‘small mirror’ at The Honest Ulsterman

small mirror     tree’s bole coldfoots the mire,                                                               she gathers to herself a small black mirror,   enclosing then, into her skin, a stray leaf dereliction   (frozen /floating/ static)   she throws out an image of birds,   tree births a shatter of birds, eddying – swooning into black air.   from bind Poem Poetry at The Hu

Image ©  Ceridwen

“Pink is a Sister Sick” and other poems by Seanín Hughes

Pink Is A Sister Sick with sweetness. Bright; blinds beautiful men, robs them of their enamel, but they never protest. Fat lashes fan those flushed cheeks, like blood blushing milk, bones so high and hollow beneath. Pink licks the dark, but refuses to wear it. I went panning for black diamonds in her hair in our girlhood, and found nothing but dirty pebbles and rust for treasure; I couldn’t love her. She’s a predator with doll parts, a perfect Pinocchio gone rogue and hungry for boyprey. I’ve got a perverted prayer that in time, she’ll dissolve into herself; melt at midday, nothing more than a discarded boiled sweet. Equilibrium I’m strutting stratospheric, embellished and splendid in my NHS wedding dress. My mother was here before me, her father before her, his uncle before that — lucky, lucky me — our platinum gilted heirloom hops generations and genders, our gene pool a puddle of madness thickened with blood and tear-streaked shrieking saliva. I’m in my unsilent season, souped up and bursting, far too sexy to sedate. This is my circus and I am the airborne acrobat defying my earthly anchors until they come for me, saturnine. Anthem New York’s summer breath climbs heavy through the window and the restless worm wrestles through apple rot. Narcissus’ trumpets wither in astonished atrophy, recoiling into the earth as the amnion ruptures, a parting of seas in the holiest of churches – between the wide open legs of an obedient woman, held to ransom by blanched agony, lips anaemic, lily white. Skull shards shift tectonic and give passage to the crowning; the searing stretch of emergence, the ripping of the mantle, the sting of the slap – and it breathes. The bed sheets are soiled with immigrant blood the colour of November poppies, and writhing in it, the jaundiced newborn skin of an epoch in waiting: a God complex with baby sized fists clutching nuclear warheads. Going Dutch I cut my teeth on you; let enamel tear through the warm pink tissue of adolescence. I bared my legs, but bent them inward, dressed them in angles in case you found them too soft, too fleshy. You didn’t (they weren’t). I kept my hair down so subtle shadows fell where cheekbones might be, stolen symmetry, in case you realised I wasn’t pretty enough. You didn’t (I was). We’d play pool – I never won (I never cared) – and eat chips on the way home; you paid your way and I paid mine, and I never needed to wear my coat (I did), until that one night when you didn’t walk me home, the night I fell asleep and you cut your teeth on me, the ones you lied through (you did), and I paid in full. I’d Be Queen of Myself (if I weren’t anti-monarchy) She said I seemed brighter and I was that day, that week, but my brightness had a lid on it because I couldn’t let it spill – unless I was alone and then I could sing and sing and grin at the windows and the cutlery and laugh at the shape of the front door all angular and rigid and trapped by lines – not like me – I was bright that day, that week, in cahoots with the sun (she told me so and she’s a puppeteer) and I’m dancing jigs in the frozen aisle and I’d be the Queen of myself (if I wasn’t anti-monarchy). But I’ll settle for this power, this rising gift, this momentary lapse when the numbing fog clears and life is so vivid, and it’s right under my nose, the promise of it, and I forget that it can’t last – it won’t last – until it slips through the membrane of my skin and I watch it leave, I watch the lights dim, I watch the numbing fog and the way it trundles in again, bearing the weight of things I can’t carry. Pink is a Sister Sick & other poems are © Seanín Hughes Nebulae & Salt at Dodging The Rain

Diphylleia Daughter, please       hold my hand. There is rain coming; look — a congregation of heavy promise waits above our heads to bathe us.                     It gives God to our ordinary air. Aren’t you beautiful? I have a gift for you. Please, hold my hand; k ep me in your tender palm. Parts of me are fading — your name, your sister flowers. Did        have sons? Oh. Why must I be                                dismantled s slowly? I’m afraid. Please                          hold my hand.     I’m s rry. Aren’t you         beautiful? I have a gift for you; diphylleia — the rain makes a s-skeleton             most gentle from its petals, translucent when touched by falling skies in Japan. See how its colours                   weep — see that crown of clarity, the petals in                                  their party dress, clear as Cind rella’s glass slipper. Ar n’t you b autiful? Pl ase, dau ter, hold my hand. Parts of me            fading. A ‘t you beautiful?  There’ll b         ain for flow rs today. I named you after a fl wer,       crowned you        mine. Please I m be utif l. hold my hand?

