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Contents Cover Image: Daniel Seiffert, from Kraftwerk Jugend, 2012
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01 Gerard Beirne 05 Ceara Conway 06 Michael Casey 08 Rachael Mead 09 Afric McGlinchey 10 Nadège Mériau 11 Clare McCotter 12 Zoë Murdoch 13 Olive Broderick 14 Rachael Mead 15 Ruth Le Gear 16 Howard Wright 18 Geraldine Timlin 19 Brian Kirk 20 Daniel Seiffert 21 J. Roycroft 22 Mark O’Flynn 24 Daniel Seiffert 25 Aoife Mannix 26 Arthur Broomfield 27 Ethna O’Regan 28 Antony Owen 30 Dougal McKenzie 31 Gerard Smyth 32 Nadège Mériau 33 Howard Wright 34 Rachel Mead 35 Steve Sharkey 36 Gerard Beirne 38 Kelly Richardson 39 Simon Perchik 40 Nadège Mériau 41 Sue Morgan 42 Victoria J. Dean 43 Stephen Sexton 44 Celeste Augé 46 Bernadette Bradley 47 Jan Uprichard 48 Contributors 49 Daniel Seiffert
After the Death of Free Love
Editorial Abridged 0__28: Once A Railroad
Abridged 0___28: Once a Railroad explores the destruction of the dream. The world that exists where ‘reality’ is presented as something to aspire to, something other than the real; where every emotion is public and quickly
In this marriage of ours abusive and ill-conceived/I hide from everyone under the welfare motel bed/
perishable, where expectation has replaced hope and where love and fear are the same thing.
while in the kitchen the fry cook sifts rat feces from the flour/and hour by hour the bereaved give birth to the underfed/the hippies already out to lunch serving free food over the counter-
Once we built a railroad and now what is left? What dreams are there still to dream? And the only lines we lay take us up from the void and lead us back down again. Once the future blinded us, strident as a mid-day
culture/offering crash-pads for the homeless/tie-dyed shirts and whole wheat bread/this frame
sun, now the tempered day is old, stooped and shuffles. Once we built a railroad guided by a dream, and
of reference without cost/Beneath the mattress and springs melancholia comes creeping in/having
what is left? People stark as death, anxious with absence, on crowded paths murky with limitation. No longer
siphoned gas in the desolate all-night parking lot/junked cars and drunks refused at bars/the corpse
hearing the warning whispers or seeing the signals, voided in a theatre of happy endings and perfect fates. Not a future here, so what is left? Burned out stars left to linger in a dusty limbo. Gone are the soft watermarks
unfound for weeks on end/a magnum .44 beside it on the ground/unrecogniseable even to his friends/
of the dream.
But all is not lost/we were made in another century were we not/asphalt, dust, dirt and diesel fumes/ rural rebels giving hell/diggers, true levellers of real property/This life is mine/I know no poverty/
2013 will see Abridged activity taken to new heights. There will be three Abridged poetry/art publications, an exhibition in Switzerland with accompanying magazine, a collaboration with Belfast Photo Festival, and an
there are no boundaries, no enclosures/we’re up-against-the-wall-motherfuckers armed with love/
Abridged archival project space plus more to be announced. Details can be found on our Facebook page and on
assassinating poets with blanks/What’s happening/my muse has other things for me to do/
our website. Next: Abridged 0 - 33: Undercurrents, Abridged 0 - 29: Primal.
the beatniks, dropouts, space-cadets are at the ranch/the hard-rock miners have given up the ghost/ draft-dodgers making dope-runs through the snow/the one-lane twisted road hugging the granite cliff/ the rock-strewn river below/Leaving nothing to chance/we’re digging irrigation ditches and terracing gardens, harvesting plants for dinner/our inner energy precariously balanced on this lofty ridge/ aspiring to deer antlers, the jawbone of an ass, nails and bailing wire/perspiring in the sweat lodge, we chant and rub cornmeal onto each others burning bodies/then gorge ourselves on roasted goat, drink homemade wine, smoke dope, make love with someone elses mate/It’s not too late, the hobo bundles still hold out hope/the daughters of Albion looking to the west/where women work on trucks, wield a pretty chainsaw like Essenes men renouncing sex/the scorn of cross-dressing
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In this state of grace/the nakedness of sin and shame/stricken with remorse the holy beggars
no part of this publication
denounce the purse and steal a market woman’s chickens /camaraderie amoureuse/ Oh Death,
may be reproduced without
you have refused my non-conformist caresses/and if it’s all the same, we’ll rename Lucifer,
permission. copyright remains with authors/ artists. abridged is a division of The
the morning star, as Venus/declare this marriage open, lewd, lascivious and obscene/but no matter how much I wash my hands of you, I cannot get them clean/Beneath the bed the air is stifling/ and the space they claim to be unending is trifling, heart rending and claustrophobic in the extreme/
Chancer Corporation,
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celibates, the as yet unborn/brethren of the free spirit justifying licentiousness, violence and rape/
c/o Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry Londonderry BT48 6PU website: www.abridgedonline.com facebook:abridged zero-nineteen twitter: @abridged030 telephone:028 71266946
Overleaf:
email: abridged@ymail.com
Ceara Conway, Cabaret – Carcass,
Gerard Beirne
Digital Photograph, 2011
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THE HORSEMAN DREAM
The horseman is first seen On a distant ridge just above The horizon. The image seems Flat against the sky, deprived Of depth and movement. He fades momentarily, Descending the grey shoulder Of the hill, then emerges faintly Against background rocks, Not much more than a blur though Surprisingly closer than before. Shade your eyes against the sun; Details appear, a glancing sheen On the horse’s flanks, puffs of dust
Mountain galaxias fish Galaxias olidus
This creek, more shadow than water, weaves between rock and bank, over and down, now silent now grumbling, holding itself thin. The casual eye will not see your body in the fast riffles swimming to hold yourself still, a dream of a fish, a shadow lingering against the current’s undertow with nothing to snag the eye, no splash no iridescence bursting or tail flukes blossoms. In shallows close to gasping you hide, the endless struggle
From hooves, suggesting speed.
