*

During the sojourn of my youth

I ventured on a journey

Across time

and flat land

(I never had tons of verbiage)

 

And why we lived lives of waiting,

hoping for the unhoped

long expecting the unexpected?

 

The guests are due here today

(Our guests will arrive shortly)

 

As a child

I didn’t toy with dirt

I didn’t fight with boys nor girls

– I didn’t toy like children would toy –

I climbed trees and dreamed from the treetops

Gazing into the horizon

As if horizon was the future

As if land had anything to do with time

(Land has nothing to do with time)

 

As a child

I didn’t hope, I didn’t overthink

I dreamt lucid dreams at nights

and dreamed of better days

when I would grow

(I didn’t think I wanted to grow)

I wanted to grow

 

But there won’t be darker days and there won’t be better days

Only the night is dark; the day is brighter than the dark

Days are not darker, nor better

and nights are not better than the days

 

Darker days are not coming

They have been long present

Shadow intruders,

forced guests overstaying their present’s welcome

(Who’s the host and who’s the guest,

who’s guesting which host?)

 

And now what will happen?

Shall I wait for the brighter days?

Days are just days, and nights are just nights

There are good days and bad days;

There would be good days and there would be bad days

There will be days –––––––

And there will be nights;

and these are just dates

But they’re no guests

(guests have no guests)

*

Biography

Stelios Hadjithomas is a lawyer (currently not practicing), a published copywriter, an online editor, a researcher and art professional with a focus on organizational management and user behavior. His interests include contemporary visual art, technology, and marketing. A hopeless romantic at heart, he is also an author working with storytelling, words, speech, and new media. He is currently working on his debut novel andfirst poetry collection. A brother and an uncle, a son and godfather, he comes from a long family of eight. His poetry has appeared in the The Honest Ulsterman and Spontaneity.

*

Hazel Copse

We chittered like squirrels

gathering the hazels from the branches,

picked them bare, before the local fauna,

leaving them only windfall to forage,

safe in the embrace of our mother’s gaze.

My sister’s wrong footed, red wellies.

 

Past the church and graveyard on the hill,

the hazel copse stood in the back fields.

Only local cows surrounded us and a lone

fairy gate of two whitethorn trees

woven together in an arch.

Neiphin’s peak stood watching

in the distance.

 

We’d ripen the nuts in batches

in the range heated kitchen,

lay them out on the floor on newspaper.

We watched the green over days

turn to roasted butter brown.

Cracked them with our baby teeth

and cracked her patience too.

 

But rentable land can’t have copses;

they bulldozed a scar for progress across

my heart when they flattened the hazels.

Removed the landmarks that anchored me.

*

Exile

We were dragged up on the road,

moved from place to place,

every few years a new house,

in town or out of town.

 

Townie in one place,

Culchie in another,

Jackeens to the Culchies.

Till we were all names and none,

belonged nowhere.

 

Chameleon like in personality

we changed to fit in

till we didn’t even know ourselves

and some still don’t.

 

Now that itch to not stay feels right,

to stay feels wrong but still

we are filled with longing

to belong.

*

Patchwork

Let your needle run through
The patchwork quilt of my confidence

Let the thread pull closed
The ragged edges

Let the blanket stitch smooth
The frayed ends that unravel
Use my porcupine quills
As your needle

Take my heart in your rough hands
Scarred from pin cushioned jabs

Let me hold your tired arms
As you sew my tattered trust of touch

Let my colours shine through
Your gold and silver stitching
Woven like strands of prism light.

*

Biography

Rena Garrett has just completed the MA in Writing student in NUIG. She has been published in The Moth Magazine, Spontaneity.org and was shortlisted for the Galway Rape Crisis Centre Short Story Competition 2016. She will be a featured reader at the Over the Edge Reading in Galway in August.

*

I can remember the feral children from next door, their outstretched claws

The sieve-like quality to their coats, bright eyes and grubby faces.

 

A Dickensian novel brought to life by the smell of cooked scones

With mother always obliging, tea-towel-wrapping steaming spheres

 

To be taken home so the warmth could be shared amongst the family.

From the porch I would watch their tracks dissipate in the snow down

 

Our winding avenue, three wise men laden with compressed gifts of

Sultanas, flour and margarine and how the moon shone differently that

 

Night, curling conspiratorially, tugging at the drawstrings of their

Jackets.  Urging those footsteps faster and faster through the dark.

 

Forgotten footsteps until a random errand forced us out into the gleaning void

When rounding a bend our headlights caught wolf-like movement in the hedgerow.

 

Six eyes transfixed by the glare, so startled that scone pieces good be seen

pirouetting through the air, the look of innocent savagery on pale crumby faces

 

That reminds me today of a light in our hallway that shines on half the staircase.

