Va n d a l l

PLATO AND THE PEPSI CHALLENGE

Plato frowns up at me from the pages of a dusty old textbook I’m reading. He looks the way one might think, chiselled nose, sculpted brows, marble eyes and no pupils. True to form, he scowls when I crack open a Pepsi. My soda hisses and snakes through the dialogue into the garden of Athens where I find Plato holding a can of Coke like an Olympic torch while proclaiming nothing beats the real thing. I find it difficult to swallow what fizzles up and falls flat on its face.

He thinks Pepsi’s are like poets, phony reflections of the divine perfection. Perhaps Plato should look in a mirror.

One could argue, he’s the carbon copy of another philosopher. Good old cottage cheese and heart disease pops to mind.

If Plato would step aside from the joke side of life he might see I’m not the waste of a new generation. I know. without a shadow of a doubt, he’d rise to the challenge and sip from the fountain. He’d gulp back a Pepsi and then proclaim:

What happens in the cave, stays in the cave.

124 Small Amnesias

I travel planets, through your hair the mathematics and folds of my flesh lamps of your six-sided heaven, the given night. Warm gestures the irretrievable beauties spread like tiger lilies of your smile embellishing and then leaps off the melting grass. itself in pure light. A blessing spirals

Such gifts have no relation hot and peeling and falling nowhere. to the human coldness bleeding Why bear such a cross, the world of forgetfulness. such cold pink petals? Surely, I will not lose my breath How they sit and flake and spot! in the white space of your eyes, Shall these dances the drenched smell of calla lilies sleep forever on the grass, touching themselves, entirely emptied these small amnesias, of ego. My lips fell like comets so black?

**“Small Amnesias” is a transposition poem of Plath’s, “The Night Dances.” A transposition poem keeps the same form and uses the same words as the original poem but subverts the order and meaning.

THE GIST: P.C. Vandall is the author of three collections of poetry: “Something from Nothing,” “Woodwinds” and “Matrimonial Cake.” She has books forthcoming from Oolichan Books and Porcupine’s Quill.

125 Carly Heider

Combustion

This Virginia heat is killing me. 90° and things begin to simmer. 91° and things get hazy. I stand screaming from the outside that your happiness is only a mirage. 92° and tempers start to rise with the temperature. 93° and red flags are glaring, yet you are still daring to drink the water, trying to stay cool. 94° and you keep opening the door to fan in conversation, close it when he comes around, close it when you don’t like the sound of sizzling truth. 95° and I strive to rescue you before you are burnt alive. 96° and you and I are both sick of this talk. 97° and this friendship starts melting. You cling to him while letting go of me. 98° and we reach a boiling point

126 as I watch the danger unfold through a piece of broken glass, but in there, it’s 99° and you insist that “it’s fine.” You sweat out your troubles together, while out here your troubles are making me sweat. 99.5° and I’ve seen this before, so I tell you again that as your friend I am burnt with worry, catching fire with concern, but you just ride the heat wave because you’d rather combust than catch a cold. 100° and this Virginia heat is killing me.

127 Roots

Every now and then, I flee this small town and drive the endless hours up north, 128 miles on long, lonely stretches of highways. I sing to myself for four hours, songs of sentimentality and homesickness, songs that make me feel less alone. I am greeted by potholes as I cross state lines, followed by a sign that reads “Pennsylvania welcomes you!” The farther north I go, the higher the gas prices climb. When they reach $3.09, I know I am not far from the place that built me. Nothing changes no matter how long I leave or how far I go. More businesses close, more try to take their place, but few ever make it for there are too many chains. Only a few remain, like Skis and Nicks, the dive bar up the street, where everyone either knows your name or if you are an outsider. Mom waits eagerly at the front door when I arrive like a puppy awaiting their companion’s return. She hugs me tight before I can even set my bags down, as though she wasn’t sure I would actually come home. There is no hug like a mother’s hug to make you feel safe in such a dangerous world. The streets around here are only safe in certain parts of town, dependant on time of day and skin color. Some are inviting and filled with culture and life, some you simply don’t walk down alone at night. My roots grew here,

128 in the industrialized soil watered by manufactured rain. They grew until they touched state lines and new rain came calling. A rain unstained by steel, a rain that did not reek of sulfur. Driving away feels like an escape. 128 miles south to a place where new seeds have been planted in a state for lovers, where the holes in the road disappear, where the smell of farms is always near, and the stench of cows is oddly comforting. Where strangers ask how you are, and instead of “yinz,” they say “y’all.” A place carved out in the Blue Ridge with mountains on each side. A place full of peace and color and a community that thrives. A place with old school roots but love for all people, homegrown or newly local. The southern wind came calling, and I answered, “I can call this home,” as new branches started to grow out from old roots.

THE GIST: Carly Heider's roots were first set in Pittsburgh, but have expanded to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where she is a middle school English teacher and an aspiring writer of poetry and prose that follow themes of love, heartbreak, hope, change, trauma, and healing. She says, 'Where my voice fails, my writing speaks'.

129 Short Fiction Selected By Seanín Hughes

Editorial

In this issue, four stories have been selected. Roisin Maguire’s ‘Cacophony’ grabs attention from the opening line ‘Everyone knows exactly where they were when the little girl died’ and the following cacophony of voices create the little girl’s story, showing how one death is not just a statistic but ripples out and touches many.

Kelli Allen’s ‘One hundred knots’ weaves ritual and tradition as a young woman is faced with decisions over a hidden pregnancy.

In Rachael Murphy’s ‘Ruler of the Roost’, a daughter was sidelined when her mother died giving birth to her brother who became the ‘Blessed Child’, doted on while his sister did all the chores including caring for the family’s hens. Now adult, she steals one just before her brother is due to visit.

David Butler’s ‘Zither Music’ takes readers on a tipsy tour of Dublin in that hour when the bar gets boring but it’s too early to go home and winds up at a party with Bosnian folk musicians where the narrator begins to sober and hope he’s not disgraced himself, but is he still in a certain woman’s good books?

130 Featured Author -Roisin Maguire

Cacophony

Everyone knows exactly where they were when the little girl died.

It was a momentary intake of breath, the news. An oh-my- god instant, and then the reassuring breath out and their own lives jerked back to them, arrhythmic but safe. Sweet Jesus, isn’t that awful. Tell me all about it.

Addy in the shop, sweeping up the remainder of the tiny candy balls which had bounced, crazy, around, and got in everywhere. She’d never get them out from under that crack in the counter. “Millions” they were called, and did he not have any wit, to open the pack like that, all rough, with his teeth? Sure he should‘ve known they’d go everywhere, millions of them indeed, and here she was on hands and knees like a drudge, hoking the bits up, when the hiss of the doors let in the hot- faced runner with the news. What? Where? Oh my god, really? Sure those Blaney girls were in this morning, no time ago, right enough, and the wee older one, what was it you called her? Chelsea? Yes, counting out the money so carefully. Took ages actually, I had to call Aveen from the back to let the queue away but God love her, she had only enough and no more. And the wee one, god almighty, pulling at her other hand trying to get free. A bit wild, that wee one, Emily I think, I had to speak to her oh, maybe a fortnight ago, running around like a crow on the loose, that hair all tatty, nearly knocked the Refreshers off the counter. And sweet Jesus. Dead? God that’s desperate. That’s one pound twenty for the water love, please.

Alice at her window with her aching bones, tutting at the dust in the top corner, where she couldn’t reach it… Sure where else would she be today, waiting on that postman… Sun pinking her face on one side… giving her eyes the creaks so she had to keep shifting to see the road… And it hurt like the goodness to move anywhere… flames in the hip- OH -when she shifted at all….Miracle she got herself dressed this morning and down the stairs, really… all alone like Lazarus or that other one in the Bible… and those bloody tights laddered when you looked at them…It’s as well no one was

131 coming to see her, the hole in them. OH- there he was, at last. That was sharp, shouldn’t have got up so fast… Could have set your watch by the last one, but this fella? Looks in a bit of a hurry all right…take your time… take your time, Mister… fair enough, but I want to get the letter in my hand, not all mixed with the special offers from the Mace…What d’you say? God save us! Dead!… Oh my god you know, I think she went right past here this morning… not an hour ago… yes, a wee girl ran on past here… and down that, that shortcut to the water… see where the bin is?… Oh yes… Cut right over there…in behind the fish factory…Oh yes… I do believe that was her, right enough… Sweet Mother of Mercy… Whatever next… Yes, skinny wee thing, should’ve been in school at that time of the day, I thought to myself… Oh aye, running away as happy as Larry, round the back there… I can’t believe it… They need to put some fences up, stop children getting in like that, sure it was only a matter of time…. The poor parents… God that’s desperate…Have you my letter there? Oh thanks now… It’s good to get it in my hands, you know, waiting for it all morning… No, you can keep the other stuff, I’ve told the other fella, I don’t want that junk.

Carrie in the staffroom, dallying over the kettle boiling so that break would be almost over before she got into the playground. Such a nice day but it was her time of the month and if Lacey Doyle came yapping to her one more time about those bitches in P4 she’d surely slap her. Mr Allinson’s looking pale, moving slowly, getting out of his car with another man and coming towards the outer door. She’d better ask him to get onto the social worker again about those Blaney kids, another no- show from Emily this morning, and after all those interventions too. The class smelt fresher without her, that was for sure, but that was not the point. And Stephen Miller should not have mentioned the fact. Smart little bollocks. “Miss Lennon, we’ve had some terrible news, some really dreadful news, actually. God. I can’t believe it. Put the kettle on will you, this is Sergeant Keene. I’m afraid it’s, well it’s really awful, actually. I don’t know how to tell you. It’s really terrible.”

Mary Allen, on the phone. Yes Jimmy, no Jimmy, three bags full Jimmy. Just sign the release will you, till we get things moving here. Forty tonne to get out, still sitting in the warehouse on the quay behind her, and indecisive dickheads up there frigging about instead of making decisions. A snatch of movement out of the corner of the eye, a blown rag of skirt and flash of white skin. Hey! You there! Bangbangbang, irate on the windowpane. Jimmy’s head under her knuckles. Get out of there you wee monkey! No don’t worry, Jimmy, just a wee girl sneaked through into the processing yard. No, yes, I did say to him and he was to get your man to call and price for a fence, 132 both kinds. But sure. Yes. No, she’s away again. Looked like a breath of wind would’ve blown her…who the hell is looking after these wee buggers, that’s what I want to know. Should be in school, not running about here tame. I know, I know! Sure that’s all it would take, I know. God, there she is again, the wee bitch, no, she’s out of ours and into the harbour. No, no, I better go, here, and give Peter a bell. She’s no size to be out on the quay on her own. And get those shitheads up there moving will you – please…

Annie Blaney in the girls’ bedroom, picking up socks, pacing, distracted out the window by the seabirds coasting. How would he ring her with no fucken phone. Jesus Christ. Of all the days for this to happen. He was definitely going to ring. Definitely. She had this one in the bag, definitely, and then that bad wee cow Emily went and dropped the phone again, probably on purpose, dropped it right on the fireplace and smashed the bloody screen so now touchscreen wouldn’t work, the light wouldn’t even go on. She was mental. Mental. God forgive her for saying that about one of her own. But. Someone was going to have to give them a hand with her, always screeching and crying, couldn’t even hold her long enough to get her washed, get a brush through her hair. That hair – state of it, God! Next thing will be, cut it all off. Mum would’ve cried to see the state of the grandchild running about all tats like that, always so proud of her own girls. And Chelsea so good, pity she was the picture of her da. Christ, it’s busy down at the harbour today. Jesus. Cars, people running, shouting, down there, crowd gathering, looking off the quay like they’ve dropped a fiver. Health and safety my arse. That fishery is mental. Siren now. Bit of excitement. Maybe take a walk down myself, see what’s up. Jesus, wish that phone wasn’t broke, I’d call Cathy to go down with me. Maybe that’s her now. Not like her to have come all the way up the hill though, fat bitch. Jesus, leave the doorbell on, will you.

