“St Christina’s Gut” and other poems (series) by Clare McCotter

Saint Teresa’s Heart   Claiming it a charism too diamond for the dark they hung her heart out to dry in a glass globe. Scraped and chafed with a life story the walls of its chambers reverberate still. A girl calling out to another, scratches gold swallows and nival lilies on woodwork none can unravel. A mystic with inquisitorial breath brimming the nape of her neck etches on stone: he has no body but my own immaculate and shining in fields of barley this flesh has flown. A nun crossing night’s cedar soul, writes on an acre of snow: O my sisters this I left, leaving only entrails filled with stars and garnets. An old woman contemplating a wide geranium sky pencils in its margins: morning has come all is light and all are inexorably pierced peregrine and moons circling earth’s fine tilth.   Saint Teresa’s Heart published Abridged 0-39 (March 2015), p. 12. (Revised since publication)   Saint Christina’s Gut   Of all the trees my favourite this sea green turning silver pine roosting me among the stars the strength of its scent sapping the stench of their flesh and their gold. Hunched on the top branch I am a sparrowhawk female of the species larger by far than any male. Today I have fed well on the prey he could not take. I, my own cartographer up here with my book of maps comping high contours in charcoal chords. Under this cape my dewy breasts swollen with lapis lazuli. Out at the end of a birch twig I am an ortolan bunting my song winding its way past the sun a thousand pin pricks of light bursting from seeds in my craw. No holy anorexic I gorge on the tufted heads of thistles in the lavender fields in fields of millet vittles needed navigating night on my long journey south. High among incensed rafters I am a pigeon sunk on the hoops of my nacreous skirts. This scavenged gut a neap tide warm and lapping the edges of magenta feet. Saint Christina’s Gut published Abridged 0-37 (July 2014), p. 44. Saint Joan’s Mirror   Pouring over her like amethysts and water the voices tell how she glowed white and gold walking with night’s dead in doublet and hose. Whispering we know breast buds bruise plaits hiss, mirrors sicken they slip away in snowdrifting petals leaving her luminous in the garden of almonds. She will put the Dauphin on the throne rise the fleur-de-lys over Orleans and in male attire still be their astral child inviolable in the last pond of sky.   Saint Joan’s Mirror published Crannóg 41 (Spring 2016), p. 51.   Mary Magdalene’s Foot   Pilgrims kiss the window in this silver shoe seeking a blessing or cure from flesh once witched by the beauty of a road travelled with Mary of Bethany and Salomé. A wanderer then casting my sandals off before entering the fields of the forest the footprint left beside morning’s stone a weathered intaglio washed with wild hyssop and water. And washing others on the shores of the black harp sea I was the starry diviner the myrrh bearer in eastern light my insouciant sapphire heart freer than any in Samaria or Judea. Some stormy season this small window will shatter returning me to the holy ground my fingertips swimming out to the pines and hawks my sole firm on the dark mineral earth. Mary Magdalene’s Foot published A New Ulster 39 (Dec 2015), pp. 15/6. (Revised substantially since publication) Julian’s Eyes   All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well – Julian of Norwich She did not drink dark cups from the sores of the dying, feed the destitute or found an order. Bernini did not trace the arc her spine, sculpt her sigh or tease out the sweetness of her fiery entrails. In a stormy seaport she saw, that is all. The remaining years in an anchorite’s cell spent sounding the depth of her vision till touching the loveliness of its nacreous floor she wrote: do not accuse yourself of sin behovely, it lanterns the stones of your wrath and of this be sure wrath has no breath but your own. The father no entity only place where winds stir the high green grain and a mare swims across a lake’s sunstone face. Julian’s Eyes published The Galway Review (January 29 2016). (Revised since publication)   Mechthild’s Tongue   Lord, you are my lover, my longing, my flowing stream, my sun, and I am your reflection – Mechthild of Magdeburg Though they think the bright wick burning in my dark cave unfit to proclaim the word still will I speak because for you, Lord I have wept in the school of the night with you tasted mint and wild sorrel in the mouths of stones. I have touched rock drank wine and wild honey gulped jasper from the face of the sun. And other than the bird divining blue, the fish breathing aquamarine, I cannot be. My name written always outside their book a Beguine sans rule or vow, cursing the cathedral clergy who withholding holy office withheld little the night a wounded deer moaned beside the spring that is myself and kneeling there to drink drank molten light. Mechtild’s Tongue published The Galway Review (January 29 2016). (Revised since publication)   Our Lady of Częstochowa   Not one to meet on a dodgy side street Częstochowa is a hard looking case round the block more times than she cares to recall some claim her canvas a tabletop painted by Luke the Evangelist. Carried in a blanket over wintered fields and lakes to a village shrine. Placed there to guide and guard every man woman child golden grains and heavy horses their dancing flocks of white strokes. Not ones for faffing around the Hussites hit the ground running shedding icon blood to sap self laying low sanctum and soul. With two deep scars gullying face eye to jaw slashing swordsmen thought her well and truly done for. Fooled by mossy breasts and robes of iris fleur-de-lys they could never have guessed how well the bitch on the shelf could handle herself. Czarny Matka The Black Madonna Queen of the Heavens Mother of Earth, Star of the Sea Hodegetria She Who Shows the Way. Her right hand pointing at her son. His straight back at her.   Our Lady of Częstochowa published The SHOp 46 & 47 (Autumn 2014) p. 46.