How best made intentions often give way to the dark; how we are constantly caught

 

In the no-man-space between self-preservation and camaraderie

Squabbling with each other among the ruins.

*

Biography

Vincent Steed has been published in the Galway Review, Headstuff, Into the void, Crannog and Skylight 47. He was longlisted for the 2015 & 2016 Over the Edge competition and shortlisted for the 2016 Doolin poetry competition.

*

Teddy bears talk to each other at night.

All fish are called Nemo.

Your lovely eyes will fall out

from watching too much television.

There are fairies at the bottom of the garden.

If you are very quiet you might hear them.

The moon is looking right at you tonight so wave !

We are all kind to each other.

Books and toys get lonely too and it’s ok to be sad.

I will always be here.

*

Biography

Jackie Gorman is from Athlone. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Wordlegs, The Honest Ulsterman, The Galway Review, Headspace, Bare Hands ,The Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and Obsessed With Pipework. She has been highly commended in the Goldsmith International Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Awards. She received the Phizzfest Poetry Award in 2016. Her poetry has appeared in the writing anthologies ; “Ring Around The Moon”, edited by Noel Monahan and “Respond”, edited by Alan McMonagle. She is currently studying for an MA in Poetry Studies at the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at DCU.

 

*

Springing from beneath a rock,

Clear water dancing in the rays.

Sunlight gleams on every drop,

It laughs and gurgles, trips and plays.

 

Does it travel on forever?

To another world perhaps?

Does it enter, exit never?

The dark woods keeping it in wraps.

 

Do fairies dance by the waters

When the dusk steals o’er the mountains?

Dwarves chased a fairy, never caught her;

Perhaps she hid in its crystal fountains.

*

Biography

Aoife McBride hails from Donegal originally and now lives in Dublin. She wrote her first poem at the age of eight and has scribbled her way through a Masters in English Literature at UCD.  As a teenager, she won poetry prizes at the Allingham Arts Festival and Listowel Writers’ Week. As an adult, she has written for college newsletters, had an article published by U Magazine and had a poem accepted for the soon-to-be-released anthology ‘1916-2016: An Anthology of Reactions.’

*

I’ll read your death at breakfast- a small article

woven just beneath another story-

“Historic Oak tree removed for public saftey…”-

that instruments, tuned to every sharp , sang you hollow

and the men eyeing your open cage

counted your rings,

one for every year you held a shadow.

 

When I was three feet from the earth

you were my monster,

eating each figment，

your lungs had howled a century

bracing every one of them-

the storms that shook you-

the lightening, war ready,

itching to parse you.

 

At six feet, I saw your skin everywhere,

stoic on infinite fields, cast in an overhang on streets-

under dinner plates-

holding up spines and crooked backs.

 

Years from now, returned to four feet,

men eyeing my open trunk-,

my rings countless,

I will remember you

overseeing our Sunday picnic, sighing

your arms braced.

Little acrobats lost from parents ascending,

small hands hooking your royal skin

sometimes falling

unable to catch them,

to float beneath your tower.

 

And when the sun

folds itself into the horizons breast,

I’ll look back to you & see my father, linear,

draining himself behind you – ushering me away,

you, the silent sentry

side by side-

two old Kings-

two great Beasts.

 

I’ll hear the fade of my mother

swimming the incus of my ear

 

Hurry pet, or we’ll leave you behind.

*

Biography

Simon Costello graduated from Athlone Institute of Technology Ireland with a B.A in Law, and currently work as a childrens’ English teacher in China. He has completed a poetry workshop under Irish poet Eileen Casey. He was previously long listed for a competition with Brilliant Flash Fiction in Ireland.

*

Callous Alice

When a bad shot sent the ball into her front garden

Callous Alice came running out

with a big knife out of an ‘80s slasher film,

a knife that was both a blade

and a wicked, stainless steel smile.

 

We’d watch her gleefully cut the ball open,

slice our games to tragic ends.

It was a quality meant for young love,

that eagerness, that zealousness of hers,

her dressing gown often cape-like behind her.

 

There were rumours going about, too,

that Callous Alice had been leaving out poison

for all the curious cats in the neighbourhood.

Too many were inexplicably vanishing.

Everyone believed she was guilty.

 

Back then none of us would have been surprised

to see Callous Alice on the news, to learn

she was guilty of a series of grisly murders.

We’d seen her ecstasy opening up a football

and knew enough to name this evil.

*

Poem for a Tree

“There were one too many poems about trees,

            leaves and the changing of seasons…”

– Róisín Kelly, note from a review of The Rain on Cruise’s Street

 

There’s a reviewer in the near future

advising against this.

I can sense her there, sitting at her desk,

her head shaking at the title

while the light of confused weather

comes through the window.