of finding a place, a way
The rider’s face is still unseen
to live that cannot be taken.
But direction is all too clear.
So long ago now you almost forget how your shining spine bent the water,
Look again: no idle canter this;
how it was to swim filled
The double-headed image
with nourishment
Is approaching at a gallop,
when this water was world and the world yours,
Through fresh-turned furrows
eyes flashing tinfoil stars.
Of scattered sand and scree,
But now you are usurped in these starving shadows
With purpose and fidelity.
and you are not alone in shouting.
Now on the level plain You see, with dawning fear, The rider rise and fall, Vaguely in a molten haze; To an ancient rhythm of attack.
Michael Casey
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A spectre shimmering
Rachael Mead
Railroaded
The sky was falling to skittles with a crow bar, ice skitter-skattering under the table, and all I could think of was the worms, waiting underground for love and tomorrow, while through an open door, amiabilities of steam from the chipper rose into the empty street, and further down, they hauled armfuls of blue clay and olives, tossed them with furniture onto the railroad, along with all the dead rabbits, and sad boys who wrote such long letters in a lovely hand to their mamas. After a star was spotted pitching its tent on the point of a steeple, a black-haired orphan with birthmark crept into a ditch, where his skull was crushed like an egg by a hydra-headed dragon. And then, flying like bats, wine glasses cracked and you said nothing as I ran towards walls and doors, white corridors, collecting amulets, angling elbows against the wave that appeared in the doorway, a car floating on wheels, following in the footsteps of hitmen brothers and baby clothing. Cats usually play it cool, but that all changed as soon as the ozone bidding wars ploughed through clouds and traffic, and below a trapdoor, calves were stripped of flesh and eaten by wild animals. Now all I’ve got is somniphobia and a loose floorboard, one warm chicken salad with an egg, all set:
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everything in the kind darkness of a handbag.
Opposite: Nadège Mériau,
Afric McGlinchey
Au Centre de la Terre I, c-type print, 127cmx102cm, 2011
The first Maasai medicine man saw it crawling through his bones and whispering entrails straight to a lake at the end of time. Before fish-plates and fish-bolts, before a million sleepers buried their heavy heads in dry rustling savannah grasses two Tsavo males heard it coming from Mombassa. Prophesied serpent larger than any ever seen its iron jaws disgorging buffalo, eland, wildebeest and all the tall white cattle into strange foreign lands. Where men without skin strut sovereign soil calling this space this time Europe in the late Pleistocene. Ancestor, atavist, ape, ivory, coffee and tea hauled forward down lunatic lines. The railway worker’s destiny manifest in the rhadamanthine iris
Clare McCotter
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The Lunatic Line
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of The Ghost and of The Darkness.
Opposite: ZoĂŤ Murdoch, New Hope, 2012
BALTIC
Doldrums for Stephen Lawrence
Was it the kittiwakes; or the exhibits of LED words spilling over spreading out across the floor in measured lines, stock phrases
Leaping out to grasp a different future
that echoed the constant commentary in my head and didn’t deliver
you steeped this place sepia.
on their promise of the profane or the inappropriate, or was it you?
Now the rest of us find it hard to look up, the places we went to ride out the storms
Because last night it came to me that there was a poem there
rocking under this uncharted king tide.
and I went back to look for it, trying to calm the nausea again
What I once saw as treasure,
by bringing to mind the view from a window on the top floor
this drawing life from words,
of that converted flour mill, approving of a city that has capitalised
is revealed as a pile of plastic chips, jetsam only redeemable for tattoos
on the beauty of bridges, that has seen the wonder in the architecture
inscribing skin with failure’s copperplate.
of its Industrial Past. The gulls still calling out an early warning on the estuary but no cargo ships are travelling in their wake now.
This week the rudder lunged, unheld
Descendants of Mnemosyne have come home to roost
the bail bobbed against my calves, rigging loose and cracking in the wind.
under the massive eaves of Tyneside warehouses – perhaps
My map is true but without a destination
they never left but took shelter in hard to reach places, instinctively
what is its use? Just a list
holding onto their ideal habitat, knowing that this river is tidal.
of places the current might take me,
The kittiwakes have stayed on too, and only they seem right here.
including the grey lips of rocks. And yet this vessel remains afloat.