Chelsea Blaney, sitting quiet at her desk, hating Barry Quinn. Hating him with all her bones. Aching with it but nothing to be done but glare. Called our Emily those names. Bastard. She was nearly at the gates, she nearly had Emily in the bloody school, till that Barry started. Where is she now, the wee rat? After the promise of the morning, feeding her sweets, coaxing her along like a bad puppy, one street, another, into Meadowlands, round the corner, nearly there. She hated school, wouldn’t go. Every day the same, yapping. It’s not actually that bad. Art’s the best. But that Barry Quinn. Hope his thing shrivels up and drops off. Look at his fat stupid face, can’t even keep his fat eyes straight, looking out into the corridor at somebody coming, nosey bugger. Hope Miss asks him something, the bastard. Now they’ll be round to mum again about Emily. Wee rat. She can bloody 133 look after herself this time, mum’s not fit for chasing her either. I don’t like it, myself, running around in the quiet day like that. Done it the one time. It’s scary. Weird. Rather be in school here. I shouldn’t‘ve left her maybe. She’s not right in the head, I think. Oh! Good morrrning, Mr Allinsonnn. Yes sir, now? Will I bring me bag?

Peter Kelly, hands cold, nose cold, feet cold, counting boxes in the freezer shed. No way is he making this one, there’s just too much to do and not enough of them to do it. The sun cuts sharp across the water and slices in through the shutter door but he hasn’t frigging time to step out in it, not even for a minute, to stretch, to warm nipped hands, ease the cramp. Would murder a cup of coffee. He keeps at it, clicking the clicker. Clickety-click. 400 dead. Something passes the doorway, flickering the sun a second, shadowing the day an instant. Bird. Clickety-click. He makes that 428. The fill of two trucks. Better get Jameson Haulage in as well. Nothing else for it. There goes the bloody margin. A screech. A bellowing. A woman’s voice wailing in over the clickety-click. Jesus Christ, WHAT? The clicker hits the floor as he swings round, sees big Mary Allen hanging out the window over the pier. Screaming and roaring and waving and pointing from under the top-hinged glass. What, for frig’s sake, what is it, woman? Where? The water? Christ.

Patrick Fitzpatrick, don’t laugh, the joke’s old, waiting for wheezing Elsie by the waters’ edge. Too fat to run, too old to want to, she waddles a little into the lacy curls and stands, pensive, looking out at god knows what, panting a little in the warm morning. The leash swings empty on his calf, no real need for it unless to hurry the old girl on a bit up the slope at the far end, stop her sniffing butts and generally making a nuisance out of herself. Fresh fish for lunch, brine and butter on bread. Yes indeed, sniffing the air like the dog, happy. One of the many benefits of living by the water, indeed, indeed. Mustn’t forget teabags on the way home. Elsie stiffens, barks shortly, lungs not up to much. What is it, old lady? A disturbance over by the fish factory. A huddle on the quay, agitated, crowding in, looking down. Nothing moving on the water, what are they looking at? Then a running figure, hollering up from the end of the quay, pulling off clothes, shouting, the rest backing off, covering mouths, eyes, distressed. A leap. No sound but a white splash, splodge, like in the comics. The water closing back, gone. The crowd bending low, urgent, strained. He’s trying to see, but there is nothing but that small crowd pressing, crying, their sharp whimpering noises carried over the water and flattening Elsie’s ears.

134

JP Finn, casting again into the grey oily wash of the harbour waters. No, you wouldn’t eat anything you pulled out of here, filthy spot, but sure there’s not much else to be at, and it’s good craic trying to pull a fish in, before the snap- mouthed seals snatch it off the line. The sun’s a friendly arm across his shoulders, the rope stack’s firm against his arse and things are grand for the moment. He’s got the one roll-up left but he’s keeping it for later, a thin ragged promise in his pocket. Big Pete gave him a wave when he ducked in under the barrier. Decent spud, lets him come and go. A sleek shiny head watches him casually from a little way out on the water. The nose is long like a dog’s, hiding sharp teeth and guile. A seal. I see you, you bastard, stop sniffling there. They eat the throwaway off the boats, fat as slugs but can move like the shite when they want to. Saw a thing once about them underwater, like dancers round the diver, nipping at his camera. All those fat and flippery bits sucked in and streamlined. It’s looking at something else behind me now. Oh, it’s ducked away, satin, under the water, gone. There’s a wee girl coming onto the quay, that’s why. Jesus, Peter’ll have a fit. Got something, a pack of sweets maybe, in her hand, picking one out at a time, popping it in. Tiny wee thing, dancing along. What’s she doing, all on her own down here? Shit, is she mental? She’s walking the edge of the quay like a tightrope. Hairs a rat’s nest, like bloody dreads or something. Fuck’s sake- Hey! -Foot’s slipped. Shit! I knew it, silly wee bitch. Here- Jesus – Shit – Fuck – everyone running, screaming, move! Fuck, looks deep. Fuck, that’s cold. Dark. Breath sucked out. Water brown, grey near the surface, bubbles and splash. Air. Jesus, where? Where? Can you see her? Did she come up? Did she- Where? Down again. It’s all one, down here. It’s all the one colour. Can’t see the bottom. Can’t see my hands, oh my god, this is shit. No way can I see her in this, poor wee thing. Air. Sky is so blue. Faces like moons above. Where? Has she come up yet? Has she- fuck’s sake – standing there shaking heads like a pack of sheep. Can’t feel my fingers. Ears are on fire. Spinning a frantic 360, 360, 360. Where? Slower. So cold. Shaking heads. No chance. So quick. Fuck. So quick.

And Emily Blaney, what about her? Mouth and eyes stretched, every sensation endlessly engrossing, she feels as if she’s falling, falling forever. Nothing happening quick, at all. She can sense her own thin arms drifting wide from her body, cast off from the sinking ship of herself, separate entities on their own voyages on the strong sea-muscle. It was only cold for an instant but now it’s dark, very dark and brown, and she is all alone. She is weightless for the first time. She is flying. There was a horrible, painful, burning, tearing fire in her chest for a short time, and she cried for Chelsea, but it passed quickly and now she is content to be sinking, falling, spinning with what feels like tiny bubbles tickling from the corners of her eyes, popping from her ears. She is giving up 135 air. She is becoming water instead. There is no strong preference for either. Only the fact of herself, weighing less than a crow’s feather, down and down in the brown, the dark, the silent water, while all the noise, the hubbub, roaring and ruction throbs up above, the whole world of her village aghast, shrieking, incredulous at what she has done now. She turns slowly over in the water, and sees only blackness. She smiles into the silence.

THE GIST: Roisin Maguire calls herself; 'A late arrival to fiction-writing, I completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Queens University Belfast in 2018 with Distinction, at the age of 49, and had a piece of short fiction published in "The Blackbird" at the end of the year. I am currently working on the second draft of my first novel, the first chapters of which formed my dissertation, and have currently got 130,000 words to hack at for the next few months. I am a writer by trade, in the entertaining world of Health & Safety policy for small to medium enterprises, and I work at the Real Writing in the early morning while the family sleeps, so retaining my sanity and sense of soul.

136 Featured Author -Kelli Allen

One hundred knots

Swords swallow wheat in the north and every girl learns early how to keep rice grains dry in the pockets of her own skirt. One summer begs that there will be another, yet twenty hours can mound granite into karsts before we rub grains from our eyes as quickly as minutes from yes to please, stay. But so little stays, and we hoard the mouths at our throat.

There is need here, but the word need is wrong. Need is the rain, but there is no rain today, just a picnic in the everyday gloss of lily heads craning against still water. And then, as a sigh, there is no time for sweets melting into the tongue, and no time for counting ants in their round march after sacrifice and duty. Choices are made quicker than breath and both have their consequences. One girl keeps what was left, or she does not. Breathe in, and breathe out.

Four parts to a mantra as she collects blanket, reed basket, and dried abalones into the shallow of her chest:

The women agree that they have murdered desire every morning for one hundred and thirty-one years; the roofs sagging over these houses proves as much.

No one asks for the milk to arrive at the breakfast table, and grandmothers hide honey under our beds for the winter, where in snow, everything complains.

Spiders will watch arguments from the furry refuge of their nests, debts collected in full.

Nothing spells shame brighter than teeth-meeting-teeth in a dry kiss gone on too long. These truths begin each week and, by noon, the sun says what she might to every winged thing brave enough to answer.

137 This girl, who is no bride, is forging one of two princes in the cabbage folds of her womb.

When she understands that the rabbit has died, she bends to untie her slippers and begins the meticulous work of cradling the ribbons into signs for girl and for boy. The rough silk crescent and dagger will greet her in the months to come as she passes from basin to hearth. She will make this trek in half circles until her head nestles into dried shoots, her legs arching for expulsion and arrival.

At the washing well, she considers how often she is told to marry a brown bull. She has welcomed too many rods to strike her into flame and is wasted through her want. This is known, and this is the silence that follows her as a painted dog snapping at the elk’s rump in spring. The village men insist she let the fleshy button of her ear tear into a new tongue her husband can wield when he begins to sing. But there will be no husband.

Her sister will allow only two trips to the butcher’s block and the feast is coming soon, though not for her, not for celebration, but to welcome mourning as the cousin to elation. The hand resting flat on her used thigh reminds the stomach of emptiness and emptying.

Patterns to memorize and spirals to carve into just melding iron. Hedgehogs scatter when her chisel meets its target—they know when to burrow into quills and when to leave the newly born for raptor and asp. These, too, are tasks for the growing, the weft securing what will be carried through cave and into a grotto carved by not-yet kings who knit white bamboo into crowns for the unwanted girls, the July wives. These rivers know each mountain goat by name. Where one leaps to ledge, another drowns and becomes a priestess ever gathering salt and scales.

She feeds her toenails to the crows each quarter moon, yet the rounding continues. Too late for death to mean more than itself and too late to keep mirrors hanging from tree-to-tree along the riverbank.

So instead she sits, legged tucked as cranes beneath her thin hips, and asks the brown waters to listen to her stories, to forgive her the gift she will place into the current soon enough. If she sings now, no one will remember.

138 She paints a tortoise shell across her widening belly. Each finger collects a thick tip to add swirl and plate to stretching skin. Yellow for the corn mother, grey for the second brother to walk down from the steppes. Kingfishers catch minnows in the bright knife of afternoon and will be back tomorrow, and all tomorrows, and will speak nothing when her boy leads the silver fish to a new kingdom.

THE GIST: Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books (2012) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her collection, Imagine Not Drowning, was released by C&R Press in January 2017. Her newest collection is Banjo’s Inside Coyote, C&R Press, 2019.

139 Rachael Murphy

Ruler of the Roost

I stole a hen. Not a nice hen. Oh no! Not a cute hen, not a posh hen. A pure useless brown hen. Scrawny. Ugly. Scraggly.

And now he’s staring at me—balefully. I didn’t know hens could stare balefully. I didn’t know what balefully meant until the hen started staring at me.

Balefully. I’d read the word somewhere. It’s a Good Word. I looked it up on the Google. He has been staring at me balefully for the last fifteen minutes. I know, he’s not a he, he’s a she. Hens are shes. But he’s a he in my head. Tommy. I’ll call him Tommy. He looks like a Tommy. He is a Tommy.

“Quit staring at me.” I look away. Pretend he isn’t there. I look back. He’s still staring at me. “Seriously, quit it. Cut it out, I rescued you.”

Well, morally I rescued you. Granny liked morals. Her beady eyes shone when she was going on about them. She was a very moral person, so she said. Her eyes shone a lot. Legally, I stole you. Granny wouldn’t have approved. She wouldn’t have got the difference between moral and legal but I looked it up on the Google and there is a difference. I know the difference. But now I know that I could get in Big Trouble for stealing Tommy. But Tommy needed to be stolen. Try and make sense of that between morals and legals. I haven’t a notion. That one didn’t look after you. I seen her. Every day on my way home from the shop. She’d be out rounding up her hens. She never seen you hiding in the bushes. Well, I think it was you but you all look the same. Brown, scratching, scraggly, scrawny, ugly thing. And baleful. Tommy, you were full of bale.

I’ve never liked hens. I hate the fuckers. That’s a Bad Word and I shouldn’t say it but hens are fuckers.

140 Granny liked hens. Well, I think she liked them. It was hard to tell with her. She didn’t like me. She was nicer to her hens than she was to me. I’m not making it up. Swear to God. She told me when I was five “I don’t like you, you’re pure useless – you should’ve been born a boy”. Not my fault—I’d no say in it.

“Only child after years of them trying,” Granny said.

I don’t know what they were trying. Then five years later the boy came along and Mammy went. She stopped breathing. You need to breathe to be alive. That’s what Daddy said.

Whatever chance I had of Granny liking me went with the birth of the ‘Blessed Child’. That’s what she called him. I called him ‘Bastard Bog Baby’. But not out loud. Bastard is a Bad Word. I looked it up on the Google. He wasn’t actually a bastard but he was a Bastard.