Clare McCotter Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won the IHS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2010 and 2011. In 2013 she won The British Tanka Award. She also judged the British Haiku Award 2011 and 2012. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Her poetry has appeared in Abridged, Boyne Berries, The Cannon’s Mouth, Crannóg, Cyphers, Decanto, Envoi, The Galway Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Iota, Irish Feminist Review, The Leaf Book Anthology 2008, The Linnet’s Wings, The Moth Magazine, A New Ulster, Panning For Poems, The Poetry Bus (forthcoming), Poetry24, Reflexion, Revival, The SHOp, The Stinging Fly, and The Stony Thursday Book. Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, was published in 2012. Home is Kilrea, County Derry. Disarticulation and other poems by Clare McCotter

“Magic Bullet” and other poems by Rus Khomutoff

 

Untitled for Andre Breton   Nostalgic sentiments and new wave nocturnes intersecting in a normal chaos of life an hourglass of neglected affinities idols of saturated phenomena night of filth, night of flowers the aporia of revelation   Magic Bullet (for Tristan Tzara)    Smell of death smell of life of embrace a medicine of moments semiquavers and sundial conductors of the postspectacle deposits of legitimacy left behind sortilege of the divine decree words in blood like flowers   Grand Hotel Abyss    Selenophilia of our being the obscuring of the queen vexed in your hollow divine incipience of the notable nonesuch like fragrant paperwhites in the corner of the transcendental frame pleasure ground of annulled pretext in hysterically real daymares everyday extraordinary grand hotel abyss   Masque of the minutes for Adam Lovasz    Masque of the minutes like a red psychotonic cry agnosia of the just interloper scarlet bellowing of the deep end excisions on vacuous origins temporal flight of the elemental route   Hygge    A sense of timelessness surrounds her mistress of malfunction platinum god afterbirth countdown to zero inferior rhyme over the threshold redux and progression   Magic Bullet and other poems are © Rus Khomutoff.

