Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and is a dual American and Irish citizen. Her poetry include Consent (Doire Press, 2013), Imagines (New Dublin Press, 2015/ICAD prizewinner), and Strange Country (2015), her full-length collection on the sheela-na-gig stone carvings. Eyewear Publishing released her version of the Hymn to Kālī in May 2016. ZimZalla will publish MOTHERBABYHOME, a book of conceptual and visual poetry next year. In summer 2017, poems from MOTHERBABYHOME will appear in Laudanum Publishing’s second chapbook anthology alongside work by Fran Lock and Abigail Parry. Kimberly’s play Constance and Eva – about the revolutionary sisters Constance Markiewicz and Eva Gore-Booth – will be produced in London at Bread and Roses Theatre in September 2017.
Now the wracked bodies
of charred rabbits
have disappeared
from the fields
and the village is flooded
with people who can’t
speak the language.
Each day we help each other
peel back our eyelids
despite the sun.
We prepare food
with a rusting knife
made by a child
we don’t know
laboring
on the other side of the world.
We sharpen
a hundred pencils each
and work on new lines
to press into our palms
new veins to line our legs
new omniscience
to goad our hearts.
II.
To displace
the obelisk’s
stacked stone
To invent new trumpets
tubas saxophones
To march
To attack first with rosemary
then predictions
to demand money
to accept tears
To run up the street
from our offices
in high heels
to grab our babies
to feed them
from our breasts
then and there
To light candles
in the grotto
to light so many
it will explode
III.
I squat over these rising white ribbons,
these maggots reaching
and twisting themselves
from a rotting leg joint.
They promise me
there are salves
for all of this.
Salves stronger
than nuclear waste
with a smell
that could fill a church
like incense.
Biologists say
a maggot’s whole body
is covered with ocular cells,
eyes that never blink.
They always
respond to the light.
Copper kills sperm offerings, you see.
An old knowledge. That, and its
T-shape hovers and bounces
along womb walls, evicting occupants.
A bucranium within a bucranium.
Bull’s head and horns of the goddess.
Uterus and fallopian tubes. The coil.
Once we drilled holes in her stone belly,
filled them with branches and antlers
spreading outward like a child’s fingers
reaching for an egg. Once we carved
a triangle above her pubis
for the bull’s nose breathing
heat, rustling and shining wet
before the charge. Once we handed the ear
to the man who killed best. The heavy
body falling. The throngs rising
to their feet. Or we snatched rosettes
tied to the horns, twirled their
stems in our fingers, brought the petals
to our noses. And all of this means something. Perhaps then, as now.
Now, this act of gynecology—someone
must reach in and twirl its strings
so we can know it’s still there.
Will it be me, or you? Copper
kills sperm offerings, you see. Once we
excarnated our corpses. Crows
tore skin from fat, fat from flesh,
exposed the bull’s horns for the first time.
When bones
heal
we say
they knit
themselves
together.
Are we
plaiting ourselves
together
like the bones
of tantric dance aprons
human remains
carved first
sized perfectly
dipped
in liquid
to preserve
colour
for at least
1,000 years?
Or are we
mostly
shattered
stacked upon
ourselves
making
ourselves
substantial
like catacomb
arrangements?
And now
are you
slicing
and pulling
back
my scalp to see my skull’s
growth lines
proof
that I
have been? Am I seeing
your lines
right through
your skin?
Are you
coming
closer
closer
so I’ll crack
you open
and drink?
Noel Duffy’s debut collection, In the Library of Lost Objects, appeared with Ward Wood Publishing, London, in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish poet. His second collection On Light & Carbon followed in 2013. His most recent collection, Summer Rain, was published in summer 2016, again with Ward Wood. His poetry has been published widely in Ireland and beyond, including in Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times and The Financial Times, and has also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. He lives in Dublin.
There is a man among us who knows secrets.
He gets up when night comes, looks
at the outline of the woman’s body, a question mark
against the sheets as he dresses quickly
and leaves her there asleep. He is already late,
but then everything is his life is late, or lost
as he retrieves his car from the apartment carpark
to make his nightshift at the sorting depot.