He was never sent to clean out the hen house. Granny saved that job for me. The Blessed Child went to school. And University. Granny said school didn’t agree with me so I stopped going. Daddy didn’t notice because I did Important Jobs around the house. That’s what Granny called them. Important Jobs. Like cleaning the hole of a hen house.

The bockety split shovel with the scratchy shaft scraping against the solid floor of the hen house, scooping up the acidy hen leavings and straw and mouldy food and slinging it into the stinking heap of ever increasing hen shit outside the shed. Shit—another Bad Word.

She never sent the Blessed Child out to collect the eggs even though I was scared of the hens. The pure useless, ugly, scrawny things pecked at me when I reached underneath them to get their eggs. A Good Morning was when the hens had gone out already and I just had to collect the eggs from the nesting box without one of the fuckers being there.

A Double Yolker. The Egg of eggs. I never got one, even though I’d collected it. Always given to the Blessed Child. Bastard Bog Baby.

141 It was a double shit day when there was a double yolker on a Sunday.

We used to go to Mass on Sunday. We went to Early Mass. Up out of bed and straight to Mass. Granny used to puck me when my tummy rumbled. It wasn’t my fault—Communion doesn’t fill you up. Eggs do.

We used to have a priest all the time in village. The first one I remember was a Canon. He was really old, maybe 100 years old. I don’t know his name cos everyone called him The Cannon. One time, he called to the house and I thought Granny was going to take a fit. She went white and then red, white and red again and then let a roar out of her, “Mick, The Cannon is here. Sacred Heart of Jesus! Holy Mary, Mother of God and sweet baby Jesus.”

Daddy came running from the yard and saw the car and blessed himself. He was in his shitty yard clothes. They always smelled no matter how often the clothes were washed.

Granny flung off her house coat and roared at me to get out of sight and then roared at the Bastard Bog Baby to ‘get his arse down here’. If the stuff she had said to Daddy wasn’t enough, roaring at the Bastard Bog Baby told me she was ‘up to high doh’. I’ve looked that up on the Google and that’s what she was.

I slipped into the house the back way and hid at the top of the stairs where I could see most things and hear everything.

The Cannon went to the front door. He didn’t know that it stuck and the person on the inside had to shout at the person on the outside to ‘give it a good kick’ as the person on the inside tugged to open the door.

The Cannon didn’t kick the door. I think Granny must have found some kind of Divine help to tug the door open from the inside. Swear to God, I’ve never seen anyone open the door from the inside without outside help. I was disappointed that The Cannon didn’t kick the door. After Granny got the front door open to The Cannon, she was all smiles. As if he hadn’t heard the roaring. And the bad words. And the Taking of Our Lord’s Name in Vain.

142 Daddy wiped his hand on his trousers and held out his hand to The Cannon. The Cannon’s face was a pure picture as he said, “Thank you for the welcome”. He didn’t shake Daddy’s hand. There was a big fuss with the good china and making tea and putting the Good Biscuits on a tray. I knew the Good Biscuits were soft. I had tried them the week before. It was a good thing that Granny didn’t notice the missing pink wafers.

The Bastard Bog Baby was left in in the room with the Cannon. He talked a load of rubbish to the Bastard Bog Baby. Turned out, he wanted him to be an Altar Boy.

Granny was made up—her Blessed Child was going to be an Alter Boy and serve The Cannon. Daddy wasn’t convinced but what Granny wanted, Granny got.

So the Bastard Bog Baby became an Altar Boy. Granny was so proud seeing him up there serving Mass. She was able to go on about it to Smiley Mrs. O’Malley and Mrs. Reilly. The Bastard Bog Baby was even worse after that—there was no pleasing him. He even cried sometimes before going down to Mass and serving the Canon.

Because of him being an altar boy, it meant we had to be at the church fifteen minutes earlier than we needed to be. After a while he became the Head Altar Boy.

And when he got too old for that he used to read at Mass. Hah! I seen him out the back of the Church smoking fags with the other eejits and taking a piss in the graveyard. The Cannon is dead now.

Back home after Mass for breakfast. Sundays wasn’t porridge. Granny would fry up rashers and sausages and boxty and eggs and we’d have heaps of her brown bread and butter. After, I still had to clean up the hens—they’d no notion not to shit on a Sunday.

I was sent to Smiley Mrs. O’Malley on a Friday. I liked her. She lived halfway down to the village. Granny gave me her pension book and then I called into Mrs. Reilly and then Smiley Mrs. O’Malley to collect their books and then down to the post office to collect the three pensions. On the way back Smiley Mrs. O’Malley was the first to get her pension. She had a shed that was a shop that sold everything. I didn’t like the smell in the shop. It smelled dry and dusty—old animal feed, old paper, old people and old food.

143 She used to give me Coke—the real stuff—and proper Tayto. The first time she gave me Coke it was in a glass bottle and she left me in the kitchen with it and a bottle opener and went to serve a customer. I’d no notion how to use a bottle opener. I thought I’d be in Big Trouble cos I’d look like I didn’t want the Coke if I hadn’t opened the bottle by the time she came back. I ended up breaking the bottle, catching it in the half-pint glass and putting the bottle in the bin so she wouldn’t know. She gave me tins after that.

In Smiley Mrs. O’Malley’s I’d to get a stone of chlorenda for the hens. I’ve no notion to this day what it is. I’ve looked it up on the Google since but can’t find it. Then again, I’m not great on the computer or at spelling—probably me. But I know what baleful means.

Chlorenda looked like Corn Flakes. Didn’t taste like them —I tried it. Granny made me eat porridge so I’d never had Corn Flakes. For years I thought that Corn Flakes tasted like chlorenda. Until I tried Corn Flakes. They don’t taste like chlorenda. They look like it though. And a half a stone of the seedy stuff for the hens.

Smiley Mrs. O’Malley would tell me to go home. I used to look back at her smiling but looking sad at me heading a mile up the road with a stone and a half of hen food. I don’t know why she was sad. I was grand. She asked me once why Daddy didn’t come with the car to carry the hen food up the road.

Smiley Mrs. O’Malley is dead now. So is Mrs. Reilly. So is Granny.

Granny kept the hens even though Daddy gave out. What Granny wanted, Granny got. Daddy hated the hens. They were always escaping and scratching up the garden and shitting everywhere. Granny ignored him when he gave out about it. Laughed—cackled like the hens. The baby hens were cute. Yellow and fluffy with shiny black eyes. She cooked the eggs in the range. Kind of cooked them, got the eggs to hatch out by heating them in the bottom oven. Made the baby hens breathe.

One time for dinner we had chicken cooked in soup. I thought it was chicken. Daddy told me it was chicken. Granny told me after dinner it was an old hen that had died. I got sick—all over her. She slapped me. I asked Daddy if it was true. He didn’t answer but I knew then that it was. I’ve never eaten chicken since.

144 Tommy’s done a shit! On the floor. I get some toilet tissue and clean it up. I’ve no chlorenda or the seedy stuff for him…I fill a bowl of water and another with Corn Flakes and put them in front of Tommy. He looks at them and then goes back to staring at me.

“Quit it. If I’ve told you once it’ll be the last time!” That’s what Granny used to say to me. Tommy ignores me. Like I used to ignore Granny.

I don’t live at home any more. I’ve my own place since Daddy died. I work in the shop. Not the one Smiley Mrs. O’Malley had, that’s gone. The proper one in the village. I mind my own business. Daddy always said ‘say nothing and after a while say nothing at all’. So I don’t. Except when I have to cos it’d be rude not to.

I don’t say anything to the yoke with the hens even though I have plenty to say. I don’t know her name cos she doesn’t come into the shop. Too good for the likes of me. But I stole her hen. My place is nice. A bedroom, a kitchen that’s a sitting room as well and a bathroom. And a telly all to myself. Daddy got me my place. He said ‘sure what more would you need’.

The Bastard Bog Baby lives at home. He comes to see me sometimes. I know he doesn’t want to but he does anyway. I give him tea and ginger nuts and tell him I’m grand. He doesn’t know I hate ginger nuts. I keep them specially for him.

He’s married to an awful yoke. She hates me. That’s ok because I hate her too. She’s full of notions. I went up there for dinner once and she said it was cock o van. It was chicken in soup and I didn’t eat it. The Bastard Bog Baby got all thick. I went home.

Tommy has scrunched down. His head is to the side. Still staring at me. But not balefully. I lie on the floor so I’m on the same level as him and stare back. He hasn’t touched the water or the Corn Flakes.

Sweet Baby Jesus! He’s fallen over. He’s not moving. I poke him. Nothing. He’s warm. I poke him again. Nothing. I stare at him for a bit more. Not so baleful now. I don’t think he’s breathing. I don’t know how to make him breathe.

145 There’s a knock on the door. It’s the Bastard Bog Baby. ‘Christ Lizzie, why have you a dead hen in here? You’re pure useless, do you know that?’ I stare at him. Balefully.

THE GIST: Rachael Murphy is self-deprecating, calling herself an unpublished writer. She started writing beyond her journals in 2018 thanks to a local creative writing course. In her professional life, she writes many reports, funding applications and proposals. She is quite good at them as she adheres to the advice of ‘answer the question you have been asked’. She has a BA from TCD in Geography and Sociology (she wanted to travel and meet people) and a MSc from DCU in Education and Training Management.

146 David Butler

Zither Music

We’d been to the Gate to watch Barry McGovern do his Beckett thing. A character whose proportions might’ve been dreamed up by Alberto Giacometti. McGovern’s, not Beckett’s. Then across to Conway’s for pints. This is before they shut the place down. Before the smoking-ban kicked in, and everything became euro.

Ruthie was giving it ‘What was the story with that story, anyhow?’ Throaty Monaghan accent, like everything is a big joke.

‘Which story?’ ‘That malarkey about being attacked by a family of weasels.’ ‘A tribe of stoats,’ sighed Johnny D, lenses flashing in my direction. ‘Are they not the same thing?’ ‘Fucked if I know,’ I say. ‘I don’t get it, but. How can you guys say he’s funny?’

‘Funny? He’s fucking hilarious!’ And that is Johnny all over. Whatever Ruthie said, John D was bound to take the opposite tack. Only this time he wasn’t stirring it just for devilment. I know him on this one. But now Ruthie’s looking to me like I’m meant to adjudicate between them. Which would be grand, except for on the one hand I’m with Johnny, I always found old Sam not exactly hilarious, but funny. Droll, you know? Deadpan. And on the other hand, I have the serious hots for Ruth McArdle. I never let on. As if I needed to. She’s one smart cookie.

So I’m ‘Well he’s not exactly Billy fucking Connolly.’ Which is about the worst thing I could’ve said. Because now I’m caught between Johnny D’s antenna eyebrows twittering oh yeah? and Ruth McArdle’s not-one-bit-impressed puss, which looks like it’s had about a dozen injections of Botox it’s that immobile.

Maybe a change of tack? ‘I’m not sure he got it either. Left off writing it by all accounts. Notes from an unfinished work.’ 147 ‘Abandoned would be the mot juste, Maguire.’ ‘Whatever. My point being, maybe ole Sam got bored of his stoats.’ But Ruthie’s having none of it – my sitting on the fence. ‘So is he? Pause. Hilarious?’

Now here’s the crux. Johnny can be really fucking annoying. When we were over in the Gate, he’d been doing that thing of the extra-loud guffaw, showing off how he got the gag and all. And Ruthie’s unimpressed-look is telling me that if I take his side of the argument it’ll smack to her of betrayal. But then, I don’t want to betray Beckett. Which I realise sounds Looney Tunes. The way I’m caught in their pincer stares, I’m not going to be let let it drop, either. It’s what you might call a nice dilemma. Bar everything else, it’s Johnny’s round. And he has no intention of moving from the table before the matter is put to bed.

‘Is he hilarious?’ I consider the flier from the Gate. ‘Can I phone a friend?’ No one budges. The pincers tighten.

Another tack, running downwind. I iron the flier flat on the wet table. That black and white photo you’ve seen a dozen times. ‘Ever strike either of you how heraldic Beckett is? Like a griffin out of a bestiary. Or a seagull, say, to Yeats’ heron. Which would make Jimmy Joyce what…an owl maybe?’

No-one bites. Now, a cartoon angel is whispering into my right ear how if I play it wrong, I’ll be stuck all night in the supercilious company of Johnathon Dowling esq. Reason is screaming to hand Ruth McArdle her little victory. Hilarious is not the mot justewhere Beckett is concerned. But, not for the first time, my left ear is assailed by the seductive whisper of the Imp of the Perverse. ‘Nah,’ I say, slapping the empty glass gavel-like on the wet flier and disarticulating Beckett’s forehead. ‘He’s pretty damn funny. Dark. But yeah. Funny.’ With the result that all through the next round Ruth won’t look at me. Is all over Johnny and every inane witticism he fires out.