Seanín Hughes is an emerging poet and writer from Cookstown, Northern Ireland, where she lives with her partner and four children. Despite writing for most of her life, Seanín only began to share her work in late 2016 after penning a number of poems for her children. Prior to this, she hadn’t written in a number of years following the diagnosis of her daughter Aoife with a rare disease in 2010. Early 2017 brought a return to writing in Seanín’s spare time and since then, she has completed an ever-increasing volume of new poetry. Drawing from her varied life experiences, Seanín is attracted to challenging themes and seeks to explore issues including mental health, trauma, death and the sense of feeling at odds with oneself and the world. .

“The Bellmouth” and other poems by Gráinne Tobin

Internal Exile   It was all too much. He took to his bed, and stayed there for ten years, begetting, however, several more children. She carried trays up and down the stairs and he lay hidden, staring out to sea. At night he watched the lighthouse winking through his shuttered window. All the money was gone. It didn’t matter. They picked a living from their children’s labour at this salty edge of earth, where there was always fishing, chickens, a smallholding of sorts, some barter.   What got him up and dressed at last was this. One afternoon from under his eiderdown he gazed beyond the glass panes, as the waves framed by floral curtains, silently rose, and gulped his two sons in their boat – corpses never found, skiff washed ashore in pieces, the coastal searches just as futile as that warm sanctuary where the need to witness woke him in the end.   From The Nervous Flyer’s Companion   Happy Days in Sunny Newcastle   The air’s washed now, last night’s sad leavings swept up and away. Van drivers park outside the bakery with fried eggs held in breakfast soda farls.   Arcades of slot machines lie berthed between streams that slip downhill to a tideline flagged with pebbles, faded wood, wrecked loot, rubber gloves, broken glass abraded to droplets by the tumbling waves.   The daily walker on his coatless course between youth and age, observing wading birds and children’s games.   Up for a trip, out for a drive, dandering down the promenade.   Loudhailer hymns, crusaders’ tracts warn of strange temptations offered to ice-cream lickers, candy-floss lovers.   In the chip-shops’ wake the street opens to the sea which is the reason for everything, shingle bank, shops and houses, foundations sunk in marsh, confined by a shadowed arm where mountains lift out of the water, growing darkness like moss over the forest where the young roost with beer and campfires.   Heron pacing the harbour at twilight stiff-collared in clerical grey, squinting at coloured lights edging the bay.   Far out, the lighthouse signalling, Good – night chil – dren.   From The Nervous Flyer’s Companion   What Did You Say?   Asda, Downpatrick   While the till extrudes my coiled receipt I’m making small talk for the checkout man penned in his hatch by the conveyor belt.   Getting busy now? is all I’m asking, but he responds The building is sinking into the marshes as if the two of us   are conspirators with codes and passwords, exchanging news of dangers met or planned. He smiles, he nods, he shrugs, he sweeps   a hand towards the dipping car-park in a gesture from an opera’s revelation, to the orange barriers and repair signs   shoring up the ground of all our commerce against stirrings of the earth in peaty reed-beds. Under the paving, the beach. Under the tarmac, the bog.   Counting Children   The little boy is counting in clear-voiced German eucalyptus cones that drop, pock pock, on the café tables by the coach trip basilica, as up and down the half-mile staircase to the hilltop chapel with its cold-drink stall and cats, every child that passed was counting, in the languages of Europe, how many steps.   An idle afternoon is stored, recessive, a hundred aromatic seed-bells saved in a bag. Picking the crayfish off his plate for a puppet, speaking its words, snapping its claws for his dad, he lays down love in his bones like calcium.   From Banjaxed   The Bellmouth   Silent Valley Reservoir, Kilkeel   Come on, we’ll take a spin up to the valley, cross the sentry’s palm with silver at red gates in Water Commission walls, admire mown lawns and plaques on benches, tread new tarmac to the bellmouth – time a spillaway that swallows all.   Here, around the whirlpool of partition, when engineering was godliness, and the doctrine of the city was the purity of its water, they walled the heather slopes with granite blocks, trimmed the plughole of the reservoir in Protestant-looking burnt-blue brick, smoothed to the curve of a brass-band horn, a vortex fed by reeling mountain streams.   Granite, laid on puddled clay by giants whose folk-tale graves lie deep in stony fields, who drank their tea from sooty cans, ate their cold hard porridge sliced, worked the hills for a boss with a voice like rifle fire. I smell blood, one said, stopped halfway in the overflow tunnel when the hooter sounded a fatal fall. Stone men who wore starched shirts to dances in the recreation hall, watched Chaplin at the valley picture house, grown men who’d give a push-up to schoolgirls climbing the Mourne Wall in polished shoes, dropping down to leave the mountain roughness to walk the road to Mass in Attical –   girls of twelve who fastened wood-shavings as ringlets in their hair, whose uncle, one quiet Sunday, lowered them from the derrick down the hole half-dug for the dam, standing in a metal bucket, up to their necks, to look out on a hundred feet of dark, at grit and water leaking between cast-iron plates that lined the trench and held the walls apart –   living with Bignian in front of them and Pov-rty behind, spelt out in scree on the slope of Pig Mountain.

