Poems by Michèle Vassal

Drunk as Brendan Behan “Lovers    lovers their empty skins hang limp in opiate closets pulsing between insinuations of naphthalene and the barbitural scent of forgetting, they swing embittered and toxic, mothy costumes of a play that lingers only on faded posters and skin. On the wrong side of midnight drunk as Brendan Behan I scooped up a last high king kneeling on Clontarf road          battled out knees sanded to the bone by the wet grit of ancient wars         singing         something about not worrying about a thing amongst Viking corpses on the steps of the Bank of Ireland where Wood Quay used to be we kissed ourselves an island.   I clinched a burned out arsonist        hands shaking      climbing railings in Stephens Green      ..fucking left an aftertaste of phosphorus         reeking red        like inhaling the soul of a cracked match.   I chased a light eyed dragon heart caving in to the count of nine elliptic filigree of sins I kept twitching inside a reliquary of abalone dreams whilst the rosary of Chopin’s Polonaise undid itself in silver beads. I slashed my defeats in the wrists of actors snorted stars on the mercurial mirrors of their well rehearsed eyes and DT-ed on night’s poitín when I drank neat the distilled dew glistening on the mouths of girls.”   © Michèle Vassal, published in A Taste of Hemlock, Salmon 2011

Dublin 75   Nineteen seventy five and Mary worked Fitzwilliam square genuflecting at closing time for wretched men in nylon shirts too drunk to know too drunk to care that whilst on bended knees she thought only of communion.   From the Liberties to the Green   Dublin vomited poets and patriots under the gassy glare of streetlights leaning on convoluted shadows and not quite balladed out saints and scholars spewed up Spancil Hill and Dirty Old Town, like a bad pint In nineteen seventy five love smelled of stout and vinegared chips.”   © Michèle Vassal, published in A Taste of Hemlock, Salmon 2011

Michèle Vassal Michèle Vassal is from Barcelonnette, a small town in the French Alps. She moved to Ireland, aged seventeen, to learn English and stayed there for thirty years. Her collection, Sandgames (Salmon 2000), received first prize at Listowel Writers’ Week and some of her poems were short-listed for the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Awards. She has been widely published internationally, in both French and English. Michèle currently lives and writes in France. Youtube Salmon Amazon Amazon

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The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud at the Dublin Writer’s Festival

IMRAM and Dublin Writer’s Festival request the pleasure of your company when the newly commissioned translations of Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac will be presented in two special bilingual events, The Thief of Fire: A Celebration of Arthur Rimbaud and La Nuit est Ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s Search for a Language and Identity. The bilingual collection, sioc maidine/morning frost, translations by Gabriel Rosenstock on the haiku of Jack Kerouac, will also be launched. The Thief of Fire: A celebration of Arthur Rimbaud The Thief of Fire celebrates Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Ciaran Carson has just published his stunning new English versions, In the Light Of, published by Gallery Press. Liam Ó Muirthile will read newly commissioned Irish versions. The reading will feature on-screen projections by Margaret Lonergan, and commissioned music by Seán Mac Erlaine. Venue: The Sugar Club, 8 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2 Date: Wednesday May 22 Time: 8.30pm Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.   Ernest Pignon-Ernest – Arthur Rimbaud dans Paris 1978

La Nuit est ma Femme: Jack Kerouac’s search for a Language and Identity La nuit est ma femme will construct a literary exploration of Kerouac’s relationship to French, to Catholicism and Buddhism; of his bi-lingual identity; and of his fraught relationship with America. The selections will draw on his letters, poems, haiku and novels. Two writers – Gabriel Rosenstock and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn – will both translate and respond to Kerouac’s work. The texts will be read to improvised jazz accompaniment by The Dirty Jazz Band and on-screen projections created by Margaret Lonergan. Launch: sioc maidine/morning frost, which presents a generous selection of Kerouac’s haiku, will also be launched on the night.   The collection has been published in Irish for the first time – and translated by Ireland’s doyen of the haiku, Gabriel Rosenstock. He unerringly finds Irish registers that reveal the beauty of these haiku anew. Like Kerouac, Rosenstock makes the haiku sing.   Venue: The Workman’s Club, 10 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2 Date: Thursday May 23 Time: 20:30 Tickets: €10/€8 Special group price or individual student price of €5 available. Just use the code scribhenoir when booking.   Tickets are available from the Dublin Writer’s Festival Box Office: www.dublinwritersfestival.com Festival Box Office, Filmbase, Curved St., Temple Bar, Dublin 2 Opening Hours: Mon – Sat 11am–7pm & Sun 12 – 5pm T +353 (0) 1 687 7977 E boxoffice@dublinwritersfestival.com