Fast forward a couple of hours. Ruthie’s long gone. Didn’t even wait for her last DART. And myself and Johnny D are somewhere along Capel St trying to figure out the next play of the evening. Funds are low. We’re barely into term two and what little of my grant remains in the ATM will just about stretch to the next instalment of rent, like one of those either/or duvets that either covers your head or your toes. Johnny’s tank is running on empty. Nothing beyond the shrapnel in his pocket, if the fecker can be believed.

148 There’s meant to be a party out in Stoneybatter, some of the IT crowd. But you don’t like to arrive out empty-handed and besides it’s only recently gone midnight. You get to an IT party early, you end up having to talk to the early-birds. And believe me, that’s not something you’d risk twice. A scoop on the way, so. Maybe Sin É, or the Cobbler.

Jump cut to pub interior. ‘Tell us this now, you,’ goes Dowling, phlegming up into an accent that’s more John B Keane than Ardal O’Hanlon, ‘would you say now, Maguire, that Ruth McArdle is hilarious now, would you say that?’

‘Leave it go Johnny would you do that for me?’ It’s about his fifth time having a pop at her. Or at me would be nearer the mark. Bad enough that I have to stand the fucker another pint. But of course he doesn’t let it go. Keeps circling about it, the way a tongue keeps touching on a sensitive tooth. And whether it’s the pints or the hour or the supercilious eyebrows, or whether it’s that I’m still mad at myself for crossing Ruthie, suddenly we’re down on the floorboards, scrapping. Rolling over cigarette butts and sputum in a forest of truncated legs amidst which his glasses have gone skittering.

He’s not much of a scrapper, Johnny. Almost at once my fingers are locking his jaw, his face all gargoyle and indignant. I’m digging my kneecaps hard into his shoulder joints. And as a dozen hands hoist me off him I taunt, ‘Would you leave it go now, would you, now, you bollox?’

Where all that came out of I do not know.

The upshot of course, not twenty minutes later I’m on my Jack Jones. He’s skedaddled like a scalded thing, hands shaking so bad it took him two goes to pick up his glasses. Last words I hear, hoarse and high-pitched, ‘You really fucked up this time Maguire.’

Yeah. Probably.

So I’m alone, somewhere down around Smithfield or the back of the Four Courts. Terra Incognita, and not exactly friendly at this hour. Stoneybatter, I’m thinking. That party. Only I haven’t picked up a take-out. Too bad I don’t have my guitar with me, to bang out a few chords by way of a quid pro quo. My steps are being directed by some tentative internal compass. But the orange alleyway I’ve strayed into has the melancholy of a cul de sac. Not a sinner to be seen. Not so much as a cat.

149 By rights I should just turn around. But no. The Imp of the Perverse, once again. ‘Maybe,’ she goads, ‘there’ll be a way through. It’s just you can’t see it yet.’ So I persevere, each streetlight shrinking the shadow before me then reeling it about until it’s stretched into a Giacometti figure. There’s no sound but my own reverberate footfall. I’ve been down this nightmare before.

End of the road. And sure enough, there it is – the opening.

It’s a narrow passage, a solitary bollard thrust up from its jaw like a yellowed tusk. I even recognise the cavity down one side. Closed in by blind walls the laneway has an evil air. Brick and concrete brambled with graffiti. Bottle shards. A honk of cardboard and stale piss. I’m about half way along when I hear the approach. A gravel voice speaking foreign. Shadows large and angular. Cue the zither music.

They’ve blocked the exit. One short, behatted. One huge as a bear. Making yours truly the eponymous Third Man.

The skinny one has a folded-up cane in the crook of one arm. Hook nose, eyelids closed but animated by the tiniest flutter. The tall one carries a huge accordion slung over one shoulder. Head as round and blank as a traffic beacon. Seeing me his mouth opens, a piano dropped down a flight of stairs. These guys, I’m thinking, have climbed out of the shallow-end of the gene-pool. ‘Gentlemen,’ I nod, making to pass.

The trouble of course, the laneway is so godawful narrow. At the best of times I’d have been hard pressed to negotiate the circumference of the giant with the accordion. Whether out of malice or ignorance, the foot-wide gap between instrument and wall is plugged by the blind man. A desiccated face, not without cunning. It’s him I address. ‘Do you mind?’

He does, it seems.

Why don’t I turn round? Why don’t I retrace my steps? It’s not too late. There’s nothing quite like sightless sockets to give you the willies. The grinning companion might’ve stepped straight out of a late Goya. So what’s holding me? All I can think, the whole scene is glazed with the giddiness of the ludicrous. Not exactly hilarious. But yeah. Funny.

150 Could it be they haven’t any English? Impossible to be certain in the fickle light, but there is a swarthiness about them. The snatch of language could’ve been anything – Romanian, Ukrainian, who knows, maybe even Sheltie. Or Gaelic for that matter. But it wasn’t as if my present intention wasn’t blindingly obvious. Keep it light, I think. ‘Scusi. Entschuldigung. ¡Por favor!’

‘You have maybe cigarette?’

A toll to pass. Seems fair. Only I don’t smoke. All the same I go through that pantomime of tapping every pocket from coat to breast to trouser, which is doubly pointless seeing how the guy in charge can’t see. The one who speaks. Sancho Panza’s mouth is still flashing its keyboard missing a few keys. ‘Look gents, I’d love to parley…’ My instinct is to simply push on past. But you don’t want to go laying hands on a man’s accordion, especially not a giant’s. And you can’t just barge through a blind man like he was a saloon-door. ‘You after money? You’re out of luck my friends. I’m a poor student. I haven’t a kopek.’ Which wasn’t a mile off the God’s honest.

‘You think we are thiefs,’ states the blind man, more in disgust than indignation. ‘We are no thiefs.’ And this has me wrong-footed entirely. I hadn’t meant to insult the man. Even the BFG has shut the lid on his piano grin. I’m racking my brains. That accordion. That trilby on the small guy. He’s in a cheap pin-stripe, something out of the 40s. The other’s greatcoat, unbuttoned. Had we come across them one night, busking off Wicklow St? That night we’d been upstairs in the International, the three of us. We’d gone to see Huis Clos, on Wee-klow St (Ruthie’s gag).

The way is still blocked. But I’m beginning to think that’s out of carelessness. The blind guy can’t see where he’s standing, and the man-mountain is maybe too slow to realise his girth. All of a sudden I’ve a plan. ‘Say, do you gentlemen want to come to a party?’

‘A party?’ Voice like a grating hinge. ‘Sure! Maybe you could liven it up. Blast out a few tunes.’ His mouth turns down, as though he’s literally chewing it over. ‘A few tunes?’ ‘Only if you feel up to it. Hey, it’s your call.’ ‘Where is this… party?’ ‘Not far. You know Stoneybatter do you?’

The upshot, I set off with Little and Large. A few wrong turns. A few cocking ears at the debouchment of street and alley. It’s a bizarre odyssey. Large is a dummy for all I know, and Little 151 is not much given to talking. I make a few wry comments, try a couple of wisecracks. Neither gives any indication they’re paying the slightest heed. At last we hear the low thrum, the smash of a bottle, the white noise of voices through an open door.

In the hallway my co-travellers are accosted by an anorexic with beard and glasses. Shane, I think his name is. It’s his gaff. ‘Look Shane, they’re with me. Ok?’ He has a superior smirk you’d love to smack. ‘Ok?’ He scans the hall for allies. Whatever, he shrugs, and subsides into the clamour of the living-room. Tea-lights. A fug of excess males. We make for the kitchen. It’s more sparsely populated. A wincing fluorescent light, unpleasantly forensic. Carnage of dips and crisps. There’s a punchbowl at low ebb in which wine-stained fruit tarnishes. I dribble the dregs into a trio of plastic cups, salvage a round of cheese and cracker. I even manage to bum a cigarette for shorty.

The few hanging out in here are the social rejects, which is saying something.

Fast forward a couple of hours. Earlier I’d clocked Ruthie’s plaid skirt and knee-high boots on the stairs, Toby Wilkins sitting real close in behind her, a guy I cannot abide. Arrogant individual. Essex. I’d melted back into the kitchen before she clocked me. When at last I made up my mind what I’d say to her en passant there was no sign of either of them. Not on the stairs, not in the front room. I’m hoping to Christ they’ve gone. The alternative, that they’re in the bedroom beside the smaller one where all the coats are dumped, is too unpalatable. It has my gut clench up any time I can’t distract it.

The party is beginning to thin. But the more it does, the more of a crowd precipitates into the kitchen. To hear the performers who, it turns out are Bosnians. Banja Luka. Been living here since things went crazy over there. When he’s not rasping out lyrics like a beardless Ronnie Drew, shorty plays something halfway between a kazoo and a harmonica which he cups in his hands. I do my best to pick out the bones of each Balkan chorus and parrot along. The crowd joins the merriment by clapping out the rhythm. Then, once in a way, the mood shifts. There’s a lament, or a love-song. The bear, it transpires, has as sweet a voice for harmonies as you could wish for. At such times shorty leaves him get on with it.

Past four. Anorexic Shane is giving a look both smug and world-weary. For my benefit, he makes a slow show of checking his watch. Which of course only encourages yours truly to keep the concert going. More and more riotously I wave my arms, cajole the listeners to join the raucous chorus, which they do. Syllables all zeds and vees which could mean anything. The bear is loving it, and 152 waltzes his accordion about the kitchen. Each time we think it’s over he kicks it off again, to a big laugh.

Then I clock Ruthie.

She’s sat on a windowsill, having a good ole tête-à-tête with the blind man. Or she’s listening to him, enrapt. Leaning in. A dark tale of his dark land, could be. How I lost my eyes. Or maybe not, the frown she has is light, almost amused.

No sign at all of the English prick.

I’ve picked up that she’s picked up that I’m behind this intrusion of rowdiness into the party. And as she’s leaving she fires me a look. One of those looks that goes on just that second longer than it needs to. Not quite Sally O’Brien, but near enough.

And I know I’m forgiven. And that is enough for me.

THE GIST: David Butler's third novel, City of Dis (New Island) was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, 2015. His second poetry collection, All the Barbaric Glass, was published in 2017 by Doire Press. His 11 poem cycle ‘Blackrock Sequence’, a Per Cent Literary Arts Commission illustrated by his brother Jim, won the World Illustrators Award 2018 (books, professional section). Arlen House is to bring out his second short story collection, 'Fugitive', later in 2019. Literary prizes include the Maria Edgeworth (twice), ITT/Red Line and Fish International Award for the short story

153 Poetry From Australia & New Zealand Selected by Denise O’Hagan

Editorial

It’s been an honour to be on the receiving end of all the submissions for my first stint as Poetry Editor for Australia and New Zealand for The Blue Nib. Writing is, as I know, an act of courage; sharing your work sometimes even more so. Given the quality of poems, it was no small challenge to narrow down a small wedge of them for publication.

I was thrilled to read the work of young and emerging talent, such as Rosie Bogumil and Erin Frances, alongside that of established poets such as Peter Bakowski, also our featured poet in this issue, and the very strong presence of a host of promising poets such as Fotoula Reynolds, Julian O’Dea, Warren Paul Glover, Anni Coyne and Glenn Whalan. I was also struck by the sheer variety in both themes and styles. As the weeks wore on, the poems that emerged combined a characteristically laconic flavour with themes that are both local and universal, topical and timeless. A sensitivity to the Australian and New Zealand landscape runs through this body of work, and with it an urgent sense of the preciousness and precariousness of our environment – and an implicit plea to do something about it. Sharp observation is blended with lyricism and a deep feeling for language and the sound of it. Many of the poets are regulars at open mic events, and it shows. Typographically and in terms of layout and design, the poems are similarly adventurous and imaginative – challenging as this can be formatting-wise, the reader will undoubtedly appreciate its visual excitement. There’s an impressive variety of styles, too, with free verse, haiku, acrostic poems and villanelle. These are truly poems of the first order.