My name is Rus Khomutoff and I am a neo surrealist poet in Brooklyn, NY. My poetry has appeared in Erbacce, Uut Poetry and Burning House Press.Last year I published an ebook called Immaculate Days. I am also on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@rusdaboss Immaculate Days

From “Parvit of Agelast” and other poems by Máighréad Medbh

 

From Parvit of Agelast (Verse Fantasy, to be published by Arlen House in 2016. The poems below are aspects of the ‘real’ world.) ‘Your face is ridiculous: O. . . . . leeeeee ugly 🙂 ❤ / thanks, sure i know !’ :L’ – Ciara Pugsley, ask.fm net whn th little lite shinin frm abve doesnt n younguns mad fr luv r spected 2 b home thumbs go drum on magic pads n open windows so they travel in thr dreambots huntin souls they go weft upon th crystal warp unshuttled hookin up witout a plan 2 build a planet trances risin tru th base n snare of ask n tell wot u c is wot u feel n wot u feels rite tho snot a total giggle when th trolls r out —no1 knows th cause like with any freakin demic— bitch please u aint jesus wots wit all the posin howd u like my cock up ur ass, u cross-eyed ho som1 feelin tiny in the sprawlin fabric hauls back in2 her drum for a re-birth much 2 brite bodys blinded so her double takes it weepin 2 th woods to be an hero wit a reel hank o rope   ‘…the body of Wafa became shrapnel that eliminated despair and aroused hope.’ – Adel Sadew   The Key to Paradise You will be snatched back from the place of no landmark, where you wander, scapegoat, under the frozen hot eye, blister-backed, hairy, and crunching backward to beast. You will regain the unrivalled kingdom of your source, your beauty will be unsurpassed, and you will sit on the right knee of a virtuous king, all-powerful but for his abject love of you. There will be bright-plumed birds and four undying springs of milk, honey, oil and wine. Your lover will adore you under the great tree, and there will never be a touch without the perfect ecstatic end that leaves you weak and wed to the grass you collapse on. There will be no argument and never pain. Balm will drip from every leaf in this catchment of considerate sun. Best of all, you will be thought wise, not inessential. So gird your waist with red rockets and blow your littler self to the garden of infinite fecundity. Do it. In one starry bang.     Sleep is the only escape I have. When I don’t dare think, I dare to dream.’ – Jaycee Dugard Pine Each autumn, in Lake Tahoe, El Dorado county, CA, the kokanee salmon turn from silver-blue to vermilion. After spawning they die and their carcasses are meat for mink, that some unabused women sport as symbols of perhaps love. The kokanee is not a native, arrived in 1944, so a mere child compared to the happy-birthday lake two million years old. Jaycee’s eleven were a tiny tint to that time spread, and the moment when her fingertips touched the pine cone— print to Fibonacci imprint, whorl to spiral—a netsuke eye. That darkened in the backyard in the small shed where sleep was the best activity and a gnarled man made her pine and desire the woody grenade that was the last thing she had touched before. A pine can last a thousand years, an eye much less; Jaycee eighteen in the pulp of a small brain, twisted in and round, not knowing what would sprout when a forest fire melted the resin and out fell, in hazardous liberation, winged seeds.