 

A Deconsecrated Furniture Showroom

 
Fultons Fine Furnishings

The glass hall’s empty except for a sellotaped notice
to show the pilgrim to the upstairs cafe,
where a waitress tells me
the place was shut down months ago,
and we say the words to each other –
receivership, jobs, recession,
antiphon, call and response.

The restaurant will continue to trade
in spite of the recklessness of their banking partners
and their agents.

The Private Dining Room’s a locked royal chapel,
and the nave a funnel of celestial light
within the shadowy void
as the escalator carries you upwards,
a ladder of souls,
to vacant room-sets, side-chapels,
frescoes, marble and parquet altars
sealed off with swags of tape.
Shaded lanterns burn on their chains
as in Toledo of the captives

and the faithful still meet for conversation,
broccoli bake and apple tart,
in their breaks from the industrial estate,
retail park, car dealership, warehouses,
hospital wards across the roundabout.

The Bell Mouth & other poems are © Grainne Tobin
 

Gráinne Tobin grew up in Armagh and lives in Newcastle, Co Down with her husband. She taught for many years, in further and adult education and in Shimna Integrated College. She is interested in keeping poetry open to its audience, including people without long years of schooling. Her books are Banjaxed and The Nervous Flyer’s Companion (Summer Palace Press) and a third collection is due soon from Arlen House. She was a founder-member of the Word of Mouth Poetry Collective, which met monthly for 25 years in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, and she contributed to Word of Mouth (Blackstaff Press) which was translated into Russian, and to the Russian-English parallel text anthology of members’ translations from five St Petersburg women poets, When the Neva Rushes Backwards (Lagan Press). Some of her poems are available in online archives, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Troubles Archive and the Poetry Ireland archive. Some have been exhibited in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and Derry’s Central Library. One was made into a sculpture and is on permanent display in Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick. She has had poems in anthologies – The Stony Thursday Book, Aesthetica Creative Writing, Washing Windows, On the Grass When I Arrive, Something About Home – in magazines such as Abridged, Poetry Ireland, The Dickens, Mslexia, Irish Feminist Review, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, Crannog, Banshee, Acumen, North West Words, Ulla’s Nib, Fortnight, the South Bank Magazine, and also online, in Four X Four and on a website for psychotherapists. She has won the Down Arts, Mourne Observer and Segora poetry prizes and has been listed in competitions.