A sampling of the words of the poets themselves, however, showcases the quality and breadth of work better than any description of it. Thus, for example, to CS Hughes’ artful eye ‘a symphony of final straws and camel backs’ is effortlessly juxtaposed with ‘broad-rimmed hats and lawnmowers’; Anne Gleeson notices how ‘the river mouth becomes mirrored / as a cliché’ which is preceded matter-of-factly by ‘reports of worsening floods and blame’; Peter Rimmer depicts the slow beauty of ‘Te Marama the moon … / Now climbing her way / To her place / Among the firmament of old, cold stars’ yet employs the gritty ‘I sit before a Hobo fire / Sipping beer’; the delicacy of Anne Casey’s imagery ‘Modest as a novice / Autumn slips in’ is both complemented and extended by the haunting quality of lines such as ‘A grey gash of ache / for the lost babe’; the elasticity of language and thought inherent in James Walton’s ‘the caviar piles of yabbies / speak of other things’ is delightfully present in ‘the way I can hear you thinking … / hooking the whole argument in the tide between the lines’; the poignance of Peter Bakowski’s ‘Hands are / Raw which once played the piano’ is set against the blunt humour of ‘Find a way out of the fog of your pyjamas. Get vertical. / 154 Flex an eyelid.’; Ali Whitelock’s wry and witty turn of phrase in ‘twenty kilos dropped from him / like leprosy’ blends with the tender perceptiveness of lines such as ‘the thing is i didn’t know what it was i couldn’t quite say’; Richard James Allen strikes a lofty tone with ‘In your last delirium, / you orchestrate / gravelly totem sounds / for your funeral’ but also an intimate, conversational one in ‘I sleep with two hot water bottles / when you are away’.

These poems have it all – and there is something here for every reader! To those poets who took the time and effort to contribute whether or not we were able to accept your submission this time round, we are deeply grateful.

In terms of literary analysis, too, we are indebted to Ada Wofford for the first part of her incisive three-part commissioned series looking at poetry of the twenty-first century which complements the work of the poets themselves and challenges us to be more aware of how we respond to this art form.

May you, the reader, enjoy all the poems and emerge, as I did, the richer for the experience. Please continue submitting and let us all work together to make our artistic community as strong and vibrant as possible.

Thank you and happy reading.

155 Featured Poet - Peter Bakowski

The Poetry

The Magdalen laundries, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne 1932

Emerge from stone cold rooms. The penance of work will cure you of Nocturnal sobbing. Do not voice the Doubt—that morning prayers may not salve your deepest wounds. Unending torrent of laundry to starch, iron and fold. Hands are Raw which once played the piano, dared to hold the hips of a man in Errant embrace. You must quell the fires of the flesh to be truly saved.

Views from a park bench, the Treasury Gardens, Melbourne, 28 May 2018

Please rest even recuperate on my slatted lap. Accept that you may be judged by passersby, Relegated to a type, perhaps of fanciful vocation— Kilt-maker, embalmer, lion tamer.

Bustling is for others. Let them stampede to water cooler and Elevator, while you, in looser clothing, study the plumage of a duck, Nibbling at bread scraps lodged in tufts of grass. You’ve gravitated, Chosen to venture here, to undertake this escape or close examination of How you are or how you aren’t, as the autumn leaves loosen and fall.

Wake up call

Doing can take a lot of doing— Involves getting off the couch of your thinking. Find a way out of the fog of your pyjamas. Get vertical. Flex an eyelid. The sky’s still there, the horizon its trump card. Interest yourself in more than yourself, there are other Curious beings, relentless in understanding, undressing the Universe. Look at who you are as a seed not a sentence. Learn and unlearn. Excuses are more scaffold than building. Truth—coax it from the hiding place on the tip of your tongue.

156 Peter Bakowski -Interview

Born premature, with a hole in the heart, on 15 October 1954, to Polish-German, delicatessen-running parents in Melbourne, Australia, Peter Bakowski fell in love with the map of the world and reading at an early age. Peter and his wife, Helen, a clothes-maker, travel to Europe annually, particularly Paris and most recently Berlin. 2019 represents Peter’s thirty-sixth year of writing poems. In 2019 Wakefield Press will publish Elsewhere Variations, forty-eight call-and-response poems by Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton and Recent Works Press will publish Wardrobe of Selves, Peter’s seventh full-length poetry collection.

Denise: What drew you to poetry in the first place, and when did you start writing?

Peter: I started writing poetry in 1983 at a friend’s farmhouse in Waco, Texas. I wrote a poem as a cry-of-the-heart response to receiving a ‘Dear John’ letter while I was on the road, travelling. My response came out as a poem. I was attracted to the taut, direct nature of a poem, rather than blocks of prose, perhaps prone to over-description or a convoluted plot.

Denise: Which poets have influenced you and your work the most?

Peter: Contemporary North American poets have influenced me the most - initially Charles Bukowski’s poetry showed me that you could write about the urban and the local, that you could be plain-speaking. From Bukowski I went on to discover Raymond Carver, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins and Charles Simic, whose poetry is infused with Eastern European sensibility and black humour. I’m also influenced by Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Rozewicz and Ramon Gomez de la Serna - all these poets I consider plain-speaking but able to authoritatively Include insight, humour and surrealism in their poems.

Denise: What is your main inspiration for writing?

Peter: No matter how many books I write in my lifetime, they’ll all be about what it’s like to be a human being. Given this, I continue to write a spectrum of portrait poems of real and fictitious individuals, to reveal the creative and destructive, the vulnerable and the tenacious, often occurring simultaneously, ‘at war’ in the individual portrayed. I’m also drawn to cities. I like to be a poet-detective in a city, noting people in parks, cafes, the commuter rush.

Denise: When you’ve finished a poem, what is your editing and reviewing process?

Peter: I edit a poem by looking at the poem and asking myself, ‘What am I trying to say in this poem and have I said it clearly and strongly?’ I also review whether the poem has an engine, a momentum to it and also whether it’s skeletal or even stillborn. As I work towards a poetry collection I print out my accumulation of poems, lay them out on the living room floor and look at whether any of the poems are passengers. Each poem has to do some work, earn their place and keep. I tell every budding, emerging poet to send their poems to magazines. The actual process of submitting poems often makes me re-look at the poems and often fine-tune them, iron out any wrinkles or anything superfluous.

157 Denise: Do you have a particular writing routine? How do you balance work and personal time?

Peter: I am continuously ‘nourishing’ myself as a writer by walking, by reading and by thinking - thinking about people and life - Why are we here? What is our purpose? Is there an afterlife? etc.

Denise: What are you currently reading?

Peter: I’m currently reading a biography of Diane Arbus which I will follow by reading biographies of Vivian Maier, Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, as I want to write one or several poems about a real or fictionalised photographer.

Denise: Among the many countries in which you’ve spent time, which have influenced you the most?

Peter : Although I was born and largely live in Melbourne, Australia, I feel somewhat North Hemispherian. In the 1980s I hitch-hiked several thousand miles through the US and Canada, caught a freight train across Montana, lived in a cave on Isla Mujeres, Mexico and travelled through Egypt, Sudan and Central African Republic. I feel I’m a tidal, fluctuating mongrel mix of European and Australian - at times melancholic, at times laconic, capable of a philosophical shrug and an absurdist laugh.

Denise: What role do you feel poetry plays in our society, and what if anything about that role would you change?

Peter: I’ve found that the French revere poetry and I’ve had a very heartening response to my poetry in France, critically and from library audiences.

Denise: What advice would you offer to aspiring poets out there?

Peter: Send your poems out to magazines and journals, read other writers, other poets. Go out your front door. Observe. Digest. Think. Be positive when you face the blank page - you have a vocabulary, life experience. Face the blank page, calm but open, even though the subject matter may be personal - the world needs honest writing about what it has been like/is like to be you. Don’t use abstractions in your writing. Be alert to the world and write about the real without dilution or cosmeticising. Keep self-pity and complaint and rant out of the poem. Find out if you’ve got the will, the drive to be a writer.

158 Featured Poet -Anne Casey

AFTER MAKING LOVE WITH THE LIGHTS ON, DOORS WIDE OPEN resting my head on your shoulder when you said there is no future no past only this this moment and i replied it is always now never yesterday or tomorrow we can live forever in this unending now and then we turned out the light

159 DARKLING

Artemis, protector of unmarried girls, where were you when they howled your name?

ghosting over shadows of fates evanesced you waxed and waned while no-one knew

how you’d let them down

160 LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

I: Do you miss her?

Only when she is off stood by my father shapeshifting his mood

Do you miss her?

Only when she flies to my brother’s side holding still to her first-born child

Do you miss her?

Only when she sweeps in like some changing wind to bewitch superstitious minds

II: Do you miss her?

Like a small round stone in the hollow turn beyond my swollen tongue

Do you miss her?

Like a clinging vine intertwined in the cleft of my left ventricle 161 Do you miss her?

Like the wet black scratch as a sharp nib inscribes her name inside my ribs

III: Do you miss her?

Only as far as ice crystals on the heights of Sagarmāthā

Do you miss her?

Only as deep as serpentine in the floor of the Mariana Trench

Do you miss her?

Only as much as a heart or a lung not inasmuch as

I could count the ways

Notes:

1.The title for this poem originates from a line in the 43rd sonnet of a collection of love sonnets written by Elizabeth

Barrett Browning.

2. Sagarmāthā meaning “Peak of Heaven” is the Sanskrit name for Mount Everest.

162 FOR EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN

Modest as a novice, Autumn slips in without the riotous fanfare of her showier sister, Spring.

Her breath is cooler and with unassuming care, she whispers prudent prognostications, summoning forth a solemner air.

Subtly, she draws us back, like some distant drummer from all the fuss and heat and noise of her raucous brother, Summer.

In muted robes of earthen tones and with steps more measured she slowly sheds the gilded charms that her flightier siblings treasured.

In between the trappings of fallen beauty all around, she leaves a hint of times to come when all will lie ungowned.

Darkly chasing sister Autumn on hooves of ice-cold steel, Winter—wielding whetted blades—will bring the weak to heel.

163 A POCKETFUL OF DREAMS

A twirl of emerald First Holy Communion lace for the circular skirt unfolding into a bridal train that caught your eye as Bridget Brennan A grey gash of ache swanned into your life with her for the lost babe shopgirl glamour, and you forever knocked sideways by the wondering how you ever won her over bright red-yellow-blue flash as five sons clash to split the ash across your fresh-cut grass A twist of turquoise and slash their mother’s prize begonias trimmed with amber for the laughter in your darling boy’s eyes The clink, clink, chink of them— reaching out of the tea-chest— tiny, shiny multi-coloured orbs makeshift play-pen—for his one by one slipping and spilling Daddy’s arms to hold him between grazed knees past the muddied margins beyond the grasping reach The chestnut swirl of your loosened grip of your little girl’s curls framed in white reflecting the glow of her shining face

THE GIST: Anne’s collections are 'where the lost things go' and 'out of emptied cups' (Salmon Poetry 2027/

19). Anne worked for 25+ years as a journalist, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. Her poetry ranks in The Irish Times Most-Read and is widely published internationally — Anne’s poetry has won/shortlisted for awards in Ireland, USA, UK, Canada and Australia. She is Senior Poetry

Editor of Other Terrain and Backstory journals (Swinburne University, Melbourne).

164 Peter Rimmer

PECULIAR CHILD Dreaming adventures With witches, trolls, wizards and dragons I was a peculiar child Castles made in trees In love with magic and wonder My sister was gifted a bangle In a world awash with both Something in the word jarred I dreamed it alive in sweated sleep A mirror was a portal To another world A troglodyte monster Where a child Atop a lonely mountain road Looked back at me Stripping flesh from human bones Capered and clowned The notorious Bangler Mimicked my every move Made his abode Set and framed A window between worlds I shivered in the warm sun bright When I saw its talisman Lying in the cool grass Proudly worn Shaded from the sun A circle dancing with impunity I’d watch the sky people About my sister’s wrist Drifting by Taunting, daring me to breathe magic into its In shape shifter billows, name Imagining I could fly The fearsome Bangler Soaring the blue infinite Hiding in plain sight Dancing on wings Riding air I’d play

165 HOBO FIRE

Shaggy tree shades The Southern Cross Cut a silhouette Shines from a crystal tear Ink on silvered cloud A rent in a silvered swirl of cloud The Night King owns this hour

I sit before a Hobo fire Behind me Sipping beer To my east I imagine myself to be Mountains cast up their proud bulk An infinite echo In a boundless room

Te Marama the moon Sister silver face In my innermost world Has hauled herself upon their shoulders I dance with the flames Now climbing her way That flicker and flare with primal joy To her place On the face of an ember bed Among the firmament of old, cold stars

I am at peace with myself At peace with the world

166 MATARIKI WINTER SOLSTICE

A dove grey breast Of cloud Settles low in a broken sky

Winter has made his home here A brittle sun Lances our world With fragile Hesitant light Pale honey fluffs the underbelly Of the sky doves cloud breast

Soon now The winter solstice Matariki The pivot Upon which the seasons swing

167 WASHED

Rain washes a hush On the tin roof above my head The Pacific Ocean Is in the sky Occupying the dawn With night and shade Its ally

A steady drum salutes the day There is no colour Only shades and shadows Picked out against a slate grey sky Define this day

In waves of sound As sweeps of intensity Range from dancing hammers To falling feathers A hush To staccato drum

THE GIST: Peter Rimmer is an Auckland based poet. He is a member of the Wordcore band (poets and musicians collaboration) The Cowboy Gangstas, mean as a snake poetry with badass blues. He is a regular contributor at open mic events around town.