 

Against her better judgement, though,

the words on keep leaving my pen

and falling autumnally

onto the page, itself

once a tree, now playing

the ironic role of preservation.

 

The particular tree has suffered.

Since the years of my childhood

and today, still, it suffers.

 

It always tilted enough

to be easily climbed and this moment,

as a result of our games,

it is close as can be to horizontal.

 

We tied many rope swings out of it

and, naturally, we spent those years

getting heavier, pulling it downwards

 

with our bulks, yet – near impossibly –

it keeps on going, keeps on being a tree,

it’s stoicism equally

a comic and tragic sight,

with never the slightest temptation in it

to give an undeserved inch to gravity.

 

Here in the present, I understand

that there are small yet significant guilts

that etch their names beneath the skin,

and that the braille of them

tells the body to tell memory

that their healing needs the right salve,

and so I must ignore

said reviewer’s disapproval,

remind myself this was never about trees

and leaves and the changing of seasons.

*

Biography

Edward O’Dwyer, from Limerick, has poetry published in magazines and anthologies throughout the world, such as The Forward Book of Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Manchester Review, A Hudson View Poetry Digest, The Houston Literary Review, and many others. His debut collection, The Rain on Cruise’s Street (2014), is published by Salmon Poetry, from which the follow-up is due early 2017. He is an editor for Revival Press, a community publishing house in Limerick. He was selected in 2010 by Poetry Ireland for their Introduction Series. He has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Award, the Desmond O’Grady Prize and the North West Words Prize, among others. His work has been nominated for Forward, Pushcart, and Best of the Web prizes and is translated into Slovene and Romanian.

*

Bypassed

We shot some black and white:

fields to be forgotten

hideouts in hazel glades

scabby knees and binoculars

we were tomboys equipped

with notions of eternity

like magpies followed

our silver through clumps

and roots up to the stars

yielding to kestrels and silver birch shedding

til tar divided us

poured stretch marks over our time

to the zoom of Exit Seven.

We would freeze it all in 10mm,

measure the length of a day

against feathers collected and barbed wired cuts

every stitch filthy from no good shenanigans

 

We are with the badgers now

scuttling across motorways

determined to travel

our ancestral pathways

succumbing to the simple idea; home.

Knowing we are changed by places

as much as they are changed by us

 *

The Blue Bicycle

Nothing has guided me through life

like my blue bicycle

teaching me about the edge

how to fall off the map and into nettles

my eight year old wails

where I heard the first sound

of my own cry,

realised the world is not flat.

 

Since then I’ve pedalled in and

out of disasters

learned about the farthest reaches

fields beyond the fields,

great downhills, no hands,

secret hideouts within

and without.

 

We still follow midsummer across the fields

watch the clouds throw themselves

over our long shadows,

freewheel through winking poppies,

seeds bursting

til the horizon swings around to meet us

and the revolutions of humming things

remind me how everything

goes back to the beginning.

 *

Biography

Aoife Reilly is a primary teacher and psychotherapist living in Co. Galway, Ireland. She attends poetry workshops at the Galway Arts Centre with Kevin Higgins. Her poems have been published in Crannóg, Skylight 47, The Ogham Stone (U.L. Literary and Arts Journal,), Ropes, The Galway Review, A New Ulster, The Lake, in other on-line magazines and on the Poethead website. She was a featured reader at the Over The Edge Series in Galway City Library in 2015. Aoife was short listed for the Doolin Poetry Prize 2015 and long listed for the 2015 Over The Edge New Writer of the Year award. She was selected to read at the Cúirt International Literature Festival as part of Cúirt 2016/ Over The Edge New Irish Writing.

* 

Past stone circles on meandering

northern bends, upon the wet

lash of Sutherland a magician stands.

I could swear I climbed up

there and put my palm to his boot.

 

It only became apparent one day, years later,

sunlight on the backs of stags by the railway line,

chimneys sighing over quiet morning glen,

that it was not possible, his foot’s about seventy feet up.

As clouds parted the single-track road rolled out in front of us.

*

Biography

 

*

The china

our mother brought out

for the clergy

bore a faint whiff of Flit insecticide

from the plywood back

of the walnut cabinet.

 

That china,

thin as eggshell,

brought images of afternoon tea

in great Irish houses,

or mischief

in Maugham’s colonial homes.

Such china —

an inquisitive boy could

be scorched

by blue dragons

or drown

in its depths of red and gold.

*

Biography

Louis Mulcahy is a potter who writes poetry. His work has been published widely in quality publications and read on RTE1, Lyric Radio and Radio na Gaeltachta. He has three collections of Poetry one in Irish and two in English, all published by An Sagart Publications.  He has served as Chairman of the Crafts Council of Ireland and of Samhlaíocht Chiarraí. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of Ireland. He is married to the tapestry artist Lisbeth Mulcahy.