Excerpts from ‘microliths’ by Paul Celan

from ‘Microliths’   161 Re­membering also pre­membering, pre­thinking and storing of what could be Yeats: I certainly owe more to that poet than to Fr. surreal. Strange. In front of a candle Now I tried to render visible the grain of sand (Buber, Chass. — //Nibelungens[on]g) that had to have been sunk into me too at some time. Mother, candles, sabbath But the poem lead me out of this idea, across to a new level with this idea 162 162.1 ­ It is part of poetry’s essential features that it releases the poet, its crown witness and confidant, from their shared knowledge once it has taken on form.  (If it were different, there would barely be a poet who could take on the responsibility of having written more than one poem.) 162.2 —Poetry as event Event = truth (“unhiddenness,” worked, fought for unhiddeness) Poetry as risk Creation = /power­activity /Gewalt­tätigkeit (Heidegger) Truth ≠ accuracy (­i­: consistency) –in each first word of a poem the whole of  language gathers itself — –handiwork: hand / think through connections such as “hand and heart” handiwork — heartwork Beginning: “Poetry as handiwork”? The handmade crafting of  poetry? About ‘Microliths’at Jacket2 Magazine About ‘Microliths’ at Poetry Foundation. I would like to thank Pierre Joris for his translation of Microliths. These translations are © Pierre Joris

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Once Once I heard him he was washing the world, unseen, nightlong, real. One and infinite, annihilated, ied. Light was. Salvation. From  Fathomsuns and Benighted  by Paul Celan (translated by Ian Fairley for Carcanet Books) (1991)

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Paul Celan related texts by Pierre Joris    Threadsuns by Paul Celan translated by Pierre Joris

The Meridian Final Version—Drafts—Materials  (2011) PAUL CELAN EDITED BY BERNHARD BÖSCHENSTEIN AND HEINO SCHMULL TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS SERIES: MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS .

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Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (German Edition) (German) Hardcover – December 2, 2014 .

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Further Reading on Paul Celan Pierre Joris websites and articles Celan/ Heidegger: Translation at the mountain of death; on translating “Todtnauberg” by Pierre Joris On the Translation of Later Poems by Paul Celan by Pierre Joris (Harriet/ Poetry Foundation & blog) Paul Celan and the Meaning of Language; An Interview with Pierre Joris (Interview; Doug Valentine, Flahpoint Mag) Celan the aphorist (Nomadics Blog, Pierre Joris) Original article at Jacket2 Magazine On Poethead: Once, Irish & (Todesfuge translated by John Felstiner).

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A Celebration of Irish Women Poets on Bloomsday 2017

“Canal Walk Home” by Gillian Hamill   What is it About the power of the water To heal hurts   Three lads sit on the boardwalk They hardly look like delicate sorts. And yet they gaze out Contemplate The rushing rippling mottles of the Undulating lake Can soothe souls.   Car lights are reflected in Striking streaks, always dappling Buzzy thrill of Modern pyrotechnics In the most basic of Science laws.   Edged by banking sycamore leaves I took one and put it in my pocket To describe it better. The smell of its earthy salt and bark Present. And the bare elegance Of stripped black branches Spearing themselves into the night air Soldered into the genesis Of life And yes they are Wild quiet.   A little further on There’s a piece of street art says Only the river runs free And maybe that’s the attraction Of this portal into liberty.   And then to gaze down the row Through Camden Street from Portobello The multi-potted chimney tops Sophisticated lego bricks Pricked by the Edwardian arc Of ornate street lights.   The red car lights more dense The further in you go Speeding up into A crescendo Of urban adrenalin As if in a movie And the cameras were moving in Drawing you in Crackle.   Crackle Quick, quick slow Travelling Boom in.   For all your talk Of dalliances with the dark Don’t you know that they are One and the same.   The splendour of the curvature of the veins in a leaf’s skin Echoed with variations Of trickled threads of gold. Are as a naked woman’s Crystallised spine Waiting for your touch Nymph and nature They are one and the same.   But purity Glorying in freedom In liberated breeze There is no need for Shame.   “Canal Walk Home” is © Gillian Hamill

Originally from the village of Eglinton in Derry, Gillian Hamill has lived in Dublin for the past 12 years (intermingled with stints in Galway, Waterford and Nice). She has a BA in English Studies from Trinity College, Dublin and a MA in Journalism from NUI Galway. She is currently the editor of trade publication, ShelfLife magazine and has acted in a number of theatre productions. Gillian started writing poetry in late 2014.   ⊗ Gillian’s Website

 