From: Imbolg (Unpublished Collection) Your Grace You are alone in what they would call a new life. What they don’t know is that for you nothing is old. A morning is always a question, as if you were a web living each day in a different cell of itself, seeking. Seeking maybe nothing, but in that mode, hiatus behind and before. It has seemed true to take a sable cloth to the slate of fact and not only wipe but cover, occlusion of the frame removing the form entirely. Entirely it might seem, but like minerals that leave a trace in water, small events make change. Tonight you have remembered a Columbian dress you bought on impulse at a Fairtrade sale, undyed, handwoven. Woven into your consciousness now like most of your clothes, but you wore this slinky to a wedding and people remarked. For the first time you thought your body taut and that of the normal, not a flop. You flaunted. Flaunting was your wont in a sub-chador sort of way. Exclusivity was the bait, the prospect of private vice. But you see in the mirror tonight a shape that could turn heads. There’s a Grecian curve at the base of your back. Back to where you sat huddled in a lone hut by a struggling fire, watching the small yellow flame fight the red. You had crammed a bush into each windy gap of the hedge. Beyond, how could you know several had gathered to your grace. Grace was a false thing, you said, being rustic. But many thought you walked like a careless queen. They took the switch in your hand for a sceptre, wielded fiercely against the meek, shaken at the indifferent. Indifferently endowed, you thought you were, and hardly cared, except for the faint sense of an untried trail. It occurs to your image now that you could have kept your own counsel, sat straight-backed and been petal-showered. Showering in what was given, you might have made some plans, not waited for a suitor to tear at the bushes and tell you your mind.   climacteric in the extreme   the room darkens. foetal faces draw spotlights from the dense matrix. she kneels. not a whimper but centrifugal quake and strain. ovular potentials huddle in lines for stringing crowded and frozen onto a tight choke. she hugs her shoulders, surrogate, unconsoled, and a creature leaps out, trailing chains, snarls and spits, goes surfing the tidal walls. he will not come again to her bucking bounty, her bawdy talk, her raucous primitive yells; she will not be the bright-haired goddess of the barstool, fabled and revered in ten parched villages. hail of the ripped legend falls in blades, a thing of flesh flames in the mouth of the monster and she recalls a hard prophesy told in the spring grass. lincolns rev on the melting brick informants crouch in a lonely copse and beg for mercy in the torture room the air sparks and yellows black seeps into old pictures and the girl with the lank dead hair creeps blindly from the screen. she probes her body and finds a silent blowhole. her fingers return a thousand red messages that pool and brindle in the cradle of her palms. if she screams she doesn’t know, but colours curry the weather pumpkin, desert and vulva, lunatic yellow, bum-in-the-gutter green. she crashes, glass and glint flinging themselves too, watches her eyes picked to the veined bone. girl, crook and goblet smithered on the lizard- dark floor.   history (from ‘the second of april’) I walk. Where is home except in repeated kisses of foot and ground. I am having affairs. With, for one, the bonded pavement, complicit as a slice of river. I glide on ice, step lightly on the unreflecting glass panel of a foyer floor. Nakedness is rare. I don’t tell how I used to take off my shoes and mesh my toes with sand. But even that was a skim. I slyly stepped on a rock and, recalcitrant, took off. I pause at running water and watch its inscrutable fingers take sun to rock in a work of art, then abandon it, dissatisfied. Among a tree I become a stretch of soil and burnt grass and harden. There are always tears. They seem to come from outside and wash me down until, like ivy, I am again rambling. On a tarred path my jaw is jolted by hard, inexplicable haste. My ankles wound each other. I bleed and wonder if I should spancel myself to slow. There are creatures who only pace the one field. Even a hobbled route finds knowledge. I look at my feet and don’t know them. Too long with my eyes on a misted goal has cost me my body. Happenings are always outside. Strange, when I see no walls. Where is the place of occurrence? I thought life was movement. Coming to gravel I have less ground and that brings thoughts of release. Water is too deep and I fear high places. To walk is the freest I can do and I wipe my tracks. What will pass is the breeze of a small body, non-native, a light touch on a puzzled cheek.

Máighréad Medbh was born in County Limerick. She has six published poetry collections, and a prose work, Savage Solitude: Reflections of a Reluctant Loner, was published by Dedalus Press in 2013. Since her first collection, The Making of a Pagan, in 1990, she has become widely known as a performance poet. She likes to explore themes, which led her to write a sequence on the famine, Tenant, published by Salmon Press, and a sequence inspired by astrology, Twelve Beds for the Dreamer, published by Arlen House. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and has been translated into German and Galician. She has performed widely, in Europe and America as well as Ireland, and on the broadcast media. Máighréad has written three novels and a fantasy sequence for children. The novels are online as ebooks. She has also written for radio, and publishes a monthly blog/essay on her website. A verse fantasy, Parvit of Agelast, is to be published by Arlen House in 2016.   www.maighreadmedbh.ie PDF version of this work