There it is his duty to piece together the clues
and runes of misspelt addresses, the half-remembered
names, the scrawling handwriting, undecipherable;
the lost love letters or wedding invitations
written to those long since parted or departed –
to try, at least, to find a place to return them to,
so the one who sent them may know they went
undelivered, touched only by his hands.
This work his solitary calling as he inspects
the items from the tray, delicately lifting one
from the pile as he applies steam to the yellowed
parchment, his hand a soft caress to ease it open
to find there a cursive script but no return address,
the loss so carefully expressed, now his and his only.
You lean down close to the blossom, inhale deeply;
the stem straight, the perfect contours of the stamen,
the tight, precise folds of containing petals. There is
a sadness in the opulent grace of such things whose
season is passing. The August sunshine suddenly
darkens, the cloud thickening to rain. I take your hand
as we run to take cover, passing beneath the creepers
that climb the arching ironwork trellis of the entrance
to the rose garden. You pull tight your yellow overcoat
and we hurriedly make our way towards the shelter
of the vaulting glass of the Victorian palm house,
the slam of humid heat that meets us as we enter,
the intense odour of sweat reminding us of ourselves.
You shake away the rain and laugh as an old couple
walk past slowly, holding hands, carrying each other along,
like the century flower that blooms only once in its lifetime,
but endures so many seasons to continue so.
The print lies in the tray, the image of the hotel
emerging in the red sundown of the darkroom,
the filigree of the ironwork window boxes painted over
in the double-exposure of memory’s flashbulb
and the rust of time passing. What stories lie behind
these boarded-up windows overlooking the promenade,
the sea still washing up against the harbour wall,
yet forgetful of everything: the women in their
tightened corsets and flounce of tresses, attended upon;
the men in their bowler hats and spotted neckties;
the reliquary of old, faded postcards of the silver-nitrate
past as the ghosts of maids continue to walk the corridors
ascending and descending staircases that lead nowhere
in the stopped watch of someone else’s afterlife.
And the figure of a man caught in the scene, standing
beneath the spotlight of a street lamp, staring back at me.
We approach the jetty by a narrow path
the boat shifting with the lake’s waters.
I hold your hand as you step
from the wooden platform in half-shadow
to the rocking seat, the cradling bow
measuring your weight as it tilts slightly
beneath you, the water lapping against the hull.
I climb onto the seat behind you, push
the oars down deep into the surface,
the lake receiving my giving force
and we push outward from the bank into
obsidian waters. A crescent moon rises
above the distant treetops of the island,
your shrill laughter echoing in the stillness
the stars plotting our course through darkness
into the night’s forbidden navigations.
Patrick Deeley was born in Loughrea, County Galway, in 1953. He worked as a primary school teacher and later as principal in De La Salle School, Balyfermot, before taking early retirement in 2012 to devote himself full-time to writing. Many of his early poems were published in the New Irish Writing page of The Irish Press in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then his work has appeared in several leading literary journals in Ireland, UK, USA, and Canada. Patrick’s poems have been included in approximately fifty anthologies, broadcast widely on radio and television, and translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Ukrainian, and other languages.
Patrick’s collections with Dedalus Press include Intimate Strangers (1986), Names for Love (1990), Turane: the Hidden Village (1995), Decoding Samara (2001), The Bones of Creation (2008), and Groundswell: New and Selected Poems (2013). His most recent awards for poetry include the Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize in 2014, the WOW Award in 2015, and a Bursary in Literature 2017 from the Arts Council of Ireland towards the completion of a new collection. His poem ‘Woodman’ was chosen as one of Ireland’s 100 Favourite Poems in a survey organised by The Irish Times.
Patrick is also a writer of fiction for young readers. His novel, The Lost Orchard, published by O’Brien Press, won the Éilís Dillon Award for a First Children’s Book in 2001. His best-selling, critically acclaimed memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, appeared from Transworld in 2016.