168 C S Hughes

WHALE BONE LAMP SOLEMN GRACE

Annabelle Obscura wears a widow’s bun Solemn Grace breaks Monday morning dishes Knotted ‘round a hook of whale bone In a symphony of final straws and camel backs That her young Captain had Scraped plates make a feast (she says) Carved with the marks of saints For monsters at the corner of the drive In a peculiar kind of Braille Where the cement in jigsaw pieces That felt like the lost promises Crooked with the pulverising weight Of a forgotten summer land Of hard as spite hydraulic tongues Her fingers leave red marks From this once smoothed surface, breach Like the phases of the moon The ceremonious drumming basso voice When she holds too tight Of tossed and upended bins Harpoons crossed around her eyes Not quite divine Saying Nevertheless, a calendar of sorts Long days are strangely round Perhaps not so majestic Chrysanthemums are for the dead As solstice dolmen shadows I live somewhere in the houses of your face But still, in the aftermathing silence – That is a gull-like memory In two halves Of course, I feel sorry for the beast I am lambent before my father’s eyes Its singing heart all piercéd through But how deep it sang! To offer bones so few To light a light While I wait Turning empty cards In a fading window

169 FOXES & DAISIES (A VILLANELLE)

In the fields, the foxes watch with yellow eyes How they approached, with equal parts Autumn brings you back in the ache of burning temerity and care leaves To tremble at your outstretched hand I brought whispers for your skin and daisies for I brought whispers for your skin, and daisies your hair for your hair

In knotted threads and twined, without end or So strange, that they have come crown or throne Here again to say goodbye But this bed of cautious roses and dully In the fields, the foxes watch with yellow eyes gleaming stones I brought whispers for your skin, and a crown In the fields the foxes watch with yellow eyes of daisies

Can I hold you for a moment in a mask of For your hair sepia? Before it falls from my hand to a soughing wind I brought whispers for your skin, and daisies for your hair

I think, perhaps, you were never really here But hear again your soft-caught vixen cry In the fields, the foxes watch with yellow eyes

170 PARADIDOMI

I wonder where Judas got the ladder If he stole it from the olive grove If that were the greater sin Or if he clambered up the tree The warmth and grit of bark In rough crossed hands a kind of love Remembering when he was young Seeing twined the serpent and the sunset Short of breath, counting his delights Imagining a kind of freedom Beyond the leaves of day’s constraint In the divide of irreducible evening How the demand of this betrayal Served the waning light

171 AUTUMN LOVE, IS MANY COLOURS

In autumn we have iced-creams And count the colours of the sea Russet, bottle green Contrabasso and viridian Though a noisy wind scrapes at the sand In our hands the clouds grow high Crowns and bellies strawberry and silver Watching from the holes between the leaves They don’t melt away, but flee Still half afraid Not far behind, summer is the savage in the child We adjust the depth-of-cut Of broad-brimmed hats and lawnmowers The rain-wet grass winter blind Drunk on aldehydes and warnings Wondering at the stains Of sudden fallen evening

THE GIST: C S Hughes has been a hobo, a bookseller, a spice seller, a clock fixer and most recently, a poet. His previous book, The Little Book Of Funerals, was nominated in The Prime Minister's Literary Awards, his most recent book, The Book Of Bird & Bear, was nominated in The Queensland Literary Awards. It appears he remains unpopular with Prime Ministers and Queensland

172 James Walton

Modern love tales

I’ll put on After the Gold Rush, Sgt Peppers, Blue how much a graph of me this gives is best left for speculation

But I can tell you it’s no different to fifteen in a way, hold on to this avocado of a heart wait for the slower beat

I can’t make promises about days because decades submerged by nature’s balance are a hidden rip in resurgence

That still water, here’s my hand waving always at my best with the light behind

There’s a chance of rain the way sense trawls a ripple divining the way in or out

This fraught peace, all things being considered flotation of a gentle principle some of my recordings have the bends elliptic on now band less turntables while each replay travels on echo forever

173 Noice in Nice

I bought the Russian girls breakfast so poor they were from work, and coming down the hill pretended a little English for the couple seeking Matisse and Chagall. Later, the crepe maker told me I’d been churlish in keeping secrets, but then no taste of banana enveloped me at the olive oil distillery as it was supposed to.

(Apparently the Canadians pick it every time.)

I’d sat on a rickety pew before the stained glass and piano. And surrounded by suspended lovers, the magic of goats, colours that strained, to hold their surging fancy, could think only of the elongated eucalyptus leaf. How perfect the Art Deco reverse teardrop, the teasing smelling salts of home in the curling fingertips, of the eavesdrop waiting in background.

(Aromatics in patina of a silver smithing caesia.)

Adding to the exhibit in The Modern Art jumpers and scarves mixed to the clothes pile, the ebony beauty of traveller students turning back from the bad boy fifties sepia photographs smiled to wonder at the growing of number 23. A grimacing attendant handed over my blue cable, the slightly shredding goretex, the beanie of many hues, destined too soon for the cat’s warm bed.

(The listener had finally joined the conversation.)

174 Open pages, by the numbers

someone said poetry is sky writing for the blind

my curvature a broken horizon bundled marionette the rheumy strings entangled for hope to unravel

having outlived most who have been corrected by a life span

thoughts drawn to the neon of fireflies

whoever it was knew the ecstasy of reach the anatomy of Icarus

the downfall of angels a condensation point of reference

175 Unshredded Banksy

The only milk bar left is up Dairy Lane on the hill in the Catholic side where the gravel road runs beneath flowering grass trees their creamy spikes sway a cartoon hula they made a footpath at Wishart Street but only a few metres long people wrote in it before setting

Johnno, dog paws, ring this number for sex, even an old Foo.

By the culvert in the dip the caviar piles of yabbies speak of other things the dark in chocolate the smell of a barbecue and how the best moments are always falling where the years step aside.

176 Touch

It’s the thing with touch: the searing keening tingling of a slow passing finger to the head as on walls and urns and frescoes, leaning back bodies stretch it out extending the reach of the moment.

I love you for who you are – not this inanity of struggling prose or wit. But the way I can hear you thinking when you’re fencing alone in the night, hooking the whole argument in the tide between the lines.

When Michelangelo made the levels, of us looking to where a prophet or God looks back, along the length of salvation’s hope in arms bequeathing, I suppose he thought it mattered which way was down – or up those immortals wanting more in life as something goes.

The sentence of omniscience takes away surprise. To never know the thrill of chance, the gliding mystique of coincidence in the foetal déjà vu, of staggering to fail and the sheerness of success, when you’re turned around to the feel of it.

THE GIST: James Walton is published in numerous magazines, anthologies, and newspapers. He was a librarian, a farm labourer, and mostly a public sector union official. He resigned from an elected position in 2014 to be able to write creatively, having not done so since 1971. He is the author of three collections of poetry published since 2015. The Leviathan's Apprentice 2015, Walking Through Fences 2018, and Unstill Mosaics 2019. A fourth volume is in production with Uncollected Press.

177 E.A. Gleeson

This sky we share

Just-built houses stretch upwards lunging at ocean views angling out inlanders blocking older shacks shading neighbouring yards.

For six weeks holiday-makers hang out on their decks to die for. For the other forty-six weeks, these shrines tower in blue silence.

Spring alert

After weeks of bluster and sad skies, the river mouth becomes mirrored as a cliché.

In the no sound of this new spring day, the expanse reflects what it sees. Ducks slide in the sheen, tailgating.

Wattles hold branches steady, reeds stand to attention. In this oasis of green and blue, locals wait it out.

On-site vans and cabins leashed in the park, hold tight against the pending explosion of colour and noise.

178 Worst storm ever

On Monday morning, locals stand like sentinels watching Curdie’s River explode. It carves its way through the sand bar, slices deeply, hurtles itself into the ocean.

The town is awash. Words pass along the line. Eleven cabins flooded. Houses beyond the park seemingly afloat, two more in Cumming Street. Hectares of water flow around these house islands.

Has there ever been a worse one? The sand wasn’t scooped soon enough. Drains hadn’t been cleared. Planning schemes are way too lenient. Laptops flip to an array of media images and reports of worsening floods and blame. Everything is proffered as an explanation except the amount and intensity of rain.

All day the clean-up happens. By evening, onlookers gather on the foreshore. Families who spent weeks here in January return to stare at their summer playground.

By Tuesday, the rain stops, the wind quietens floodwaters diminish. Everything lessens except the stories. They grow more frightening, the water deeper, more ferocious with each retelling.

179 Seven Reasons for not moving to Peterborough corroded tools, stuck doors, jammed windows, wonky keys. Peterborough Rust conversation range: size of fish, type of weather number of tourists

Great Ocean Road – a misnomer for this last stretch of crumbling asphalt the coil of ‘fat as your arm’ snake sunbaking on the walking track bar-b-ques ransacked decks graffitied with splotches of white bird heaven the tumble of rocks just fallen from limestone cliffs. yesterday’s shelter the perfect number of coastal town residents is just seventy-eight

THE GIST: E A Gleeson is a poet and essayist who has presented her work in Estonia, Florida, Ireland and most states of Australia. She has published three poetry books with Interactive Press. When she is not writing, she works as a Funeral Director in the South West of Victoria, Australia. She has a writing studio on the coast at Peterborough where she garners inspiration for her poems and funeral ceremonies.

180 Ali Whitelock

in the silence of the custard

night crept in, stumbled and fell at my feet badgers keeked from hedgerows window wipers wiped grouse tails flashed patsy cline played on the stereo i listened in the dark and fell to pieces. while you drove like a fuckwit, up single lane roads that cut into the mountain like the waistband on a pair of too tight pants. the ugly woman behind the bar knew your name took our coats, showed us to our table and as you sat sleeveless, the solitary hair in your small-pox scar corkscrewed from your upper arm like a mung bean on a sheet of damp paper–– something of you finally stretching towards the light. you ordered the fish tea i ordered the same. i wanted you to see i was like you. and when the food came, we lifted our forks in unison cracked through the batter of our steaming haddocks lined up our chips on our buttered breads added our too much salt and in between gulps of our respective white teas you asked me what kind of car i was driving now. i asked you about your greenhouse tomatoes. the thing is i didn’t know what it was i couldn’t quite say. and later when we would order the apple pie with the hot crust and frozen middle, in the silence of the custard the closest i could come to it was i don’t hate you anymore.

181 once upon a time in shanghai

i was a balloon

once,

so full of helium i had to be scraped off the ceiling. back then i could come home from work paint the lounge walls green, make a curry, vacuum the carpet, walk the dog, write a book. back then it was like i was powered by solar panels in the blistering bush; back then it was like i was a cannula in the vein of a sun that would never clot & die. look at the thin membrane of my balloon now–– look at my stretched flappy arm skin crinkled like a length of loose glad wrap sagging on a bowl of fresh custard. how many more days are there? i swallow down my days like i’m dutifully finishing up a packet of expired gluten free shortbreads bought in error & couldn’t be returned. in the poem the chinese man returns to shanghai to die. i sandwich the weight of the poem between my depressed husband’s palms. his eyes nibble at the crusts of its lines, arms slip into the jacket of its filling. imagine, i tell him, the rings of our jupiters no longer hula hooping in our congealed milky ways; imagine the final flutter of our white flags grey from waving in surrender; imagine that soft warm earth in our ears; the petering flames of our suns going down; imagine, i urge him,

the stars no longer in our eyes.

