The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
The Burning Bush2 issue # 7 Nov 2014
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
The Burning Bush 2 issue seven contents
Poetry Tim Dwyer Brian O’Callaghan Patrick Chapman
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Simon West
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Bonny Cassidy
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Sumac Humble Feasts on Calico The End The Virgin at the Altar A Meditation on Nostalgia The Silver Birch Inland
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The Anniversary
Susan Connolly Breda Spaight
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The Beacons at Mornington Daddy’s Girl
About the Editors
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Fiction Sara Mullen Poetry
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Tim Dwyer Sumac Late August
A flock of geese flies south-west while a few yellowing leaves appear on the sumac trees, pioneer trees that grow anywherethrough the concrete behind my boyhood apartment, by the fence around the industrial park, in the shattered glass and dirt along the factory avenue. The old tribes would steep the red berry clusters in spring water to make a healing drink. These trees, old neighborhood friends overlooked as we ventured into the wide world. Other friends are long gone, but the sumac will be there for our weary return.
Tim Dwyer has recent and upcoming publications in a number of journals, including The Stinging Fly, Revival, Crannog, Cork Literary Review, Skylight 47, The Linnet's Wings and Southword. He is currently completing a collection of poetry and short fiction entitled Between Two Shores: Messages from the Irish Diaspora. He is a psychologist at a correctional facility. He grew up in Brooklyn and lives in the Hudson Valley of New York State. His mother and father were from Gort and Loughrea, respectively, in County Galway.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Brian O’Callaghan Humble Feasts on Calico Small wallpapered rooms Naked beds, naked space. Stale but still breathing Ghosts of children play and wash by the stream. Cresol. Endless summer of black picket fences Future tense, thin-line skyscraper visions have been realized. Deja- vu. Every old magazine kept in the garage with oil and petrol, an old bike. Pine tree skeletal murmur, Childlike barrels hold rainwater, delicately encased in rust. No running water. Two sons, one daughter. A four inch portal lets in summer and winter Dog-eared postcards from Kerry, evidence of his existence. Humble feasts on calico They kneel because they are broken Defeated communions of suffering.
Brian O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1976. He lives and works Thailand.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Patrick Chapman The End Every Kurtz begins as Marlow following some dreamer who is himself but in the future down a river that leads onward to death as all rivers must. Marlow never sees the man who follows him, this Willard. Marlow can not warn him in time that setting out on the Congo is a mistake, that setting out on the Nung is a worse idea – that he should leave the madman in the future, leave the madmen in the future.
to rot
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Do not try to find him – do not find him. Do not try.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
The Virgin at the Altar In my dotage I will flower. As age creeps in I’ll turn out exponentially desirable – even more adonic than when in my deaconhood disturbed old maidens fainted in the pews. Ostentatiously they’d swoon for the effect and after Mass behind my back would whisper: Check out Father Dreamboat Smith the Younger; how gracefully he glides upon the flags. I am certain now that in those golden days many a virgin would come to a sermon of mine. One spinster in particular, I’m sure, was dying to dance me from the stone, and seduce me to abandon my whole Casanova Tabernacle Frankenstein routine. In her organ shoes she’d tap me half way down the transept aisle, to the twist of toccata and fugue, then whirl me back up as if on rollerblades. Oh but then she would strand me to groomily wait, while she bicycled home – that extinguished apartment – and drew out the veil, smothered in camphor and dust, which she had not set upon her head since her second would-be husband had jilted her by means of fatal cardiac arrest. When she pirouetted back in through my threshold, swanlike, prim and self-possessed, slender as a single-portion ballet for all the world as though she had rehearsed
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
a day like this since she was eight – but little understanding that my love is not for her kind, not at all – she would wrap me in her feathers, enfold me in her fragrant self, and absorb my meat entirely in her chest exacting cold revenge for that unpleasant business with the rib.
Patrick Chapman is an Irish poet, fiction-writer, producer and screenwriter, born in 1968. His eight books include A Promiscuity of Spines: New & Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and The Negative Cutter (novellas, Arlen House, 2014). He is co-founder of The Pickled Body online quarterly.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Simon West A Meditation on Nostalgia It was a cool summer afternoon. White-plumed honeyeaters worked quickly gathering insects from the leaves of a gum. A plane swept low in laps for a nearby parade. I noticed how the fences of my garden rose up idly. I thought, someday if I could watch this scene afresh captured as film – a given light, the given world, and me, here, but held by time at one remove – then all reserve would vanish. Like a homecoming – I would grasp each detail keenly. Alas my thoughts turned to a nerve in my back, to the undue fame of my enemies and to my awaiting glory, as majestic as the ocean meeting the shore. I have recorded nothing.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
The Silver Birch Mortar lines and peeling paint, the well-traced bricks your curtains opened onto daily. Certainties you once found set against pink early-morning early-summer clouds, while in a middle plane of silhouette, reaching out above that wall, branches of a silver birch tossed silently for wind which blew beyond the glass. Just that. With a snapshot’s here and now. And thus it was granted you to heed how in a given light time’s hardened views may cede to the dancing tips of a tree.
Simon West is an Australian poet. He has published two collections of poetry in Australia, First Names (Puncher& Wattmann, 2006) and The Yellow Gum’s Conversion (Puncher & Wattmann, 2011). He recently took part in a tour of Ireland, organized by Australian Poetry Inc. Further info about his work can be found at the publisher's website: http://www.puncherandwattmann.com/books/book/the-yellow-gums-conversion/
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Bonny Cassidy Inland I lay my thought over the bough: mouthless white as confidence its spiral tipped and drawn. I will imagine you in foreign streets; not at the feet of history but in the alley where it limps. Sometimes still you come back in drips from your shoulders, other eyes. Last light mine I stand up in the field incommensurable a doric winter straight under my fluted brain.
