*

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.

*

A shower of small black stones

The daily toll

To keep the ghouls at bay

That nestled

Deathly still

Behind those rotting boards

Watching

As you passed

From dark and silent eyes

Sending you flying

On a windy day

With a wayward howl from that gaping maw

Even the

Hulking black birds

Quietened as they clawed its broken thatch

Forty years on

A once-cheery usurper stands in its place

Paying doleful tribute to its forbear’s fate

*

Biography

Anne Casey is a writer, poet and lyricist with over 25 years’ experience in print and electronic publishing, creative writing, media communications and business development. Her poems have been published online and in print. Her first poetry collection will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2017.

*

Armed to the teeth

with half the years that I have now,

he sat on our goals.

Eating jelly babies.

The sugared flour

ruining his camouflage.

Dark hands proffering gelatine,

I took what he offered.

Rising, he kicked the ball back in,

rejoined his squad,

and the game continued.

From behind a twitchers curtain,

a loving call to which I ran

straight into the slap.

The child’s learning.

Do not take sweets from the enemy.

*

Biography

Born in 1972, Hugh was brought up between rural Wicklow and troubled Belfast. He is one of nine brothers, thirty six cousins and is a father of two. He has a deep love of both words and numbers, but as with his children, can never decide which he loves best.

*

A snippet of the fairytale from Snow White’s perspective

*

Mother, the moon approaches,

and the sky is still and full of snow,

a late snow falling deep into spring

and the woods, and the dark words of a woman,

who sits with her tears and talks to the mirror.

Mother, the wind is thin and full of crying,

and the woods are deep with pleading fingers.

A spinning wheel clatters

deeper in footsteps of frozen moonlight.

My stitches stretch in front of me, patchwork,

like the fields used to be; full of poppies,

red as the blood on my finger where the needle slipped,

once too often and blinded all around it.

I used to cry for you under the old horse chestnut,

where you might walk into my dreaming.

You would sit and lay your white hands

on empty garden seats, silent swing moving,

rose petals at your feet and on your grave

where the emptiness was louder

when everyone walked away,

and left me there to wait

for the sky to fall and fill like swollen eyes.

I placed my finger on the snow and ran it red,

thawing and melting all around it, life red,

and dust coloured.

Daughter, it is spring;

the mill- wheels turn and water spills

and falls.  Light falls low.

Your fingers, glisten heavy on the patchwork,

The raven’s beak dripped smoke,

fire and light from a corner of the sky.

I saw shadows ahead and lifted my face,

wanting to feel the cold once more.

Run deeper, with your ghosts, and find

your place within those woods

you never enter.  This house is dark now,

and the glass holds its shadow over you.

Daughter you must run fast and search hard for daylight

in your frozen world, away from her silence.

She’ll have your heart, one way or another.

*

Biography

Lucie Kavanagh lives in Co Mayo in the west of Ireland with an array of pets and plants. She works as a social care worker, though she is currently on sick leave and learning to find her writing voice which has been silent for a while.

*

I was born the mother

you were born the child.

While I was exceedingly sensible,

you were passionately wild.

Wild child,

wild child, a source of white heat

with the life bursting out of you

like it was trying to compete.

I didn’t stand a chance. I stayed.

You played in the             darkest corner of the night

beneath a diminishing moon,

your lipstick neon pink,

like an ice-cream parlour in June.

I told you it was too bright,

you defied me

by adding another layer.

I wished you had taken it off

but it seemed you didn’t care, when

I sat in your chair with no homework done.

How could I analyze a poem,

when I constantly stared at the clock

and asked, ‘When is my child coming home?’

You stayed.           I prayed that I could someday

understand this tortuous role reversal,

but I still made you tea, put you to bed

and washed your underwear in Persil.

You died.

I cried because a mother should never have

to bury a child.

*

Biography

*

May 28^th

When I looked into your room

that day, I didn’t know

you were on the edge of death.

Your breath went

and came again, you slept deeply

like the child that you were,

the covers covered you.

I woke to changes in the air,

how it moved, where it settled.

In the vivid blue of a May morning

we went from even to odd

a new number

countenanced in your absence,

a new mother

a new father

a new brother

a new sister.

Familiar shapes re-formed

in the breach you created.

For days I circled the minutes taken

from your ribs, the muffled sigh

of your insides emptying out.

A red coat lay limp on the chair, I felt

the airborne currents of your longing,

your hair was on the hairbrush still.

This is the way life thinks about death.

How weightless is the last breath.

*

Her room

is lit with the small details of a life; odd socks,

a shoe half hidden beneath the bed,

the soft flowered quilt, uncrumpled now.

Crayons, paper planes, pink faded ted.

Day after day, I lie where she lay, her pillow-smell

flashes images; a face bled white,

fingers and silver beads twined tight, nails

of half-moon blue, hair curled in auburn light.

Across the window curtains drift, summer leaves

sashay in the breeze. I am ten. I see the glow

of corn-blue eyes, hear the echo of life’s

intention, its swift ungiving.

*

Biography

Eithne Lannon is a native of Dublin and teaches in Kilbarrack. She has had work published in Bare Hands, Issue 23, 2016, Skylight 47, Issue 6, 2016: A New Ulster, Issue 42, March 2016, the anthology ‘And Agamemnon Dead’, 2015, A New Ulster, Issue 28, January 2015 and forthcoming, Headstuff, Strange Bedfellows series, 2016. She had two poems shortlisted for the Galway Hospital Arts Competition in 2016.

She does regular open mics, has co-hosted the Gladstone Readings in 2015 and 2016, read at Skerries Soundwaves Festival, September, 2015 and Skerries Donkey Shots Festival, 2015 & 2016. She is currently Artist in Residence in Loughshinny Boathouse, Co. Dublin.