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“The Welcome” by Freda Laughton   Awaits no solar quadriga, But a musty cab, Whose wheels revolving spiders scare Pigeons from plump pavanes among the cobbles.   Past the green and yellow grins Of bold advertisements On the walls of the Temple of Arrivals and Departures, (Due homage to the puffing goddesses   Stout, butting with iron bosoms), We drive, and watch The geometry of the Dublin houses Circle and square themselves; march orderly;   Past the waterfalls of lace dripping Elegantly in tall windows; Under a sun oblique above the streets’ Ravines; and past the river,   Like the slippery eel of Time, Eluding us; eight miles clopping Behind the horses rump to where The mouth of Dublin gulps at the sea.   And there beside the harbour And the Castle, And the yellow rocks and the black-beaked gulls, The piebald oyster-catchers, limpets, lobster-pots,   There is a house with a child in it, Two cats like ebony (Or liquorice); and a kitten with a face Like a black pansy, a bunch of fronded paws;   And a dog brighter than a chestnut, – A house with a bed Like an emperor’s in it, – It is late. Let us pay the cabman and go in.   “The Welcome” is © Freda Laughton

Freda Laughton was born in Bristol in 1907 and moved to Co. Down after her marriage. She published one collection of poetry, A Transitory House (1945) but little else is known about her life and work. She may have lived in Dublin for sometime, as her poem The Welcome details the textures of Dublin City and its suburbs, and suggests she knows the city by heart. Her date of death is unknown. Freda Laughton’s poems were submitted by Emma Penney, a graduate of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College Dublin. Her thesis, Now I am a Tower of Darkness: A Critical History of Poetry by Women in Ireland, challenges the critical reception of Eavan Boland and the restrictive criteria, developed in the 1970’s, under which poetry by women in Ireland has been assessed. She considers the subversive nature of women’s poetry written between 1921 and 1950, and calls into question the critical assumption that Eavan Boland represents “the first serious attempt in Ireland to make a body of poems that arise out of the contemporary female consciousness”. In Object Lessons, Boland concluded that there were no women poets before her who communicated “an expressed poetic life” in their work. Emma’s thesis reveals how this view has permeated the critical landscape of women’s poetry, facilitating an absurd privation of the history of poetry by women in Ireland and simplifying it in the process. Interview with Emma Penney Dear Freda, Your Poems are being discussed on Jacket2 Magazine

 

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“Nurture” by Liz Quirke   In the nine months I didn’t nourish you, I made notes, I studied the seasons for ingredients to encourage your growth. Scraps of paper, post-its hidden in case anyone would view my thoughts, pity my trivia of leaves and berries.   A mom yet not a mother, a woman yet not a woman. My preparation took place in private, not in maternity wards or hospital corridors, but in the hallways of my mind where I could put up pictures, time lines, fill cork boards with plans.   As the folic acid built your brain stem I collated ideas to stimulate it further, mapped journeys for us, paths we could walk together, a staggered relay to start when your other mother passed your tiny form to me.   And I could see myself holding your hand, using my limbs to scaffold the structure your mother put so beautifully in place. I am your mom without the biology of mothering. All I have for you is my heart, my brain, my lists of things, all but those nine months when I was waiting.   (first published in New Irish Writing in The Irish Times) “Nurture” is © Liz Quirke

Originally from Tralee, Co. Kerry, Liz Quirke lives in Spiddal, Co Galway with her wife and daughters. Her poetry has appeared in various publications, including New Irish Writing in the The Irish Times, Southword, Crannóg, The Stony Thursday Book and Eyewear Publishing’s The Best New British and Irish Poets 2016. She was the winner of the 2015 Poems for Patience competition and in the last few years has been shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and a Hennessy Literary Award. Her debut collection Biology of Mothering will be published by Salmon Poetry in Spring 2018.   https://bogmanscannon.com/2016/04/02/fall-at-33-weeks-by-liz-quirke/

 

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“Detail” by Rachel Coventry   The world is full stretched, and sick with possibility. You find yourself in a gallery ill with heat and standing. Waiting for some man to play his ridiculous hand. So bored of art, but then forced into wakefulness by the feet of Diego Velazquez’ Cristo Crucificado. All suffering now upon you and you bear it because you have to.   First published in the Stony Thursday Book “Detail” is © Rachel Coventry

Rachel Coventry’s poetry has appeared in many journals including Poetry Ireland Review, The SHop, Cyphers, The Honest Ulsterman and The Stony Thursday Book. She was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2014. In 2016 she won the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust Annual Poetry Competition and was short-listed for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. She is currently writing a PhD on Heidegger’s poetics at NUIG. Her debut collection is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.