He has conducted workshops for writers’ groups and literary festivals throughout Ireland and devised a highly acclaimed poetry course illustrating ways into poetry and poem-making for and by children – Poetry in the Classroom – sanctioned by the Department of Education. Patrick has also facilitated modules for post graduate students at TCD as part of literary exchange programmes, and read at many festivals including Cuirt, Galway Arts, Kilkenny Arts, Cork Spring Festival, Irish Music and Literature Festival in Oulu, Finland, and at South Bank, London. He worked as a member of the Council of Poetry Ireland from 1984 to 1989.
I doubted our flat-porched roof, where the cypress-tree shadows
goose-bumped me awake, could be half so marvellous
as the roofs of ancient Çatalhöyük, which served as streets, had
doors in them, and ladders that led down into the houses.
Each house raised on the ruins of its predecessors,
a maker’s space for larder and fire, basket-weave and bangle,
mirror and dagger. Each as well a burial chamber,
bone-store of the ancestors, repository of their preserved heads –
kept, much as we kept pisspots, under the beds.
No, the roomy house below me, draughty and prone to creaks,
with its wild-dog-rose wallpaper begun to peel
from the door jambs that opened to the front and back yards,
with cloud-flicker across a ceiling or the sun’s pulsing aureole
on chimney breast or floor – couldn’t hold a candle
to Çatalhöyük’s plaster-crafted bulls’ noggins and painted leopards.
But I valued height and flatness, the gift of a refuge
where nobody thought to look. Things that were unremarkable
then – a sewing machine jangled into life by pressing
on its treadle, duck eggs submerged for coolness in a bucket of oats,
buttermilk left to clot in an enamel basin – become
strange enough, when I recount them, to puzzle the children
of today, just as the contents of Çatalhöyük,
in their prime nine thousand years ago, still puzzle me.
And the boy on the roof, awakening to wonders of his own nature
and place, follows in my footsteps as though to catch me up
with the harvest of mother images he holds onto and the word
he must travel by, even if destined to stay forever
gone – a father’s ‘never forget who you are, where you come from’.
A teacup lifts, tilts, empties out of and into thin air
while he – bumped by an unsuspecting shoulder –
loses, recovers his composure. Present or absent, his bind
has us playing hide-and-seek. We see the wind
disfiguring his footprints on a sandy beach; the book
that floats, now open, now shut, and then a run of bad luck
confirms him the victim of a flying fist, a knife
pressed towards its vanishing point, a handgun going off.
Blood dots the pavement. He appears to do
some good while we peer into our own future, construe
skyscraper, subway, taxi cab, neon lit come-hither,
wrist watch, popped-on sunglasses, near fatal heart-flutter.
A city’s run of the mill. After, a tranquil space,
clothes make him up, fedora, bandages defining his face,
shirt and trouser legs filling out; a certain raffish élan.
Meanwhile, the open fire at our backs dies down;
we remember the draft under the door which has been there
all along. So, we stop walking in his patent leather
shoes, fumble for the muddied farmyard boots that seem
no longer to fit us and, one at a time, twist into them.
This spike with its brittle quiff or beard,
growing out of shingly ground
along the crooked lane behind our shed,
looks scuttish even as it seeds, looks
wayward as the graffiti sprayed
on garage walls in skeins of gold and red.
Sign of neglect, my neighbour says,
but when I pluck its green-tinged grains,
unhusk the measly kernels, place
them on my tongue, a chronicle teeters,
ancient and fundamental, which tastes
of rain and sunshine, the first stand our
ancestors made, the holding down
and raising up, with cricked backs, with
cracked fingers, of field and yield,
of all that would make for a city, its modes
and means, pomps and works,
from the scatter of primordial dunghills.
Everything breathed. I planted my bare feet each in turn
and felt the shoemaker tuck and fold the cured
cowhide ankle-deep about them, cutting and stitching
with a peep for the toes and the straps
curling unbroken extensions. Run a tug-tassel off the top
of the heel, I told him – it happened so long ago that he
would surely gasp if handed the proof
of ‘his’ shoe, crafted to endure, enduring ‘so well’. Where,
he might ask with half a laugh, is the other sandal?
Weren’t they a match, the missing one well-made as this?