Though I try to keep connected it is easy to lose the others
I no longer seek a reason.
in stairwells, lifts, too many entrances, too large spaces,
Both hands on the tiller, the sail snaps full.
a confusion of different travel arrangements and, for me, an even greater sense of dislocation because everything I needed was there. And you were silent throughout except to ask me to remember that atrocities are best described by bad poetry. The kittiwakes hold everyone’s attention – as seen from the outside viewing platform and the CCTV footage in the children’s area. I hardly hear the man who says he’ll wave to us expecting us to see him through the one-way barrier of the camera.
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as he goes to see them en plein air. But there he is, saluting us, Like every other exhibit the kittiwakes are untouchable, but only they make me want to lean out beyond what is permitted, to make contact with stocky bodies, which even on their exposed platform seem warm.
Olive Broderick
Overleaf: Ruth Le Gear, Portal 2
Rachael Mead
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SLOW TRAIN Four seasons in one day, and everybody happy. Two horses, a chestnut and white in a field near Moira bordering an overgrown river and a neat stone bridge. You correct me by saying all white horses are called greys. Unlike me, they will not stray. We call at Knockmore, the twin towers of the Maze, old Maghaberry, Damhead and Trummery halts, any hole in the hedge with a level-crossing, until eased to a standstill at this station where the signal box has been closed for years, windows grilled and the tough, panelled doors are Chubb-locked. The platform backs onto shuddering weeds, wild grass and buddleia, the brickwork coming apart under ivy, though more unsettling are the plants who made it inside to flourish in the hothouse calm. All this you observe with annoyance at wasted history, when suddenly you notice movement at the window, the flicker of a trapped butterfly at the greening glass, wanting out to light and air. The village appears to be
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a day’s walk, and the river too is going nowhere fast.
Howard Wright
Opposite: Geraldine Timlin, Residue
Balancing Act
My father came from the north, from an avid race, their history a guttural mumble of townlands and churches; their home a green field half-hidden by rocks and gorse and bog water, shadowed by black hills, backs turned on their old Caledonian homes. Crude boats on grey water carried them here to new inhospitable lands. My mother came from the midlands, by the shores of grand lakes where pleasure boats cruise; one aunt a stern nun in the Far East turned her back on her calling, another ran guns for the rebels in the first Troubles; a brother drowned in a capsule up in the Baltic when the war had already ended. Their stories are real to my mind, as real as my own, I live them again and again to hold onto a past that is slipping from me day by day. I think myself modern, I relish technology; my brother who lives in Lusaka beams into my home, and we talk of the times we had pots under beds to piss in, jam jars to drink from, a hand pump for water at the end of the lane by our house. My children are happy but urban and thin, they speak with inquisitive irony when describing the world as it is, real or virtual; their futures are mapped out before them, inverted histories set in geological stone: the world is their village and they speak the language,
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and I am the axis balancing future and past.
Opposite:
Brian Kirk
Daniel Seiffert, from Kraftwerk Jugend, 2012
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. Sylvia Plath
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I The killing lines work day and night, they steam like a kettle on the boil. The city is covered in a pall of smoke, as if passing through five thousand feet of strato cumulus. Dogs in the street write ghazals; they blow in the breeze like discarded newspapers. The skyline, a blight of cranes, their metal spider work tumbles under the weight of greed. II Packs of dogs run wild in the streets, jackals, wolves, dingos under the shadow of Uluru. Their voices run along cables on packets of light, their messages folded like origami Lemarchand Boxes, packed tight into their quanta. Their howls send shivers down the spine of the night; in the street, running with dogs, hunting with wolves. III Strangers meet on a stairs and eye one another, dogs on contested territory. The limbic system is man in motion, a hardwired SAS survival kit, a coil under load, blow-back in an oilwell. This black gold, this pig-slurry, coats the pelt of the last dog/wolf. When a man runs past you with murder in his eyes and a knife in his hand, what part of the city do we map? IV The spoken word is fierce, high and mighty; the wolf’s skull, ossuary, urn for cosseted bones. The sound, the roaring of wind through trees, like the guttural voice of a drunk in a rage; thrashing about like some great cyclopean beast. The eye. The eyes, the window to the soul; the soulless beast; the manger, empty; the eyes, empty; the mirror, broken; the trees, bare.
V For Saul Mouth a delicate line, open like a bird on the city of night. Butternut hue of sky is sick. Tenebrous eyes quail in naked bulb-light. The nights tremulous heart beats faster. Footsteps crease the carpet; skin dried-out like a wasp’s leathery pelt. Yellow-tinged eyes, a wolf staring from the half-light of a sickroom. VI For Emily The world, an airless negative, where snow could be ash, and as beautiful. Lunar stillness. Lights burn in the city, their brightness as sudden as a supernova. In your bed, you stir and moan – with the fever of dreams, which are not our dreams. Ours contain the paw-marks of the pack, the hand of the host. Yours, we envy, are un-muddied, dreams of reams of pure white snow. VII The apocalypse, riotous on the streets, a carnival, of papier mache animal masks; at its head, a hand-crafted figurine, an animus, imbued with the power of the end of days. This is the right stuff. The sky is full of fire. The sky is fire. The animals fall on each other and devour themselves. Volcanoes erupt, the night sky is day-bright. The universe expands, contracts, expands, a rubber band. VIII The streets and houses, quiet after the storm, cower in the shadow of the paper apocalypse, and the soft patter of paws on snow or ash. A copper figurine weeps milk. Laps dandelion wine from the skulls of children. In the ruins of dead cities, once bombed, forever forgotten, houses, now shells, fall in on themselves, ashes and dust. Technology is witchcraft, polymers and glass towers; witches wisdom, madman’s soup, dog’s whine.