Poems from ‘We’ll Sing Blackbird’, by Rebecca O’Connor

Domestic Bliss   ‘I place a jug of lavender on the table to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge   while you draw nails to hammer with your fist. Then I draw a hammer , and watch   as you try to lift it from the page. by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,   your father and I wishing we could be so bold. you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder   as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm to mend the roof of your miniature barn.’   Life After Death   My thoughts are all opposed to that streak of red fox in the field, black clods of thought that cling to the spade that lifts them to throw them back into the hole they made.   The fox is an apposite thing, lived in without reluctance, as is the greenfinch, even as it hits the window and knocks itself out cold.   My child knows this. He won’t allow himself forget his father warming the bird’s wings with his breath, its sudden swift flight as two foxes   .trot through Fayre’s Field ahead of the hearse.   Domestic Bliss and Life After Death are © Rebecca O’Connor. Published in We’ll Sing Blackbird A Moth Edition 2012.

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Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

•  www.rebeccaoconnor.net
• Bio from www.writing.ie

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Sanctus by Kimberly Campanello

Sanctus And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? – James Joyce I. At the English pub in Indianapolis, we discuss technology. He says he can already hear the robot’s footsteps on his grave. In the worst neighborhoods, the prairie is coming back. Cattails are pushing up through old sidewalks and nearly all the important species of sparrows have returned. A Future Farmer of America—in other words, a 14-year-old white kid from the pesticide-drenched heartland—slips backwards from a mall railing and falls to his death among the Super Pretzels and Dippin’ Dots down in the food court. I get reminded of incest dreams and the two I’ve had, one for each parent. My mother calls and gives me the run-down on which of her friends is on a morphine drip and which is in remission, and she tells me that when I get back to Miami I should get a job and always keep a full tank of gas. The homilitic style of evangelical Christianity is the same in Ghana, San Diego, Little Havana, and on Ellettsville, Indiana’s Hart Strait Road where in the abortion scene of the Halloween morality play she yanks a skinned squirrel soaked in beet juice from the screaming girl’s crotch and holds it up with food-service tongs before tossing it on a cookie sheet. You’ll have a clean slate if you accept Jesus, right now. We’ll all have a clean slate, if you accept Jesus, now. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. Don’t drop it. Use a metal plate with a handle that could guillotine a communicant’s neck. And on the third day, I drank poitín at an Irish pub in Bloomington, Indiana, in fulfillment of the scriptures. Take this, all of you, and drink it. This is the bloodshine of the newest and most everlasting covenant. Don’t drop it. II. Death is a real bummer. We live through and for our parents and still Freud was wrong. You should hurry up and put your face right in it for an hour and that is definitely a sacrament, more so than that night in Garrucha at the misa flamenca, though the music was nice. Even the Sanctus didn’t offend me. Finally, I would add that the world is falling apart, always has been, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent, etc., and that my favorite sounds are when you say things like, Everything is fine, or, That cunt is mine. I hear them and I clench and unclench and I. love. you. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Let us kneel down facing each other, holding razors. Lather up my head and I will lather yours. I am worthy to receive you. I am your mirror. On which a razor lay crossed. We’ll shave it all off. If our knees can handle it, let’s stay like this until it grows back, softer than before. If they can’t, let’s make love, and say, These are our bodies, which will not be given up for any of you. Let us say our own word and we shall be healed. Sanctus is © Kimberly Campanello, from Consent. Published Doire Press, 2013

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Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana. She now lives in Dublin and London. She was the featured poet in the Summer 2010 issue of The Stinging Fly, and her pamphlet Spinning Cities was published by Wurm Press in 2011 . Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, UK, and Ireland, including  nthposition , Burning Bush II, Abridged , and The Irish Left Review .

Pic by Brian Kavanagh

Glendalough, at Iseult Gonne’s grave

Glendalough, at Iseult Gonne’s grave subside the rocks archback silica of bird leans into a granite stylus a grave bed green sea-bed of flowering heads. shatter of tree hacked-through/     windmills beside an sruthán geal gold coins in-stream-glitter out to me. a small a cloud there her gulfstream ruffles my feathering (toll the …) blood-thickener sloughs blood against. let her eat the disease                      a gelid-thaw clysters the blooms     all that glisters is not white / and not laden with small-griefs Glendalough is © C. Murray