A frown might crease his face and his fingers grease his brow
as he tried to recall the woman who bought
the shoe, the ‘pair’ of shoes, from him. Or would he
blink tears at the thought of the woman’s
‘disappearance’; or coldly look away, unwilling to meet
your gaze; or even rant – he, who seemed gentle-natured –
about ‘her sort’ deserving what she got?
And you, eyeing the thin moccasin that lingers,
try to picture my wander over Amcotts Moor, how I skited
through sphagnum and heather, the weeps and deeps
no earthly trouble, with bog cotton – the hovering ghost
of summer – a ready stoop and pick. Guess me
fresh-faced if you will, guess me dark or fair, gathering
the white eggs of a bird that nests in a hole
in the ground, or picking bilberries; guess me flowing in silk,
or with chapped lips grimacing at life’s
skimps and hardships. Or do I sing because being most able
to hear myself when walking alone? A day inhabited
by ordinary deeds – but now, suddenly, figure me
hurrying, taken, battered and broken. Or maybe I drown,
or simply forget my way, who slip – however it happens –
to the dream you’ve yet to meet, cold paralysis
in its kiss, and clay its consumptive grip. The shoe survives.
It stays even after my body, so long hidden
by the mire, is found and lost again, frittered on the journey.
Here, snug-fit for my left foot, tawny and delicate-looking
as a wild mushroom, it waits, and might wait
forever if you ask that of it, with the soft shadow of the mouth
exposed to your every conjecture, even as
it asserts the irretrievable, silently, inside a casket of glass.
Budless, stripped of leafage and bark,
trees sizzle and tick; charcoal
effigies. Become as mewling animals –
with smouldering hoofs,
with cauterised antlers puffing smoke
as they lean away from us
into the blistered distance. Bits
of them flake off, momentarily flap
ashy winglets before sinking.
Or they crack apart, trunks
grinning red-grained and open, while
what pass for their crowns –
fused, shrunken – fall, making
hardly any sound at all. It takes days
before the clearance cools.
The farmer who owns the wood
appears and disappears,
envisioning the land as forever,
the land as his. Shrugs at the good
riddance of scrub. Meaning
willow and hazel that spar in dens,
nests, horizontal understoreys.
Meaning tall, pliant poplar, and aspen,
the long-stemmed whisperer.
Meaning pine and beech, elm
and oak. The forester asks us to save
what is saveable of the burned
no less than the wind-felled.
Velvety dust squeaks underfoot, smears
and sears. Our chainsaws rebound
off the heat-toughened trunks.
We have to turn back when rain runs
everything into a morass.
There will be growth again – lichens,
hummocks of moss, raddled
foundations in their renewal restoring us.
Birds will pipe up, spiders
build. The only blaze will be of furze
blossoming. Some other April
will find a living wilderness
here, incineration covered over
as if it had never happened. We stare at
the ground and we tell ourselves this.
One stifled groan, the old boy rises
from his wheelchair, takes
a shaky step out onto the veranda.
His cotton shift, breeze-blown,
shows the cleft of his bony haunches;
his heels appear to bruise
the tiles that bruise them, and then
he’s there, framed by wood,
grumbling about something – maybe
his crocked bones, or the colours
that have slipped his palette,
or how he doesn’t care what happens
so long as he can still paint –
he’s there, or nearly, one dying dip,
one dab of the art-ravened
corpus, no fun felt in flesh anymore,
and, as he goes forward into
the light of day, he grows translucent.
Breda Wall Ryan grew up on a farm in Co Waterford and lived in Cork, Spain and Dublin before settling in Co. Wicklow. She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish (NUI); a Post-graduate Diploma in Teaching English as a Second or Other Language from Trinity College, London and a M.Phil. in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College, Dublin. A former language teacher and teacher trainer, she is now a poetry workshop facilitator and competition judge.
Ryan’s short stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-7 and The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction and have been shortlisted for The Davy Byrnes Award, Francis MacManus Short Story Award, Hennessy Literary Award, UCD Anthology Award (Fiction) and Elizabeth Bowen/William Trevor Award.