XIV Our natural history, a history of violence, born of our dreams. We dream the archetype. The great unknowing, bearded archetype. The city’s poetry is pornography, shouted from every corner, from the balconies, from the floors of the houses of government, obscenities. Words are strangled, as children are strangled in their beds, by the mad, the carnivorous under the watchful eye, the ever and all-knowing eye. XV The city, a city of masks, a city of glass, city of edifice, city of identity. The city, city of commerce, city of themes, city of memory, city of bodies, city of the fall. The city, city of the absent, city of the empty bottle, city of the half-mad, city of the skin. The city, city of meditation, city of the echo, city of endowment, city of lust, city of lucre, city of slums, city of transition, city of the beheaded, city of children, city of storms. XVI The engine of the city, the free-wheeling engine. The worm, turning. Turning in a bed of rust. The frozen moment. The naked moment. Dog days. Reality, the jaundiced eye. The rended veil. The smothered babe. The self-portrait. The mirror. The miracle of apocalypse, the confection of celebration. A warped evolution, its twisted rails. Its jumble of images, smoke. Its hash of emotion. Its immaculate eye. XVII Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen. These words spoken in a blind room with no windows. In the city of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Truth is an illusion, a dream, in the city. The city of lolling tongues. A head ablaze with stars and magnesium light. The jackal of the laugh; the dingo of the baby; the wolf of the thought; the dog of the problem.
J. Roycroft
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CITY SUITE
IX He stands in the middle of a street, all black teeth and piss-reek, stops traffic like a cloud of volcanic ash. The air fills with the noise of car horns and angry voices, lolling tongues and a dog’s panting. Gulls shriek over the river at the unrelenting cacophony. He practices a wizards art, is purely elemental, smile a grinning rictus, rabid rictus, lycanthrope smile. X Our dreams are tarnished brass, a railroad gone to seed, its spikes twisted, its wooden sleepers peeling from the ground like nails from their fleshy beds. The path is murky, ebb and flow of light, as the tide. The city, a dream. Froth on glass. The flaw in glass. City of glass. Past is freight, a lolling tongue. Words, past, are grinning teeth. Rictus of small child, entombed. XI Death and Empire. The city. They eyes. Yellow in the scant light. Rain falls like a fiery shower on the city; in the arcades, there is fire. On the shore, sea a roiling, boiling mass, The world, unrecognisable here, in dreams, in the city. Walk where no foot has fallen, is fixed through lack of moisture in air, in dream. Words, the bridge between this place and next. Years expire, one after the next, as per inventory. This, on the threshold. XII For Laura Smith Mind wakes clear-eyed from sleep, from dream. Unreality of reality stretches. Boundaries, minds, physical limits. Mental decompression. The heart is ground zero. Set in stone, and glass towers. Hubris. A man falls from a great height. A brick. What marks you in this life is that you are here. Thought is a light, a beacon, a flame with which to draw the moth. Lines dashed against stones by waves, under the ever-watchful eye, un-ending eye. XIII Walk our Via Doloroso, snap the membranes between here and there, the living and the dead. The caul. Paper crisps, freedoms crisp, as the last train leaves the fundamental nature of an important field. Art, literature, are impotent in the face of the cities of anger, the engines of ignorance. The architecture of violence, an implacable wall of nothingness. Gospels. Our natural history. Walk the halls of the dead.
JAWBONE
[after the painting Kangaroo Ochre by Natasha Daniloff]
No visible horizon here, only shards of bone like pieces of a broken dinner set scattered in the drought dry dust. A rectangle of bare earth much the same here as the next, except for these scraps of calcium. What would a herbivore want with teeth like that? mandible like a ridge of distant hills. Nothing left but the forensic reconstruction of what might have been, the way evolution needed it to be to prove itself, for why this fossil? why not that? Here it is: confetti too heavy for the wind to lift; an ivory gravy boat sinking in the dirt. Long after the ants have ceased their work,
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this lost footnote of bone.
Opposite:
Mark O’Flynn
Daniel Seiffert, from Kraftwerk Jugend, 2012
Ragged Edges
As we pick our way across the huge concrete roundabout, the sunshine shifts into grey spatterings of rain. The wind rattles through the marshes, as if the poltergeists of industrial contamination were warning us away from barbed wire lanes, the startling bleakness of gas girders circling up into the sky. The graffiti bunkers wink their loss of purpose, gigantic cranes swing their arms over the windmills of water. The mouths of diggers eat into the landscape with an obscene hunger
Being seen through Carroll’s Quarries
as the crumpled earth is fed to the river.
Even if it’s a panorama of ideas light and shade being undone a denial, in increments, of belief that makes you covet the impossible stability of December days and moonless nights illusions never so ghostly; though the grasp of the senses will haul you towards the actual a vision of grandeur in the black and grey of the carrion crow the real, if only you knew it,
We reclaim ourselves from the murkiness of the Thames,
invites.
as if this were a city we could walk through when we’ve died.