182 the great fucking wall of china

it’s no biggie. it’s what they say when something’s not big they shorten phrases boil them down reduce them like cream in a pan on a low blue flame it was christmas. the radiographer put the condom on the wand inserted it asked if i was doing anything special this year like i’m at the fucking hairdresser’s having my roots done. then he found something behind the ovary and things went from being no particular biggie to being a great big biggie. they removed it a week later. for four long days i couldn’t sit upright. i lay on my back imagined the worst counted the skylights on the lounge room ceiling (there were four) read, ‘The Stornoway Way’ by Kevin MacNeil then ached in a different way this time at the beauty of language and turns of phrase and for the wind ravaged islands i’d turned my back on too long ago. on day five i could stand day six shuffle, day seven asked myself how hard it could be to just stumble up to the organic store to get the miso and the tempe and the other fermented shit the naturopath told me to get? well really fucking hard is how hard that turned out to be. after thirty metres i admitted defeat, lowered myself to the kerb at the entrance to the bp station as the price of unleaded dropped and drivers hysterical at the prospect of cheaper fuel screeched in on two wheels mounting the kerb where i sat flopped forward like a geranium in need of a drink.

then a mercedes pulled in parked at the pump and the well coiffured driver glanced across at me, her eyes smarting momentarily with benign concern before turning to the pump and selecting, not the cheap ethanol fuel, but the super duper expensive fuel, the one that cleans your engine and blah di fucking blah and makes you feel guilty in the same way watching a volvo ad is designed to make you believe that one day all of your children will die and it will be entirely your fault.

then the well coiffed woman hung the hose back on the pump without even shaking it to get the last of the drops and by the look of the alligator handbag would not be fishing out the supermarket docket for the two cent per litre discount before continuing on her road paved in twenty four carat gold.

not like the month before in china town 183 when pain smashed and i crumpled just outside the lucky world supermarket where they sell the bitter melon and the chicken feet in the five kilo bags. the chinese man came and sat quietly beside me on the kerb, only he didn’t speak english and i didn’t speak chinese, but he looked at me. and his look asked if i was okay and was there anything he could do. and my look said to his look, thank you, there’s nothing you can do, but i can’t tell you what it means that you stopped to ask. then his look said to my look have you seen a doctor? and my look said to his look i have, but so far they say there’s nothing to see.

then the chinese man rose from the kerb, went into the supermarket where they sell the bitter melon and the chicken feet in the five kilo bags and came out with a carton of chrysanthemum tea, poked a straw in the hole handed it to me and i drank it down and his look said to my look, i wish there was more i could do. and my look said to his look you’ve done enough already. thank you for this tea. it is delicious. how thoughtful you are, how caring. and as i swallowed the last of the tea his look said to my look, take care of yourself won’t you. and my look said to his look, i promise you i will.

then back outside the bp station where the chrysanthemum tea of human kindness was in short supply i clambered to my feet and started back on the road that may as well have been the length of the great fucking wall of china towards the organic store, its neon sign blinking like a mirage in the unimaginable distance. i got my miso and my tempe and fermented tofu and stopped a hundred times on the way back home as the price of unleaded drop some more.

a week later i saw the surgeon, a man who wouldn’t know chrysanthemum tea if it jumped up and bit him on the arse. he asked how i was going. i told him i’d been drinking chrysanthemum tea, eating fermented tofu, avoiding deep fried food, the naturopath said it keeps cancer at bay don’t you know. then he sighed his condescending sigh as though i’d just told him i’d met three witches in the woods who’d casually suggested i boil the liver of a blaspheming jew, throw in a couple of turks’ noses and strain it all through wool of bat, whatever the fuck that is. he took my blood pressure, listened to my chest, shone a light in my eye and told me, if you’re predisposed to cancer, no amount of chrysanthemum tea’s going save you.

184

every time my legs won’t work

& my throat won’t swallow & my breath rears up against the hurdle of my lungs

& molecules of oxygen push up the front of the queue & try to squeeze in through the slightly ajar door of my alveoli

& every other time my legs won’t work

& my throat won’t swallow i am

convinced it is

motor neurone disease even though the doctor tells me repeatingly it is not hereditary.

185 leprosy twenty kilos dropped from him like leprosy. a friend we hadn't seen in years came to visit, noticed his weight, she’s always trying to lose weight herself––she juices kale, eats quinoa, does yoga––the hot one & still the kilos will not shift. she asks him what his secret is. he tells her the dog died. how the grief is eroding him.

THE GIST: Ali Whitelock is a Scottish poet and writer. Her debut poetry collection,‘and my heart crumples like a coke can’ was published in 2018 by Wakefield Press, with a forthcoming UK edition by Polygon, Edinburgh in 2020. Her 2nd collection, ‘the lactic acid in the calves of your despair’ will be published by Wakefield Press in December 2019 and her memoir,‘Poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell’ was launched to critical acclaim in Australia and the UK in 2009.

186 Richard James Allen

OTHERWISE OCCUPIED

You think I am not listening but I am just not listening to you I am trained to keep listening

I am trained for the war on eternity with death hanging off my back like a trained monkey

trained never to give me a moment’s peace

POET OF THE REVOLUTION

In your last delirium, you orchestrate gravelly totem sounds for your funeral, conducting everything to the last, handing around parts for a bouquet of friends to memorise black folioles.

It is understandable, everyone wants to go out in style. A ceremony of ending to make up for messy beginnings and what you sense will be the suffocating silence of an unmarked grave.

187 WHAT I HAVE SEEN, OR SOMETHING AFTER DEATH

At a certain point you may be privy to a perspective beyond all others. It’s as if you have climbed through narrow passes and across difficult ridges and then finally up the steepest cliffs of a mountain. And while you are catching your breath at the summit, you find yourself compelled to look back down over what you have scaled to the vast plain below. It’s a vista from which even the greatest passions and highest pinnacles of achievement seem very small. It is the perspective of your death.

There is a dolefulness to this dying young, to this dying before you are dead, but also, if you can survive the long, slow trudge of mourning, back down the slopes to your life, a kind of liberation. A kind of bliss. Like the tale of

the sage who has gone blind but now spends his whole day staring at the sun.

THE WOOD

The only thing I’ll miss are the trees.

THE GIST: Richard James Allen is an Australian born poet. His latest book is The short story of you and I (UWAP, 2019). His writing has appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and online over many years. Creator of #RichardReads (https://soundcloud.com/user-387793087), an online compendium of Global Poetry, Read Aloud, he has written nine earlier books of poetry and edited a national anthology of writing for performance. Richard is also well known for his multi-award- winning career as a filmmaker and choreographer with The Physical TV Company and as a performer in a range of media and contexts.

188 Back Pages -From Our Contributing Editors.

The trick to Writing is -by Melissa Todd

I’m writing this on a train. I’m at the start of a three hour train journey, and I’ve brought nothing to amuse me but pen and paper. There’s my phone, of course, but it’s switched off and hidden at the bottom of my bag. Increasingly I find this the only way I can get any writing done: effective incarceration. Trains work best. Lucky Broadstairs is so flipping far from everything.

What else can induce me to commit pen to paper? Time-consuming cosmetic procedures, especially the slightly painful ones, fat-freezing, derma-rolling, have seen me produce some good stuff. Too expensive to rely on them for regular output, though. Those aggressively trendy coffee shops where everyone looks to be writing a novel and you don’t want to let the side down: they can work too, although frequently I elect instead to instagram pictures of my tea.

At home there are simply too many distractions. It’s a cliche, but a cliche because it’s true: when writing beckons the urge to clean ovens or file receipts or iron socks becomes irresistible. My husband can gauge how close I am to a deadline by how elaborate his dinners become.

Thing is, when I do sit down to write I’m usually instantly engrossed. Hours speed away as I tug sentences into my preferred shape, fight to express ideas gracefully, rhythmically. No elation equals that produced by a finely crafted piece of work. I know that, but I can never remember it before I’ve begun. Why? I’m not an idiot. And just as nothing equals the elation of a finely crafted piece, so nothing tops the dread in the pit of my guts before I first sit to craft. What on earth am I scared of, eh? Do I fancy myself in danger of ink poisoning, death by paper cut? Course not. I’m frightened I’m about to produce rubbish. And rightly so: the first draft is always rubbish. Trick is not to be frightened by the rubbish. Allow yourself to write the biggest pile of suffocatingly stinking ordure of which you’re capable. Once you’ve got that in place you can start to shape it. Just don’t compare your first efforts to Middlemarch, or you’ll be stabbing pens through your eyeballs before you can say edit. I bet Eliot’s first efforts were lousy too. Trick is not to worry about it. 189 Second trick, for me, is to set a time limit. I will write for one hour, I tell myself, firmly, and set a stopwatch to make the promise real. When that hour’s up I’m usually so engrossed I don’t even notice its narky, tinny beep. I don’t know why that works. Still fear of producing rubbish, I guess, or worse, not even rubbish. This time, perhaps, nothing will come, and I’ll finally be revealed as the hopeless, talentless, posturing cock-up at core I know myself to be. This time I’ll spend an hour staring at blankness and produce nothing more than a doodled heart or a shopping list.

Actually, I do quite often start with a shopping list. The sheer physical act of moving my pen to make something inconsequential sometimes tricks my brain into relaxing. And I eat sherbet when I write. Usually I’m not allowed sweets because I worry constantly about spots and cellulite, but writing is the one allowable exception. Sherbet, parma violets and lollipops. That’s partly a motivational trick, but I wonder too if those childhood tastes and textures also work to coax my brain into a less angsty state.

Writing’s the hardest thing I do, which is some indication of how stupidly easy my life is. Hardly coal-mining, is it? But it’s the fear of being judged and found wanting that paralyses. That fear has resulted in barren decades where I’ve not produced a word, decades whose loss I now deeply regret.

I only fear to write those words I know will face examination by others. I know no greater treat than to scribble indulgently in a diary, pour out thousands of words that will face no other eyes than my own. I write my way through problems, scribble out every slight and wrong I’ve ever endured and my plans to be revenged; scrawl my ambitions and schemes for the future until my knuckles burn. The writing is easy. It’s being judged that’s excruciating.

Being part of a writing community – in whatever sense you choose to interpret that – helps hugely here. I completed an MA in creative writing which taught me nothing, honestly, nothing at all, except to say “concrete signifiers” while nodding solemnly, but it did find me a gang of chums who write and expect me to write too, who message regularly and ask awkward questions about what I’m working on currently. That’s priceless. Well, it was three grand, actually. I’m sure I could have found some writing chums cheaper: all the writers I know are perpetually skint and fully prepared to do anything for cash. 190 I’ve finished writing this now and I’ve still got two hours of train journey left. When will I learn? It’s a form of mental illness, this repeated refusal to believe, against all evidence, that I can produce work people will value.

Only concern yourself with what lies within your power. There’s a fine Stoic trope. More than anything I want to be respected as a writer – how I blush to admit it – but it isn’t within my capabilities to make that happen. All I can do is write as well as I can write. Tragically that involves practise. So I ignore, again and again, the deep pocket of resistance in me whispering distractions and resentment. The louder that voice shouts the closer I suspect I must be to producing something valuable.

THE GIST: As well as being a Contributing Editor for The Blue Nib, Melissa Todd is a columnist for the Isle of Thanet News. She is currently writing a book with award winning poet Matt Chamberlain. Melissa writes from the writers with a wry wit and a keen eye. You will find her articles in The Blog on the website.

191 Ada Wofford – Dive

She’d been working here since her daughter started grade school. She liked to keep busy plus they needed the money. Fifty-two, frail and thin. She kept her hair the same deep red it was when she was little. Glasses, a sweater, jeans. From behind you might mistake her for thirty but a life of smoking had taken its toll on her face and on her voice. She never drank and she didn’t believe in God either. She could smile when she didn’t mean it. The animal shelter was a stout, featureless building. It sat solitary on a hump of land that grew out the side of forty-seven. Thunder of traffic groaning persistent in the background. She pulled into the cracked and pocked parking lot and sat staring at the clear morning sky, listening to the radio talk. Some village in some country she never heard of was raped and pillaged by their own army. A victim was interviewed, her interpreter had a wooden voice, “It’s like they were possessed, possessed by the Devil. They lit a house on fire. There were women being raped in front of their children. These were the men that were supposed to be protecting us. It continued for nearly two days and when it ended no one came to help. No one’s been here but you.” She got out of her car and thought about how awful it was, how she didn’t understand the world, and entered the shelter. Joan was already there, organizing the feeds and checking messages. For some time now, the owner had been working to transition the place from a no-kill shelter to a kill shelter. At first, they all revolted. One girl even quit. But after a while they began to understand the owner’s argument for making the change, “What do you think happens to the animals we turn away?” She asked them. “You think they just go off and live happy lives somewhere else? Well, that doesn’t happen. They go off to die somewhere. They’re left out in the streets or abandoned out in the country. At least here they can die with some dignity and without pain.” “Mornin’,” Joan said as Flora hung her pocketbook on the hook. “Mornin’, Joan.” “Welp, today’s the day. And it ain’t gonna be me, I tell you.” “No one’s stepped up yet?” “Not yet. There’s rumors she’s just going to do it herself.” “Well, if none of us are willing to do it I suppose she’ll have to.” “You’re not going to do it either? I heard you were willing to do it.” “I never said that. I said I didn’t know.” “Well I could never do it. To look into those innocent eyes and jab a needle into them. And kill them. Uh-uh, I could never do it.” The two got to working and kept busy through the better part of the morning. They did the feedings and took a few of the dogs out back to stretch their legs. Flora noticed a red tag on one of the cages. “What’s this?” “Oh, that’s right. You haven’t been here since Friday. That means he’s scheduled for today.” “You mean he’s gonna be put down?” “Yeah, isn’t it awful?”