Her debut poetry collection In a Hare’s Eye (Doire Press 2015) was awarded the Strong/Shine Award for a First Collection by an Irish Poet. Contest judge, writer Kevin Barry said, “Breda Wall Ryan has an astounding control of language. And I think only a poet as sure-footed as this on the line and as certain of her own gifts could bring the poems to the very difficult places they sometimes go…”
Among her other awards are the iYeats Poetry Prize, Dromineer Poetry Prize, Poets meet Painters Prize, Over The Edge New Writer Award and The Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize.
Her poems have been widely published in print and online journals and anthologies, including Ink Sweat and Tears, Mslexia, The Pickled Body, Deep Water Literary Journal, Magma, Orbis, The OFI Press, The Fish Anthology 2013 and 2014, The Penny Dreadful, The Bohemyth, The Rialto, Itaca, Crannóg, Poethead, The Camel Saloon, Blue Fifth Review, The Stony Thursday Book and Southword. Most recently, her work has appeared in Flare, Live Encounters, Blackjack, and Poetry Ireland Review. Her poetry has been broadcast on local and national radio stations and has been translated into several languages, including Irish and Romanian.
She has been recorded by RTÉ Radio 1 for The Poetry Programme, and by University College, Dublin, School of English, Drama and Film for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive.
She has been a featured poet in Authors and Artists Introductions Series 10, in Live Encounters, on Poethead.wordpress.com (ed. Christine Murray), and in Poetry Ireland Review The Rising Generation.
Ryan has performed at poetry events throughout Ireland, including Belfast Book Festival; Wild Atlantic Waves Poetry Festival, Cahirciveen; Cork Spring International Poetry Festival; Five Glens Arts Festival, Co.Leitrim; Dromineer Literature Festival, Co Tipperary; Hay Festival at Kells, Co Meath, and Cúirt Festival of Literature Galway. She has also read at Troubadour, London and at Tres Gatos, Boston, USA.
Who, driven mad by night-feeds,
talons tensed, struck her tormentor?
Whose unlullabied child grew wide-eyed,
called to the dark in owl-song?
Who flew from mother to murder,
spurred by a blizzard of questions —
Who could not bear it?
Who haunted the owl,
insomnia’s interrogator,
abandoned her child in deepwoods
to fend with the birds? Who?
Whose feather-trail leads from cradle
to beamed barn owl-roost?
Who scorched her prey on a fire,
spun its neck through all points of the compass?
The breast on a toast-fork
run through and through— whose?
Whose cradle lies nursery-rhymed
under shattered treetops,
nest wrenched from rock-a-bye roots?
Who toasted the owl,
became what she’d eaten?
The child meant for summer, they say, came early in April,
light as a poppy, breaths that were barely breaths
fluttered his day-lily lungs,
speedwell-veined eyelids shut to a future
of TLC only prescribed on his chart.
Rumours flew round our small town that the mother
shed never a tear, but her breasts wept
when his fingerbuds opened, boneless as blossoms.
She read the plea in his palm, fixed
a soft pillow for his head.
They say she came back once, after her sentence,
begged the baker to water his Easter-dyed chicks.
A pigeon racer at a loft near the graveyard
said someone the spit of her spat on a stone
and scrubbed off the moss.
There’s talk here of pink-and-blue chicks sipping water
from a hubcap in a window of broken glass,
they say someone’s seen an empty coop and a stranger,
and a flock of opal wings swooping over a grave.
Some say the devil exists; some say angels.
I’m filling a notebook with firsts:
my first cardinal, chipmunk, chickadee,
first turtles in the wild, ranged like stones
on a half-submerged tree in Jamaica Pond,
basking to warm up winter blood.
I welcome this summering,
sip iced coffee under the awning
on the second-floor terrace, sweating
after my trek from the T at Stony Brook
where I had sidestepped an old Dominicano,
scribbled ‘Mrs Baez Serves Coffee
on the Third Floor’ to look up later.
Alert for following footsteps,
I scurried past Latinas calling Cuidado!
to kids jostling on a rodadero.