Describable
The survival of rhubarb just another miracle
the way nothing is.
of what can be saved from the waste. Here where we can lose ourselves in the architecture of the future
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and the maps are fluid at high tide.
Aoife Mannix
Overleaf: Ethna O’Regan, Table, 2012
Arthur Broomfield
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Ghost Town Once this gasping tunnel stitched slate to bluebells where navvies held fist fights. A town was made by coal, hills had their backs broken, black mountains glimmered. Men whinnied to the rest day then chirruped like nightingales in chapels of woodchip cold. Dragonflies hung with jam jar newts, their abdomens were sapphires adorning mould furred walls. Women floated from gramophones men ripped wildflowers from sleepers to dance them to a life of bourbon. The murdering wheel went still, miners washed to pale men hauling plywood through a ghost town. The bleak cargo wailed north to a town of velveteen faces
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and ports with Japanese flags.
Image:
Antony Owen
Dougal McKenzie, from Xennakis, 2012 Â www.notesoncolourmixing.blogspot.com
DANCING IN THE ATTIC It might have been called The Kingdom of Heaven – that discotheque in attic space that was the heartbeat of the night. A crowd of strangers dancing with strangers – the atmosphere so dimly lit it was hard to find a face among the girls with airs and graces, and the Johnny-Come-Latelys, hands in their pockets, backs to the wall.
Same as always, in faded jeans and check shirts hanging loose, we wandered in, hearkening to Martha Reeves, sometimes the beat of Born on the Bayou. On the stroke of twelve the music stops, the DJ pulls the plug, house-lights come on – so metallic and bright they could be searchlights
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looking for escapees along the Berlin Wall.
Opposite: Nadège Mériau,
Gerard Smyth
Au Centre de la Terre III, c-type print, 127cmx102cm, 2011
JOURNEYS
Tallack Street You quell the fear. You leave no one and have no one to return to.
My childhood home smells of earthbound birds,
The day comes early, the road wet and open for crazed loners.
carpets corrugated with the dust
It smells empty. Distant downlighters calm farmyards, secure exits,
of clipped wings and laughter
diseased signage flaring blue and green against tough clouds
swept beneath.
needling small towns bypassed and half-asleep like bones in a finger, the fist in a hand, a punch in the arm... Domestic
In that refrigerated house
departures to domestic arrivals fair no better, the train crowd
creativity was a locked pantry,
unmistakable when you settle among them as lockups
dreams sealed to moulder
and retail parks thicken, the razor wire and housebacks;
mute in airtight Tupperware.
fishermen slumped beneath atrophied salix, scattered pubs and light industries your father might recognise and as readily despise.
Wait, just wait; my morning mantra
Until the morning’s middle has you rushing the transport cathedrals
until the impetus, the ambition lay forgotten,
to stand above a bridge-straddled slow river, figments
a secret tucked into the zippered belly of a bear
and fragments, other journeys, like yours, going as far as they can.
left on the curb in a box for the Salvos. The sole consolation - time does move even in atmosphere so stifling that once outside, once breathing,
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even freedom seems to have a stench.
Overleaf:
Howard Wright
Steve Sharkey, Wall, Shadow and Exit, 2012
Rachael Mead
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Do The Damned Thing Right It is impossible to imagine the familiar maw of death robbed of every cent. Despite the spill of silver from our pockets, the moon, its light, the tree of heaven, I hate and fear myself. The wretched end spiked like needle beer, the caw of crows reposing in white-feathered dreams. It seems to me a haunting kind of summons savage in the extremes, and I reject the call. The paper skulls and clay, sugar cane and corn, myrtle wreaths hung upon the walls, the bathing in cold mountain streams, the railroad spur and engine trough we happen on to quench our thirst. It’s not enough. The beer is drunk in parks and slums where desperate ones break rank, extend their wings, take flight, do the damned thing right. The truth is quite indecent, distinguishes itself from the body, the crisis of thought. Something is obviously wrong. The lonely absorptions are too hard wrought, the nightmares that detest insomnia, the fevers, hives, boils and toothaches, the constant betrayals lonesome and sought after, the blackmails and solicitations, the dull obscenity of prowled affection. All this and more. Cataracts, arthritis and heart disease, sickness, failure, our own private anguishes. Don’t let us talk like that.
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mindful as we are of the animal waiting to devour us, its ravenous jaws. Don’t say a word.
Opposite: Kelly Richardson, The Erudition (I), 2010,
Gerard Beirne
Digital C-print, 29” x 40”, Image courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato, Toronto.
* You can still make out the stars though it’s noon and the beach changes --you can tell by the feel and listening for engine scrap breaking apart, smelling from smoke expects you to stand up barefoot keep struggling with shoreline --you’re not new to this will start the grill weeks ahead as if stars are never sure are milling around, forgot all about the darkness you’re breathing in and no way now to pick and choose the fires however small or close to some ocean or daylight till it creaks and your mouth no longer lit for kisses
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and songs about nothing.
