The Blue Nib Magazine 40 New Poetry, Fiction, Reviews & Essays September 2019 ! ISBN 978-1-9161545-2-0 The Blue Nib Magazine 40 New Poetry, Fiction, Reviews & Essays January 2020 First published in Ireland in 2020 by The Blue Nib Copyright © The Blue Nib The rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988 All rights reserved Cover image from Pixabay 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 Short Fiction Paris Vagrant By Michael Paul Hogan 1 The Duck, a story in five parts by Reyna Marder Gentin 7 Blood by Brian Kirk 10 My Uncle In The Ospital by Rosemary McLeish 16 Essays Twice Exiled by Greg Michaelson 21 Personal Banking by Linda C. Wisniewski 28 An Exploration of the Rise and Fall of Alt-Lit by Ada Wofford 33 Where does poetic inspiration come from? by Denise O’Hagan 43 On bilingualism, innate hybridity and loss 45 Poetry Selected by Clara Burghelea Editorial 47 Michelle Bermudez 49 Enough already. 50 Emily Bilman 52 Jill Neimark 53 Featured Poet, Elliott Freeman 54 Jodie Hannis 58 Paige Elizabeth Wajda 60 Jake Charles Hawkey 62 Sandy Green 64 Jennifer Crompton 65 Diana Manole 67 Mary Mulholland 70 James Finnegan 72 Lucy Dixcart 73 Fiona Pitt-Kethley 74 Simeon Dumdum Jr 75 Colin Pink 77 Kymm Coveney 79 Ben Verinder 81 Hibah Shabkhez 83 Clare Morris 84 Glenn Hubbard 85 Andrea Potos 86 Alina Stefanescu 88 Featured Poets and Writers Poetry and Short Fiction by Tracy Gaughan 90 Mittens for Nasma 90 Poetry by Tracy Guaghan 92 Interview with Tracy Gaughan 97 Bill Cushing 110 Emma Lee Speaks to Bill Cushing 115 Featured Poet, Helen Moore 118 Denise O’Hagan speaks to Helen Moore 122 Featured Poet, Anthony Lawrence 127 Denise O’Hagan speaks to Featured Poet Anthony Lawrence 132 Poetry Selected by Denise O’Hagan Editorial 137 Ben Hession 140 Justin Lowe 141 Peter Mitchell 144 Jenny Blackford 147 Ivy Ireland 149 Nadia Rhook 151 Philip Muir 154 Ellen Shelley 156 Moya Pacey 158 Rob Shackne 159 Siobhan Hodge 160 David Atkinson 162 Michele Seminara 164 Sandra Renew 165 Susan Howard 166 Brenda Saunders 167 Bree Alexander 169 Laura Jan Shore 171 Rose Lucas 173 Reviews curated by Emma Lee The Tradition’ Jericho Brown – Reviewed by Emma Lee 179 In Nearby Bushes’ By Kei Miller -Reviewed 183 River Wedding’ By Amlanjyoti Goswami -Reviewed by James Fountain 186 Birds with Horse Hearts’ by Eleanor Walsh Reviewed by 189 Short Fiction Paris Vagrant By Michael Paul Hogan I often wander through the streets of Paris completely destitute, wearing a corduroy jacket and a workingman’s cap, accompanied only by the sound of the nails in the soles of my boots as I clatter and spark beside the quais and under the bridges along the banks of the Seine – although sometimes, from the shadows of an archway, a voice will cry out, “Bonjour, Monsieur le Vagabond!” “Bonjour, Jean-Jacques le Chapardeur!” “Are you come to repay the cigarette I gave you?” “The cigarette from the cigarette case you stole in the Luxembourg Gardens?” “The cigarette you owe me, you thieving swine.” “The cigarette that burns like a candle in your sister’s eye socket? Adieu, mon ami.” “Va au diable!” “Farewell.” The nights are cold but the dawns are colder. Even the sparks I strike off the cobblestones are as cold as stars. Sometimes a man will approach me, a well-dressed man, a man in a knee-length overcoat and with turn-ups on his well-cut trousers and wearing English-style leather shoes, a man who will congratulate me on my poverty – “You must be a poet, my son. To be so poor is to understand the passion of Rimbaud and Villon. Do you understand what I mean by the word passion?” “I think I do, sir. It means suffering.” “To suffer is a gift, my son, a gift you must use as the vagabond poets of the streets used it before you. Here – ” and then put a hundred-Franc note in my dirt-engrained hand. “Thank you, sir. Thank you!” I look up from the almost unbelievable piece of paper, but he is gone, his footsteps deadened by the mist that haunts the early morning river, only the echo of his parting phrase “Je vous en prie! Spend it not wisely, my son, but well!” hanging in the damp and dismal air like the music of a bal musette. * I wake up in darkness – not the darkness of night, but the beautiful sub-aquatic darkness of a room from which the sunlight has been filtered through window blinds and green velvet curtains that hang from ceiling to floor. The darkness of safety. Of tranquility. Of caves in the sides of mountains !1 that hide behind waterfalls… Of bathyspheres