Bonny Cassidy is an Australian poet living in Melbourne, where she lectures in creative writing. Her first full-length book, Certain Fathoms (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012) was shortlisted for the Western Australia Premier's Book Awards 2013, and a new book, Final Theory, is forthcoming from Giramondo Publishing in July. As a recipient of the annual Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland Fellowship, she visited Ireland in 2014.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Sara Mullen The Anniversary I half expected to see him this morning, sitting on the wall outside the station with his hood up and just enough fingertip exposed to hold a cigarette. But he wasn't there. Or was he? I might not have recognised him. Ten years could have added bulk to his frame or wasted him away. Would his hair be darker? Sparser? Would he have shed the dark layers of youth for adult attire? Rain was falling and fog swathed the mountains, but as I approached the square the gloom faded in the cheerful bustle of a city Saturday. Men carried swags of evergreens up ladders and fixed them above doorways. Gold baubles among the leaves caught the dull light and alchemised it. A frieze of Goth kids banded the front of City Hall. Was he there too, watching me? Among slivers of faces sunk in hoods, I caught some eyes but none like his. He'd be twenty-nine now, it struck me: too old. I might have found him in Foyle's coffee shop, peering into some ancient book, but Foyle's had disappeared. After my third circuit of the square, I broke away down a side street. What if I called the number? What to say after years of saying nothing? Were the teenage snubs and retaliating slights remembered? Would the receiver be set down on my awkward greeting? I decided not to phone yet. Then not to phone at all. The streets were becoming heavy and slow. I still looked out for him in the crowd. Bottle-blue jacket, a swing of gold hair. How often he used to just appear, a figure at my shoulder, in open empty spaces where seconds before there'd been nobody but me. One time, a black cat yowled at me from a roadside. It was gone when I looked back, and he was there instead. 'There was a cat,' I said, startled. 'Yes,' he replied, staring. 'It's gone away. Somewhere.' A laughing blond man in a bandana, a bookish sort in a suit: I felt him near but couldn't make him out. At the college, the grass was drinking deeply the rain and glowing green. As it was Saturday, the grounds were quiet. How lovely the trees were now in the middle of the month. November was his favourite time of year.
(Continues on next page)
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
The rowan, glorious in the grey day, hung heavy with scarlet berries. I touched his name on the brass plaque, then picked a fallen leaf off the ground. I felt old, walking away; much older than he would ever be. What could we have to say to each other now? I walked the short distance to his street and found I had forgotten the house number. Retreating down the road, I glanced back and was sure I saw him as he'd been, fading past a garden gate.
Sara Mullen, originally from Mayo, has worked as an English teacher in Dublin since the mid-nineties. In 2012 she completed her M.Phil. in Creative Writing at The Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity College Dublin. Her first chapbook of stories is forthcoming from Tower Press (USA).
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Susan Connolly The Beacons at Mornington Come back, come back to walk this road, the wind slack, river a mirror, the pilot boat gone out to sea. Watch the beacon lights, as if somewhere deep within, you and I depend on them. The pilot boat returns, guiding a ship majestic in the dark – that’s the moment our lives join, yours and mine: the beacons guide us too. We watch, silent as a ship entering the river.
Susan Connolly’s first collection of poetry For the Stranger was published by the Dedalus Press in 1993. She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Her second collection Forest Music was published by Shearsman Books in 2009. Shearsman published her chapbook The Sun-Artist: a book of pattern poems in June 2013. She lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Breda Spaight Daddy’s Girl You were in love with your daughter by then, grooming her during daylight hours with the story of her birth. A mid-December storm. The south-westerly wind boomed through bare oaks that fringed the two-roomed gate-lodge, all that day. By evening, Mrs Hayes from over the road was sent for. ‘I held you, imagine it, in the palm of my hand.’ I see you with your daughter in your palms. I see you as proud man of the house. I see you slip, God-forsaken, damned. I see you in nightlight, sick-sexed in a crosier-ised State, where men masturbate after the Rosary. Our Father. Amen.
Breda Spaight is a poet and novelist from Co. Limerick, Ireland. Her poems have appeared in The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Skylight 47, The SHOp, and ROPES (2014). She was awarded an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. Her debut novel God on the Wall received wide critical acclaim and she was a guest reader at the Paris Book Fair (2002).
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
About the Editors Alan Jude Moore is the author of four collections of poetry: Black State Cars (Salmon Publishing, 2004), Lost Republics (Salmon Poetry, 2008), Strasbourg (Salmon Poetry, 2010) and Zinger (Salmon Poetry, 2013). He lives in Dublin. His website is www.alanjudemoore.com Dr. David Gardiner is a writer and editor who has lived and worked in Manhattan, Dublin, Coleraine, Chicago and Boston. He has been visiting scholar at Boston College, New York University and the University of Ulster. From 2006 - 2010, he was founder and editor of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts (New York / Dublin) as well as Director of Creighton University Press where he published the works of Pat Boran, Gerald Dawe, John F. Deane, Theo Dorgan, Eamon Grennan, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Paula Meehan, among others. He has written five books, edited ten and authored over sixty journal publications. His poetry publication Downstate was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011. His poetry has been featured in publications throughout the U.S. and Ireland. His most recent collection is The Chivalry of Crime.
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The Burning Bush 2, issue seven, Nov 2014
Thanks for reading issue #7 of the Burning Bush 2. If you would like your work to be considered for a future issue, please read the submission guidelines, available on our website, www.burningbush2.org Please send all correspondence to burningbushrevival@gmail.com
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