Opposite:
Simon Perchik
Nadège Mériau, Grotto, c-type print, 127x102cm, 2011
Memories of Ya Full-fat figures, Angels of the North with pendulous breasts and soft Sotiran thighs, well posed soapstone is found within the bitten dust. A lone heart cries in a door-less round–house, foetal forms curve, carefully lain beneath dark-carved cryptic hearthstones. Brittle rumours are borne from a different, crueller age. Salamis, whose underbelly parts are Anthony’s gift to Arsinoe, cunningly by-pass a sister’s torturing asp. Then do well to remember the sun-sodden King Richard, gouged and pillaged, but true was his love for sweet Berengaria, a champion troth plighted beneath Kollosi’s Templar pentagram, still in sight and reach of vines. The General glimpsed a future free from foreign rule, a blessed enosis. But all our dreams spill inside-out in an insular mind, History rolls its bold tanks over herb-strewn hill-tops,
in a place that leads nowhere.
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and forever has no need for railroads
*Ya is an ancient name for Cyprus
Above:
Sue Morgan
Victoria J. Dean, Shelter I, Bray, Co. Wicklow, 2012
Folie à deux The ladies[…]have for various reasons
Look on the left to see a maid
Following the signpost of his arm,
preferred not to disclose their real names,
airing a bed-sheet at a window.
look how the grasses seem
but the signatures appended to the Preface
Understand that in every way
to return; rolled as a carpet
are the only fictitious words in the book.
she is moving, reconcile that the sheet
towards the lawn of the Trianon,
An Adventure (1911)
billows with air and is entirely still.
where a woman sits with her handkerchief
Press on with Charlotte and Eleanor
tucked in her bodice.
to a woman passing water
See how she seems to smile
in a jug to a child incompletely
at them past her sketching paper
as though she’s caught in your glance:
that is held out in front of her
always almost.
as if to compare
Press on with these two as their pace
the drawing to the women.
I have been lost in Cologne and Nice, Reading and Comber. I have not been lost at Versailles – unlike Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain who, during a leisurely stroll through the grounds of the Palace took such a turn; such a deviation from the tracks that they found themselves more than a hundred years in the past. Imagine as they wandered towards the Petit Trianon, the afternoon closing around them like a parasol: the sky sinks to a deep blue, the immaculate lawns worry themselves into arid scratches of sunburn.
slackens, as each withholds from the other her sense of sickness. Notice that look
Imagine one week later, as Charlotte
on Charlotte’s face when the thickets
and Eleanor decide
of greenery loom impossibly dense.
that it was Marie Antoinette
Watch them ask for directions
sitting on the lawn
in their shaken French from a man
in front of the Petit Trianon.
shaded in a sombrero, whose skin
Watch as they realise it
is fiercely reddened by St. Anthony’s Fire,
simply must have been her,
who doesn’t converse so much as speak
and watch them each reach for a pen
at them.
in all of the terror of the future.
Consider the woodlands unrattled by sound as though a tapestry – unfurled across the landscape – banished movement from its weave. Follow the weave of the path past a plough rusted in its stillness: unthinkable stillness – no tremors of sunlight haunting its surface, of anything other than not.
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no glimmer on its settled furrows
Stephen Sexton
Moving Red Dot Armpit waft, freckles, slippery hand rail. Three stage fare. I clasp the carrier bag to my half-chest as the carriage rocks against my pulse, hush-swoosh, hush-swoosh. I am nowhere––not missed, not needed, a moving red dot on Google Maps. The backs of my thighs stick to the seat. I’m off to the beach to forget myself, my shrinking life: years squeezed into jobzone eatzone Tvzone until life seems silly, the way a word loses sense when you repeat it over and over–– armpit armpit armpit–– train huddle, beach sprawl, the smell of Shankill through the open doors, one more stop and everyone will slip off, try on Bray Head, sky open above our scalps, sea clutter, skin, our selves stretched out,
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ready to lift off.
Celeste Augé
Opposite: Bernadette Bradley, 2012
Contributors Celeste Augé is an Irish-Canadian writer who has lived in Ireland since she
Ceara Conway is a visual artist and singer based in Galway, Ireland. She
was twelve years old. Her poetry has been short-listed for a Hennessy Literary
recently created ‘’Iascéalaiocht’’ a storytelling performance on the sea
Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is The Essential Guide to Flight,
for TULCA 2012, and is a recent recipient of the CREATE Artist in the
and her debut book of short fiction Fireproof and Other Stories was published
Community Research Award. Her work focuses on creating performance
this year. She lives in Connemara.
events and permanent works that respond to specific contexts and engages the participation of the public. She has plans to sing her way through 2013.
Gerard Beirne is an Irish writer now living in Canada where he teaches at the University of New Brunswick and is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead. His
Victoria J. Dean (b. Belfast, 1980) graduated from Blackpool and the
most recent collection of poetry Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual was
Fylde College in 2003 with a BA (Hons) in Photography, and has exhibited
published by Oberon Press, Fall 2011.
her work throughout the UK and Ireland in a number of group and solo exhibitions. Dean was commended by New York’s PDN in their 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch for 2007, and was awarded Honourable
Bernadette Bradley attended ‘The college of Art’ Belfast in 1976-79, and
Mention in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 2007. Represented in
despite the seventies and life intervening, she has persisted with her visual
2010 at SCOPE New York and Galeria Arsenale in Bialystok, Poland by
quest, far and wide. Known more as a painter, (she has had solo exhibitions
the Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast), her work is held in the Arts Council
on both sides of the border, also previously, selected for RUA , Sligo small
of Northern Ireland Collection and numerous private collections in the UK
works , Glebe Gallery and others.) Familiar with hopping on scaffolding
and Ireland.