‘Red Hen’ and other poems by Shirley McClure

Maternity   I want to have poems by Caesarean section wearing my Infallible lip gloss   and counting on my designer obstetrician. I will keep my bump discreet,   drink litres of San Pellegrino, strive to avoid striae gravidarum, laser them later if it comes to it.   I want to live a normal life despite the media, and when it’s time,   my lines will glide out raring to open their lungs and wail as true as any natural birth.   Published in Clifden Anthology 35, 2013   Red Hen   We know nothing about hens, yet find ourselves in charge of half a dozen.   The odd girl out – you call her Mrs.One – loses her footing in the mud.   You carry her into the hen-house with piano player hands.   Still there the next day, she has turned her blunt red beak to the wall.   We talk to neighbours about red mites, infections, wonder if she’s egg-bound.   We fill her bowl with cabbage-leaves, stroke her tight wings.   Her sisters cry out, foul her water, shit on her plumage.   We are told you’d get a new hen for the price of the vet. For the first time   I want to crack a bird’s neck. Instead we hand her back, ailing but alive.   Weeks later you find me in quick tears for the red hen;   you brush the rust of my feathers, fill up my hopper with oyster shells.   Published in Orbis, 2014   Yoga class   I skipped my yoga class because the man was due to fix the curtain rail.   Upstairs, he poised in heavy boots on the edge of my bed, but not before prudently peeling back the elegant blue Brown Thomas duvet.   Beneath him I stood at optimal angle to flaunt my cleavage, to hand him screws.   Smoothly he inserted the rawl plug, then with slightly quicker breath he drove it deep into my freshly painted, trembling Orchid White walls.   Threading the hoops unto the pole we lifted it together, our fingers touching as he tenderly completed the work.   Later we did yoga together dreamt up new asanas and held them, and each other until light began slinking through my brand new curtains.   From Who’s Counting?   Text Sex   Text messaging, the first hot Sunday in May- he: I hope you’re doing something wild. I’m busy with lambing. She: Sun-bathing out the back, does that count as wild? He: That depends on how naked you are…   She pictures him delivering, arm-deep in placenta, imagining her nakeder, fuller, redder than she really is, outside on a blue rug holding a silver mobile phone.   She turns over, pale still, unhooks her bra; they joke about his sad life chatting to sheep phone dating, dreaming of nakedness in Edenbrook Heights.   If she were less prudent, She’d ask him over now, shower him, sponge each finger carefully, massage his neck and armpits with apricot soap; but it’s not like that with them, his wedding band has left a mark that no lamb’s blood can cover. She dresses, texts goodbye and phones the take-away.   From Who’s Counting?

Shirley McClure’s (1962-2016) Stone Dress was published by Arlen House in August 2015. Her CD Spanish Affair, with her own poems plus poetry and music from invited guests, was launched in June. All proceeds from the CD go to Arklow Cancer Support Group, where she facilitates a writers’ group. Her first poetry collection, Who’s Counting? (Bradshaw Books) won Cork Literary Review’s Manuscript Competition 2009. She won Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Poetry Competition 2014. Shirley lived in Bray, Co. Wicklow. http://www.thepoetryvein.com A celebration of Irish Women Poets on Bloomsday 2015

Martyrdom by Kristina Marie Darling

‘Visitation’ by Noah Saterstrom (2012)

Martyrdom   I never imagined love as a cause for suicide. But there we were, surrounded by all of the tell-tale signs: a breadknife, a withered corsage, a white dress with some ruffles along the bottom.   The night before I sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. He told her, brushing the hair from his eyes, how her sonnets failed to turn at the volta.   Now she’s gliding along the surface of the lake. Her hands folded like the knot on a small bouquet.   So he tries and tries to wake her. He looks at her perfect wrists, nearly submerged: cold skin , a silver watch, every bracelet fastened in place.   Martyrdom is © Kristina Marie Darling, from Brushes With (Blazevox Books 2013)

I did a brief reading of Kristina Marie Darling’s Brushes With on my Open Salon blog

• Kristina Marie Darling
• Blazevox Books
• An Index of Women Poets