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“Going Dutch” by Seanín Hughes   I cut my teeth on you; let enamel tear through the warm pink tissue of adolescence.   I bared my legs, but bent them inward, dressed them in angles in case you found them too soft, too fleshy. You didn’t (they weren’t).   I kept my hair down so subtle shadows fell where cheekbones might be, stolen symmetry, in case you realised I wasn’t pretty enough. You didn’t (I was).   We’d play pool – I never won (I never cared) – and eat chips on the way home; you paid your way and I paid mine, and I never needed to wear my coat (I did), until   that one night when you didn’t walk me home, the night I fell asleep and you cut your teeth on me, the ones you lied through (you did), and I paid in full.   “Going Dutch” is © Seanín Hughes

Seanín Hughes is an emerging poet and writer from Cookstown, Northern Ireland, where she lives with her partner and four children. Despite writing for most of her life, Seanín only began to share her work in late 2016 after penning a number of poems for her children. Prior to this, she hadn’t written in a number of years following the diagnosis of her daughter Aoife with a rare disease. Drawing from her varied life experiences, Seanín is attracted to challenging themes and seeks to explore issues including mental health, trauma, death and the sense of feeling at odds with oneself and the world.

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“Hypothesis” by Clodagh Beresford Dunne   So the editor wants to know why people are killing themselves. I’ll tell you why – because they are part of a revolution they know nothing about. Not a revolution with guns and knives but one in its strictest physical sense, the revolution of the geoid, the planet earth. We might share it with billions but these days we are each on our own as it sits, upturned on its axis slowly revolving, shaking off the detritus until one by one we cling to the surface or free-fall into oblivion. And so we concoct bizarre ways to dodge our turn – we are drawn to the oceans to hide but drown in their deep waters, we strive to weigh ourselves to the ground, injecting ourselves like batteries with liquid lithium. To defy gravity we anchor our ankles to balls and chains or feel the ephemeral ecstasy of letting blood from our veins. While some tie ropes around their necks as they take their turn, ready to hang from the world, like a tarot card I once saw.   First published in The Stinging Fly “Hypothesis” is © Clodagh Beresford Dunne

Clodagh Beresford Dunne was born in Dublin and raised in the harbour town of Dungarvan Co. Waterford, in a local newspaper family. She holds degrees in English and in Law and qualified as a solicitor, in 2001. During her university and training years she was an international debater and public speaker, representing Ireland on three occasions, at the World Universities Debating Championships. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Southword, The Moth, Spontaneity and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She was the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Emerging Writer Award Bursary (2016) and a number of Literature awards and residencies from Waterford City and County Arts Office. In April, 2016 she delivered a series of readings, interviews and lectures, in Carlow University and Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of Culture Ireland’s International Programme. In February, 2017, as part of the AWP Conference and Book Fair in Washington, DC, she participated in a reading and discussion panel: “A World of Their Own” (five female poets in cross-cultural conversation) with US poets, Jan Beatty and Tess Barry, Irish poet, Eleanor Hooker, and Lebanese poet, Zeina Hashem Beck. She is a founding member, coordinator and curator of the Dungarvan and West Waterford Writers’ Group. She lives in Dungarvan with her husband and four young children.

 

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“Alice and her Stilettoes” by Lorraine Carey   We always walked faster past her little house on the brae. Every so often she’d scuttle out and snare us, clutching a plastic bag with the highest heels, scuffed and peeling, ready for the cobbler’s vice.   Her elfin face powdered, her fuchsia mouth pursed, the stain snaked onto her snaggled teeth, crept over her lips. She lay in wait, behind net curtains that twitched. Her ears hitched to the sound of the school bus, stalling, as we stepped off at Charlie Brown’s, stinking of fags.   Once John got three pairs of spine benders, for repair, so she had a choice, for Mass on Sunday.   “Alice and her stilettoes” is © Lorraine Carey

Lorraine Carey from Donegal, now lives in Co.Kerry. Her work has been published / is forthcoming in the following journals; The Honest Ulsterman, A New Ulster, Proletarian, Stanzas Limerick, Quail Bell, The Galway Review, Vine Leaves, Poetry Breakfast, Olentangy Review and Live Encounters. Her first collection of poetry will be published this summer.