she has undertaken many public and private mural works in the Northwest, (Strabane District Council, Letterkenny General Hospital to name a couple). Brian Kirk is a poet and writer from Dublin. He has been shortlisted for various awards in recent years including Hennessy Awards for fiction in 2008 Olive Broderick is originally from Co. Cork and now living in Downpatrick.
and 2011. He was twice shortlisted for RTE’s PJ O’Connor Award for radio
She has previously published Darkhaired (Templar Pamphlet, 2010).
drama. His stories and poems have appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Abridged, The Stony Thursday Book, Southword, Crannog, Revival, The Burning Bush 2, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs, Bare Hands Poetry, Cancan, The First Cut,
Arthur Broomfield has been published in most Irish literary outlets - Poetry
WortMosaik and various anthologies.
Ireland, New Irish Writings, Cyphers, Wordlegs, Poetry Bus and others.
He blogs at http://briankirkwriter.com/
One of his poems is in the current issue of Orbis. His chapbook The Poetry Beckett scholar and is currently completing a book on the works of Samuel
Ruth Le Gear (b.1985) graduated from Galway Mayo Institute of Technology
Beckett (Cambridge Scholars). Arthur Broomfield is the editor of Outburst
(GMIT) with a degree in sculpture in 2007. She has just returned from a
on-line journal.
residency in the Arctic Circle in the international waters of Svalbard. Other residencies include Berlin (Culturia 2012), Fire Station Artists’ studios,
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Reading at Semple Stadium (Lapwing) was published in 20011. He is a
Dublin (2011) Iceland (SIM, 2012/09) Limerick City Gallery of Art (2008). Michael Casey was educated in New Ross, UCD and Cambridge. He has
Exhibitions include EV+a 08 Limerick City Gallery Of Art, Claremorris Open
worked and taught in Dublin, Cambridge and Washington DC. He has
Exhibition and Crystalline at the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown,
published a novel, Come Home, Robbie, a book of non-fiction, Ireland’s
Co. Armagh.
Malaise, and a considerable volume of poetry and short fiction--much of it award-winning. He occasionally writes for the Irish Times.
Aoife Mannix is the author of four collections of poetry and a novel Heritage of Secrets. She has been poet in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. She has performed throughout the UK and toured internationally with the British Council to China, Latvia, Nigeria, Turkey, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Norway and Austria. www.aoifemannix.com
Contributors Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts
Zoë Murdoch studied Fine Art at the University Of Ulster in Belfast before
Kelly Richardson’s work is currently the subject of a touring, 15 year
Gerard Smyth’s seventh collection, The Fullness of Times: New and Selected
of the world. She won the IHS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2010 and 2011.
joining Queen Street Studios in 2001. In 2012 she was made an Associate
retrospective at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (Sunderland, UK),
Poems was published in 2010. He is a member of Aosdána and winner of the
She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Beatrice Grimshaw’s
Academician of the Royal Ulster Academy. Her work has been exhibited
Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool, UK), Towner (Eastbourne, UK) and Albright-
2012 O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the University of St Thomas in Min-
travel writing and fiction. Her poetry has been appeared in Abridged, Boyne
in a wide range of group and theme based shows throughout Belfast and
Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, USA) followed by a smaller presentation at the
nesota. He is poetry editor of The Irish Times.
Berries, Crannóg, Cyphers, Irish Feminist Review, Revival, The SHOp and
Ireland and has been included in shows in London, China, Nice, New York
Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada) in 2014. Previously, she has
The Stinging Fly. Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and
and Pennsylvania. She received an ACNI Individual Artist Award in 2009.
been selected for the Beijing, Gwangju and Busan biennales, and major
haibun, was published in 2012. Home is Kilrea, County Derry.
In 2007 and 2010 she was awarded the Robinson McIlwaine Architects
moving image exhibitions including the The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality
Geraldine Timlin lives and works in Co.Donegal. She has previously worked
Original Vision Award by the Royal Ulster Academy.
and the Moving Image at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
designing and delivering art workshops with Artlink, Buncrana; The Pushkin
(Washington, USA) and Caixaforum (Barcelona, Spain), Videosphere: A New
Prizes Trust, Newtownstewart and Donegal VEC. Her work has been exhib-
Afric McGlinchey is a Hennessy Emerging Poetry Award winner
Generation at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, USA) and Visions
ited with the Royal Ulster Academy, Belfast; Regional Cultural Centre, Let-
and Pushcart nominee. Her début collection, The lucky star of hidden
Mark O’ Flynn has published four collections of poetry and a memoir False
Fugitives at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing, France). Born in Canada, since 2003 she
terkenny; North 55; Inishowen Rural Arts Network and throughout Ireland. In
things, was published in 2012 by Salmon. She lives in West Cork.