Back home on my dappled terrace,
I write an uneasy note: no white people
until Sheridan Street. Around me,
neighbourhood gardens are lilacking,
chickadees flit through the leaves,
cars slow for the white-lettered HUMP
on the street. A six-litre SUV stops,
revs, circles the block, stops below.
It’s all judder and engine roar.
The Latino beat that throbs
from its wound-down windows
startles the cardinals, spurs squirrels to leap
impossible gaps. I jolt from my reverie,
afraid. Afraid as I was this morning,
the sole white face in that T-car
on the Orange line; alarmed
by the old man’s offer to talk;
wary of the young Dominicano peacocking
in his SUV. And it comes to me
like a voice underwater: this fear
is race-coloured. I have sleepwalked
my whole life, thinking myself untainted.
Note: ‘Mrs Baez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor’ by Martín Estrada is carved on a stone at Stoney Brook T-Station near Jamaica Plain, Boston, USA.
My first word for Hare was cailleach,
witch or crone, slack-skinned
hag with blade-edged bones.
I met her again today
where seven hare-sisters grazed
a scrawny field at Renvyle,
face to face inhaled her lepus breath,
gazed through my shadow-face
cupped in her glass-dark eye.
‘Which is my animal shade?’ I asked
the coven of leathern-ears.
Each licked her cloven lip and chanted,
‘I’, ‘I’, and ‘I’. Hare with sea-salt tongue
rolled the dark bulge of her eye,
answered, ‘All of us, all of us here;
we show no map of your journey, we
are you when you get there’.
I grabbed at scut and slippery ear,
begged her to tell more
but rain rolled in from Boffin,
plump drops slicked her fur,
she twitched a salt-crusted whisker,
slipped into Otherwhere
like a white horse in ceo draíochta,
left me straddling a barbed wire fence
with two handfuls of loose belly-skin
and a jagged gash in my thigh.
note: ceo draíochta: (Gaeilge) magic mist, fairy fog.
.
Breda Wall Ryan reads ‘Dreamless’ at The pSoken Wrod 2nd February 2016
Lizz Murphy was born in Belfast but has lived in Binalong, a rural village in NSW, Australia, for a long time now. She has published 13 books of different kinds. Her eight poetry titles include Shebird, Portraits: 54 Poems and Six Hundred Dollars (PressPress), Walk the Wildly (Picaro), Stop Your Cryin (Island) and Two Lips Went Shopping (Spinifex print & e-book). Her best-known anthology is Wee Girls: Women Writing from an Irish Perspective (Spinifex Press).
She is widely published in Australian and overseas journals including Abridged, Aesthetica, Blue Pepper, Cordite Poetry Review, Honest Ulsterman, Shot Glass Journal, Uut Poetry, Verity La, Wonder Book of Poetry and in quite a number of print anthologies. Lizz’ awards include: Anutech Poetry Prize, Rosemary Dobson Poetry Award (co-winner), ACT Creative Fellowship for Literature, and a Highly Commended in the Blake Poetry Prize plus a few other shortlistings/special mentions.
Lizz writes prose poetry and micropoems and especially likes the ‘small disturbance.’
In 2016 she posted new poems/images every day with Project 366 (URL: project365plus.blogspot.com.au) coordinated by Kit Kelen. Some of these poems are thanks to that experience. She blogs at A Poet’s Slantlizzmurphypoet.blogspot.com
In the crook of my arm is the put out of your eyes
a shocking sky fields rolling like a naming of the dead
all the ploughed bones shuddering shoulders
Impossible horrors urge the sun to catch on your collar
whitewash what we know of history
remember only the stems of freedom the fed finches
They get straight to the point
Drink feckin responsibly
Take the feckin taxi
says the Merry Feckin Christmas cab
The taxi we took on our night out
was a karaoke taxi He was sittin outside the club waitin for his hens’ party to return
One of the girls chatted him up
took him off-duty to take us
to our next venue
We’re all in the back
with microphones in our hands
tryin to sing
sayin is this switched on
can they hear us outside?
We are wettin ourselves
We arrive at the next club
all arguin to pay
fumblin with coins for the fare
The driver says
Give us 50p each and fuck off!
We tumble on to the footpath
laughin our heads off