lowered by winches and cables through the depths of the oceans to the bottom of the sea… * “Wake up! Wake up, why won’t you?” The knocking on the door is like physical pain, the anticipation of the next blow worse than the pain of the last – “Open the door. We know you’re in there!” To open the door would be to die. To open the door would be to let Death enter, a form of suicide, as impossible, as appalling, as truly sickening as the contemplation of a pavement ten / twelve stories below, the crack of one’s head on icy concrete, the echo of the shattering of one’s skull, the sound of fists on a sanctuary door, the voices goading you to Jump! Jump! Jump! “Open up, damn you! You know you can’t stay in there forever!” I grind my face into the pillow and clutch the counterpane until my knuckles turn white. I say (but softly, so softly that only a sparrow on a chimney pot in Montmartre can hear), “Yes, I can! Yes, I can! Yes, I can…” * I stand up from the floating platform upon which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are lounging behind identical pairs of blue-tinted silver-framed sun spectacles and dive in a perfect arc into the turquoise-lacquered golden-rippled Cap d’Antibes. * The captain of the Marie Roget tightened the lid of the bathysphere one last time, saluted us through the thickened glass observation window, and gave orders for Professor Apollinax and myself to be lowered into the deep… How extraordinary to descend through strata beneath strata of seemingly infinite varieties of blue then green then previously unknown variations of purple, ending (or merely beginning?) with the profoundest, most psychologically oppressive expression of black! The fish that populate these deeps are of a nature so grotesque to be almost fantastical. They are translucent white and carry their own illumination with which to penetrate the infernal dark. Some have stalks on their heads that carry electric bulbs like wilting flowers; others are studded with lights and thus resemble illuminated bateaux mouches on the Paris Seine. After thirty or forty minutes of awed silence I turned to Professor Apollinax and said, !2 “My dear Professor, I do believe we have entered a world of which God is as ignorant as we.” “My earnest fear,” replied the Professor, “is that God is ignorant of our world and that we have intruded into the world of God…” * I smoke a cigarette in the semi-darkness of my room and pray the silence will continue. Just time, I hear myself asking, just time to drink one more glass of cognac, to smoke one more from a sky-blue packet of Gauloises caporal… The smoke hangs in the air, undulating, ululating, rippling the way jellyfish ripple in the South China Sea… * After three hours of continuous descent, during which Professor Apollinax filled an entire notebook with detailed sketches and commentaries, I began to experience an alternative reality in which I was the occupant of a balloon taking off from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on a cold (it was cold in the bathysphere) December afternoon. The fish, with their extraordinary lamp-like illuminations, became a circle of photographers, all of whom wore top hats, their flash-bulbs exploding, the puffs of smoke hanging and then dissolving in the chilly air. I waved my handkerchief from the basket, acknowledging the cheers of a small but enthusiastic crowd. The anchors were cut free. I was almost immediately fifty feet above the ground. How beautiful the roofs of Paris are, seen from their own elevation, dusted with a gorgeous chiaroscuro of soot and snow! I turned up the collar of my overcoat and floated over the Quartier Latin of Montparnasse, the windows and skylights of the artists’ ateliers flickering silver and yellow in the rapidly darkening late afternoon, an occasional face framed in the anguish of composition as I (and my balloon) floated only a few feet from the grimy slates and silhouetted chimney tops. Hola! In one an artist with his back to me was painting a model who lay naked on a divan. The model was a strikingly beautiful young girl of maybe nineteen, but the portrait on the canvas was an extraordinary collage of seemingly random colours and shapes. As though to see a balloon floating just outside the window was the most natural thing in the world, the girl acknowledged my presence with the merest flicker of a smile, an almost imperceptible enlargement of one eye, both of which I returned with the smallest of bows.