192 “Well, Leo’s been here for what? A year?” “So, that doesn’t mean they should kill him.” “I’m just saying it makes sense he’d be one of the first.” “I think it’s awful.” “Well, let’s take him outside with the others.” “But he’s not with this group.” Joan lowered her voice to a whisper, as if the dog might over hear, “Plus, I mean, there’s not really any point in him getting any exercise, hun.” “But it’s his last chance.” “Well, if we get in trouble I’m blaming you.” They took the dogs to the yard and let them loose. Clouds were starting to gather and the air was cool. The yard wasn’t so much a yard as it was a patch of dirt surrounded by chain link fence but the dogs seemed to like it all the same. The one scheduled to die had a bum hind leg. He limped outside, maybe two steps, and laid down to rest. His black fur was ruff and ashen. He let out a big yawn and plopped his head in the dirt. “I guess that’s why nobody wants you, hey old boy?” Flora said, petting him. He raised his eyes a second to see her and turned away. “Aw, how can you talk like that?” Joan said. She bent down and started talking to him like a baby, “How can they just kill you, handsome boy? Huh? Aw, I’m gonna miss you.” She put her arms around his head and hugged him, putting her cheek against his face. She sprang up in disgust, “He snapped at me!” She was holding her cheek. “What’s wrong with you?” She kicked the dog in the ribs. He let out a yelp and hobbled away to lie down by the fence. “Joan! What was that for?” “He snapped at me!” “He doesn’t like it when people touch his ears like that. God, how long have you worked here?” “I didn’t kick him hard,” she went inside to wash her face. Flora followed her into the bathroom. “You can’t do that, Joan. I don’t care if wasn’t hard.” “Oh, what does it matter? I didn’t hurt him, Flora. God, relax. We both know what’s going to happen to him today, anyway.” Flora stood with her arms folded, thinking. “I just freaked out a little, ok? I’m sorry.” “Did he break the skin?” “What? Oh, no he didn’t even bite me,” Joan was scrubbing her cheek in the mirror. “Just got his gross slobber all over me.” * * * Hirah arrived shortly after noon. She wore her black hair short under her simple gray hijab. Underneath her lab coat she wore a faded tee shirt and a long brown skirt. She was twenty-some years Flora’s junior but spoke to her like it was the other way around. “Flora, follow me into the back,” she said without a hello. She took her to a room filled with filing cabinets. “What’s up?” Flora asked.

193 “What the hell has been going on back here?” “Excuse me?” “This,” Hirah gestured around the room with her arm. “I had to pull up records for a client yesterday and it took me nearly an hour to find what I needed.” She walked around violently opening the drawers. They were carelessly stuffed with manila folders—paper sticking out, others upside-down, some even torn. “The papers I needed were spread out between three different folders, in three different drawers.” “Joan’s supposed to be in charge of this. I’m never back here.” “I don’t want her to come back here anymore,” Hirah said with hands on her hips. “I want you to organize all of this. You don’t have to get it all done today, but get it done.” “I don’t even know where to start.” “You’ll figure it out. I’ll be in my office for the next few hours and then I’ll have to start the first of the euthanizing.” “Have you found someone to help yet?” “No, but I didn’t really expect to. It’s not a pleasant thing.” “I think I would like to help.” “Really? What made you change your mind?” “It’s not a change, I was never against helping.” “Then what made you say yes?” “I don’t know.” “But you’re sure?” “Yeah, I’m sure.” “Then I’ll come get you when I’m done my paperwork.” She left Flora alone to organize the mess. Flora stood awhile thinking. She took a folder out and stared at it. Thousands of papers with millions of letters and numbers, all the information in this room is worthless until the day you need it, she thought, every other day it just sits here forgotten. We need a system, she continued, otherwise it’s just chaos; otherwise people just do whatever they want. She thought about this, staring at the cabinets. Sleek gray steel, fluorescent light glaring off of them. She realized that a rule is only successful if people agree to follow it—really anything could be right. She began taking out folders and lying them open on the ground, trying to make sense of the task. She decided she would divide the cabinets into past and current records and the drawers into cats, dogs, and other, followed by identification numbers. Sometimes they got goats, sometimes even lizards. There was a lot to keep track of. The work was quiet and methodical and Flora found that she almost enjoyed it. It was structure and order and black-and-white. She understood it. She went through the folders and made several piles. By the time Hirah returned for her, the room looked worse than when she left. “Don’t tell me I made another mistake,” Hirah said. “No, I’m just organizing everything before putting them in the cabinets. Trust me, I have a whole system worked out.” “I’m sure Joan had a system too, doesn’t mean anything unless I understand it.”

194 “You will.” “Well, it’s time to start. I need you to go grab Leo. He’s our first.” “Leo?” “Yeah, why? You wanna adopt him?” “No. I can’t.” “Then go grab him.” * * * Flora walked down the long hall lined with steel cages. It looked like a prison. She knew it looked like a prison. But how else would you organize this many cages, she wonder. Leo was curled up on his blanket sleeping. She stared at him thinking. She was interrupted by the loud hum of the industrial air conditioner as it kicked on. Several of the dogs perked up and a few began to bark. It’s like they never get used to the damn thing, she thought. Leo didn’t stir though, she wouldn’t be saved from having to wake him. The barking quickly died down and all Flora could hear was the humming of the AC. It began to make a pattern in her ears as she stared at the sleeping animal, a low thumping in her ears. “What did you live for?” she mouthed. She opened the cage. She was needlessly quiet about it. She stroked his head, “Get up, boy. C’mon, get up. Time to go.” The dog struggled to his tired feet and followed her down the hall. Flora took him to the examination room but Hirah wasn’t there. “Down here,” Hirah called. Flora followed her voice to the very back of the building where a little room hid off to the side. “I didn’t know this was back here.” “Yeah, I used it for storage but I don’t know…” “How come you don’t just use the examination room?” “I said, I don’t know.” “I suppose you prefer to keep this separate from that?” “Sure,” she rolled her eyes. There were no chairs or tables in the room, just a dog bed with some blankets and a medical tray on wheels. “Today you just watch. I’ll show you how to insert the catheter and how to do the injections. Then next time I’ll supervise while you administer.” Flora led Leo onto the blankets and sat down alongside him stroking his head. Hirah took an electric razor off the tray and shaved off a small patch of fur. “You need to do this so you can put in the catheter. Then you disinfect the area,” she took the catheter and slipped it into the soft skin. “You have to get it just right,” she said fiddling with it. “Can you see that?” “Yeah.” “Then you put in the sedative. This takes a few seconds to work. After that we put in the final injection, which completely stops the heart. Sometimes their muscles will twitch a bit but it doesn’t mean they’re still alive.” Flora nodded her head. She stared at the needle in Hirah’s hands—they were shaking.

195 “Are you ok?” “Yes,” Hirah sat there staring at the dog. “You sure?” “I’m fine!” Hirah snapped. “I’m sorry, just give me a second.” They sat in the little room not saying anything. Several minutes passed. Then Hirah put the needle down, “Flora, I know I act tough. I have to, I’m the boss. But it doesn’t mean I like doing this.” “No, I understand. I never thought that.” “No, I mean it doesn’t mean I’m good at it.” Flora paused for a moment, “But you’re a vet.” “Look, after I graduated I got a job in this big practice. When you euthanize pets at an animal hospital you don’t do it like this. You’re not alone with the animal, the owners are there. They’re crying and petting them and talking to them. It’s awful.” “I imagine,” she was still stroking the dog’s head. “You’d think seeing enough of that would numb you to it but it was the opposite. It wore on me. After two years I couldn’t do it anymore. That’s why I quit,” she looked around the room as if she never saw it before. “Then I didn’t know what to do and I ended up starting this place. Over time you realize you can’t save them all.” She paused for a moment. “You know a man once tried to drop his cats off at a no-kill once and was turned away cause there was no room? I read this in the paper. He literally ran them over in the parking lot with his truck because he didn’t know what to do with them.” She looked up at Flora, “Literally threw them out of his window, backed his truck up, and ran the things over!” Hirah sat there staring at the needle. “I almost don’t blame him,” she trailed off. “I forgot how hard this was,” she forced a little laugh. “Let me do it.” Hirah looked up, confused. “Let me do it. The catheter’s the hard part, right? And that’s already done. Let me do it.” “No, you don’t have to do that. I’ll get myself together, just give me a minute.” “I want to do it,” Flora said, climbing forward and taking the needle from her. “Let me, please.” “Ok, just right there,” she said pointing to the opening of the catheter. “Hold that firm in your hand while gently and steadily depressing the plunger.” “Like this?” Flora slowly injected the sedative into his leg. His eyes began to droop, his tongue hung out a little. “Now the other. Same as before.” Flora watched the dark cloudy solution disappear into the animal. Within seconds his heart stopped. She could see herself inverted in the reflective film of his eyes, still wet with life. She thought of how easy it was to push the plunger, how easy he slipped into death. Crossed the threshold, water spilling over the lip of a glass. There was something nice in it, she thought. She wasn’t sure what was nice about it but she was sure there was something. She found herself thinking of a TV show she once saw about these monks in Tibet or somewhere. Standing on a mountain in the snow, wrapped in gold and red. Praying and meditating and causing no harm. She thought they were wonderful but it’s easy to be a saint when that’s all you do, she

196 remembered thinking, when you don’t have a job or a family or bills. When you don’t have a million responsibilities curving your spine into a horseshoe. It’s easy then, she thought. But something in it made her think of those monks. Maybe I just found peace, she thought, no it don’t work like that. Maybe I oughta go be one. Or maybe I’m who they’re praying for. She placed her hand on the dog’s head and looked once more into his eyes. They were drying up now, two black wells with no bottom. “There’s nothing down there,” she said, “nothing down there.” “What?” Hirah asked. “Nothing, are we done?” “We’re done with him but we have five more today. Are you up for it?” “Yes.” Hirah removed the catheter and cleaned up the used materials. They struggled putting him into the bag. Another facility would deal with the cremation. She handled the other five with the same ease and grace as she did the first and the time passed quickly. Neither spoke till it was over and even then, it was just, see you tomorrow. * * * Flora walked out into the late afternoon and got in her car. The sky was overcast and gray. It was beginning to rain. She turned the key and the radio started talking again. This time about a woman who abandoned her kids at a child services building. Well that seems like a good place to do it, she thought. As she waited to turn onto the road she could see a dog on the other side, sniffing at some garbage. “Nikia Wallace, thirty-five, mother of two, refused to take her children with her,” the reporter said. Flora stared at the dog. It was chewing at some fast food bag. “She just refused,” an employee being interviewed said, “We told her we were closing and that if she came back tomorrow, maybe we could work something out. She started yelling in the lobby. Said she rather go to jail than take her kids back.” The dog gave up on the bag and walked towards the road. It would hesitantly stick its head out and look around at the blur of traffic. It would take a step and then walk back. It repeated this ritual several times. No one else seemed to take any notice of it. “Wallace left the building and was arrested shortly after. Later she explained to officers that her eldest, age seven, had mental health issues she could no longer afford.” The dog started to step out into the street. That woman had three choices, Flora thought, none of them good. She turned off the radio, pulled out, and drove home.

THE GIST: Along with being a Contributing Editor to the Blue Nib, Ada Wofford is bravely avoiding her inevitable 9-5 enslavement by studying library science at UW-Madison. She holds a BA in English literature and has been published in number of journals.

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