All posts filed under: Nomadics

‘The House That Don Built’ by Kevin Higgins

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“The sky is high / We shit on earth / We look up the sky / The earth gives birth / To our future”                                                                     Yoko Ono, Poetry (July/August 2018) (i) The Christmas lights which bat their eyelids all year round on the screaming pink terracotta roof are classy as Demis Roussos’s ground-breaking retranslation of the Odyssey. The gold-plated giant front gate tasteful as the prison raps of Bill Cosby and Orenthal James Simpson combined. The foundation wobbly as the sestina sequence Access Hollywood says, Miley Cyrus, is currently sweating over. The walls and internal supporting beams solid as a verse novel by Big Bird of Sesame Street. The water faucets in the vast bathroom he had purpose built for himself understated as the last line of the Haiku Admiral Tojo wrote the morning he was hanged. (ii) In cases made of …

‘Prime’ and other poems by Peggie Gallagher

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Parlour   A bolthole, a room half elsewhere adrift in distant grandeur, where breath condenses between damask drapes and the wing of a mahogany table. Where an ear might catch the scratch of a pen, a girl trawling the depths of an inkwell pouring words, slippery as a river of fish spilling loose of their net, slapping their wet tails on the brocade.   What to do with such riches — feed them to her mother’s wedding gifts, pile them into fluted dessert dishes, fling their blue-black panic into the belly of the lamp ravening on the sideboard, the soft spill of innards silvering her fingers cracking their verbs and consonants the way her mother cracks the necks of chickens.   The Three Card Trick Man   After a line by Tom Duddy   The reason I come here is not the horses, though bookie shops abound and a litter of crushed slips. It is always sunny and work is over for the weekend and the girl in the red dress has just stepped out …

‘Fourteen days’ and other poems by Maeve O’Sullivan

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  Sri Lanka haiku after traveller’s tummy — a calming breakfast on the Laccadive Sea ˜ handbag-free no iPhone to count my steps — beach walk ˜ Gangaramaya shrine… an old lady adds some jasmine to our flower tray ˜ accompanying us uphill to the sacred footprint — frog tones ˜ the temple’s lily pond stripped of its blooms — full moon day ˜ chatter in the tour bus stops tsunami damage ˜ storm breaking we circumambulate the wishing stupa ˜   Fourteen Days   Mother has stopped eating I google what happens next: others who have done this survive around fourteen days.   I google what happens next: hunger-strikers and anorexics survive around fourteen days, declining to drink water.   Hunger-strikers and anorexics turn their faces to the wall, decline drinking water, refuse all foodstuffs.   She has turned her face to the wall though she seems quite serene: refusing all foodstuffs, just lying in her bed.   She seems quite serene, like others who have done this, just lying in her bed – …

‘burnt offerings’ and other poems by Anne Casey

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burnt offerings swilling cinders of eucalypt forests burning up and down the coast tinged with hints of fear singed possum hairs lifting into clear blue air an earthquake in Italy shakes me awake a mother crying somewhere volcanic embers cycling into smoke of broken promises women’s choices smouldering charred remains of exiles’ lives democracy doused with lies and set on fire headless horsemen prancing in the coals blackened souls stirring soot from scorched relics ashes to ashes and my mother in a box too small to hold her all laid in a field with all the others when she could have flown with the four winds so I could taste again the sharp tang of her loss married to the rest lately everything tastes of ash (First published in apt literary journal on 3 July 2017, with sincere thanks to Editor-in-Chief, Clarissa Halston.)   where the lost things go we sat upon a golden bow my little bird and i indivisibly apart we dived into the sky and to the purple-hearted dark an ocean we …

‘Hinnerup’ and other poems by Jess Mc Kinney

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*dint It Began as most things do moist things do everything everything berry stained mouth beer stickied floor & blood bloom undies you ‘don’t mind’ and sure I could probably get into you . I only ever feel the bubbles on impact during I’m somewhere else the sun was a hot coal in the sky seeing another one like you he came just before I decided a bit too late that I didn’t want what he asphyxiated thinking about sourcing justifications for those who insist swear that my saliva isn’t a contagion for those who are unknowing because kissing me will give you cancer then you’ll never be the invisible thing you imagined running alongside the car and In Dreams my hair falls in chunks to a cheering audience I grow old & genderless for money nightly I wake feverish trapped in the tight fist of your affection drowning between cool bathroom tiles & Christmas cake sponge but I won’t keep us downstairs knitting and gritting at the base begrudging closed doors & far off …