Start’. In 2013 his third novel The Forgotten World, will be published by
has been living and working in North East England. Further information on
2010 she won the University of Ulster Wright Perpetual Award for Achieve-
www.africmcglinchey.com
Harper Collins, as will a collection of short stories. He lives in the Blue
her works and practice can be found at: www.kellyrichardson.net.
ment on the Associate BA in Fine & Applied Art and is currently working in Special Education in Buncrana, Co Donegal researching methods of incorpo-
Mountains, Australia.
rating Braille into Visual Art for Blind and Visually Impaired people. Dougal McKenzie was born in Edinburgh in 1968. A co-director in the
J. Roycroft’s work has appeared in Flaming Arrows, The SHOp, and The Burn-
early years of the Belfast artist-run organisation Catalyst Arts; a Lecturer
Ethna O’Regan received her BA(Hons) in Photography from the Dublin
ing Bush 2, amongst others, with work forthcoming in The Stinging Fly. Born
in Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design until 2004; currently
Institute of Photography in 2007 and her work has been selected for several
in Dublin and educated at The Queen’s University of Belfast, he is currently at
Jan Uprichard is a Belfast based artist with an MA in Art in Public from the
Lecturer in Painting at the University of Ulster in Belfast and working
group shows in Ireland and the UK. The most recent of which being
work on the companion novels, The Imitation Game and In Fiction.
University of Ulster completed in 2010. She has exhibited and undertaken
from Queen Street Studios. A prize winner at the Liverpool John Moores
the Salon Art Prize in the MRA Project Space, London and Future Perfect,
projects nationally and internationally, notably in the National Gallery of Bul-
Contemporary Painting Exhibition in 2004 and an exhibitor again at the
in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin. Her work can be found in
garia (2006), in Erfurt, Germany (2010), the Beton Salon, Paris (2010) and
John Moores 2012 Prize.
private collections in Germany and Ireland. She lives and works in Berlin and
Daniel Seiffert was born in 1980. Before studying photography at the Ost-
PS2 Belfast (2011). She has received grants from the British Council, the Gar-
Dublin.
kreuz School for Photography in Berlin, he earned a Master’s degree in Politi-
field Weston trust and Arts Council Northern Ireland. Her recent work centres
cal Science, Media Studies, and African Studies from universities in Potsdam,
on participatory/dialogical projects frequently involving the use of smell. She
Berlin, and Lisbon. He self-published his final work “Kraftwerk Jugend”
also works as part of artists’ collective Sociable Science.
Rachael Mead is a poet from Adelaide in South Australia, currently drowning in a creative writing Ph.D. She has just had a collection of poems
Antony Owen is from Coventry, England. His first poetry collection My
2011. Among others Seiffert won the prestigious C/O Talents Award and was
www.Januprichard.com, www.odourificodyssey.com,
published by Wakefield Press in New Poets 17. Her full length collection
Father’s Eyes Were Blue was published by Heaventree Press in 2009
nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award. The book was shortlisted for the
www.sociablescience.wordpress.com.
was just shortlisted in the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literature Awards for best
followed by a pamphlet of war poems in 2011 titled The Dreaded Boy by
Dummy Award of 5th International Photobook Award and has been shown at
\
unpublished manuscript and last year she was awarded the Dorothy Hewett
Pighog Press. Owen co-organises a twin city poetry project in association
Le Bal, Paris and at the Brighton Photo Biennial. He currently lives and works
Flagship Fellowship for Poetry by Varuna, the Writers’ House.
with O’Bheal and was a 2011 competition finalist organised by The Wilfred
as a freelance photographer in Berlin.
Howard Wright lives and works in Belfast. His first collection, King of Country appeared in 2010 from Blackstaff Press. Blue Murder a pamphlet
Owen Story.
from Templar Press was published in 2011. Poems up-and-coming in Poetry Stephen Sexton lives in Belfast where he is studying for a PhD at the Seamus Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan
residence at the Florence Trust, London. Her work was recently on show at
Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere. For more information,
TULCA 2012, Galway and other selected exhibitions include FFWE at The
including free e-books, his essay titled Magic, Illusion and Other Realities
Photographers’ Gallery, London 2012, Prix Decouverte, Arles 2012, Brighton
and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at:
Steve Sharkey uses photography to investigate personal philosophy and to
Open’11, Phoenix Gallery, Album, Liverpool Biennale 2010, Exposure,
www.simonperchik.com.
reflect upon experiences and memory. Through a developing language of spe-
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nominated for the Arles Discovery Award 2012 and is currently an artist in
Wales, Other Poetry and The Interpreter’s House.
Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Format Festival, The Quad, Derby 2009, Curious Nature, Newlyn Art Gallery
cific motifs, as well as general symbolism and associations, he also explores
2008 and Bloodmoi at Rotterdam City Museum 2007.
and questions the conscious and unconscious communication between people
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Nadège Mériau is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and was recently
and their environment. Sue Morgan lives in Newry with her husband and two children. She has an
Abridged Personnel
Honours degree in Archaeology, Anthropology and Ancient History, which
Project Coordinator/Editor Gregory McCartney: Over the edge and too
she finds great for solving crosswords. Some of the places you can find her
far forward.
work are: The New Poet, Poetry24, Every Day Poets, The Southword Literary
Editorial Assistant: Susanna Galbraith: Settling comfortably into student life
Journal and Crannog Magazine.
in an English Literature degree, still learning, dabbling, and opening doors.
Sara Greavu Artlink Fort Dunree Residency, Winter 2012 Artlink, Fort Dunree, Inishowen, Co. Donegal T. 074 93 63469 www.artlink.ie
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Image: And your feet unable to find the ground, Sara Geavu, 2012
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