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Abridged 0_36 Dis – Ease Contents: Poetry _ Moyra Donaldson Photography _ Victoria Dean
Graphic novel available as a free downloadable app for iPads and Tablets from September 2014
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CROWS ON THE WIRE:
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This Weather
If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a abridged 0__36
and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who
No part of this publication may
know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind
be reproduced without permission.
of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want
Copyright remains with authors/
is not there.
artists. Hunter S. Thompson abridged is a division of
What shall we ever do here in the secular barrenness of this waste land, all the hordes uneasy with boredom, distressed with a strange sensation of absence. A ‘dis-ness’. A lacking. An open wound. We are post-ease. Negations are now our only tools of self-definition: what we have lost and what we have shifted beyond. What we are no longer and what no longer is. Everything is displaced and dislocated. Everywhere, in every area of knowledge and belief, we recognise complete ambiguity and uncertainty. We are disconcerted and discomposed. The ease our bodies remember from past generations, the sense of general wholeness, is undone. All we have is our recognition of the undoing.
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Dis-ease is a return of the gothic, and the city is a gothic space. The urban environment is unstable and riddled with dark currents of the preternatural, the peculiar, and the inexplicable. Stick figures are paralysed in strange corners of the landscape. Unnatural forms, malignant tumours, stalk the body of the city, infusing and infecting. Eerie humours and animal sprites. The system is shot, our nerves are shattered and splintering. Threatened by the uncanny, we play dead. In essence absurd the disembodied monitors, the bodiless benches, the wire fences imposing arbitrary structures on our environment. Connecting nothing with nothing. Absurdity defies connection, explanation and identification. An unidentified fever burns in the metal scaffolding of the city and in its occupants. Here we are in the outskirts of Dis, the furiously burning pit, the festering epicentre of this hot dis-ease. The heat is intense, a charged white heat that does not glow or sweat but is the whole sky weighing down on us, closing in on our anxiety. Here is hell as we know it, one we understand only by desire and absence.
One grim day after another gathers its grey garments, hunkers above us, hammers us into the shapes of rain; a huddle, a hunch. Our mouths are filled with dampness so that when we speak it is from the bog land of ourselves, a squelch of vowels, swampy and inarticulate. We are pale, our thoughts are moist and mildewed. Horses stand in mud, backs to the squalls, tails tucked, ears flat. Crows drip their black moods onto the bare trees. The garden has drowned and we have forgotten all sorts of things. What is a crocus? What is comfort? What is there to dream about?
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viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine
Concerned
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All I can do, is hope that the bees will save them; dance the direction to an understanding.
Dis from the Latin meaning apart – asunder absence of opposite of deprive of remove
Ease rest relaxation comfort respite.
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freedom from pain and worry
The Thorny Fence
There are over two thousand one hundred varieties in the Museum of Barbed Wire, La Crosse, Kansas; amongst them, Scutch Flat Crimped Barb, Ellwood Reverse Spread, Split Diamond and Arrow Plate. A lovely little museum epitomising the homely and kindly people of the State, according to Trip Advisor. It’s how the West was won, no buffalo roamed across these fences, no high plains drifter; plains tribes held in reservations. Everything enclosed by the Devil’s Rope. Stronger than steel, cheaper than dirt, more efficient than a rifle or a Colt.
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* I’ve seen it bite right down to the bone, snaking itself around the hind legs of the little black mare, tightening itself with her every panicked movement. Too much damage. Nothing to do but have her shot. * It’s no man’s land. It keeps us in, it keeps us out: stuff of nightmares; ubiquitous; always ready to oblige.
A Dream of Three Trout swims a fine finned line, slicing its element to a smooth arrowhead while swallows over-winter on the dark riverbed. We lived through three long winters with no summer intervening, father, mother, child; thought, word, action in the three spatial dimensions; past, present, future, a hat trick of the three jewels. The third time will be the charm. Three body planes - frontal, sagittal, transverse. Three venous circulations - systemic, pulmonary, portal. Energy that you put into the world, positive or negative, you will get back threefold. Each time I wake I tell you this; three times I’ve told you, three times I’ve loved you, three times you’ve left me, body, spirit, soul and I am born again on the third day, every third time meeting you all over again; one, two, many. The first odd
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prime, the lucky prime, the noblest of all digits. I have been maiden, mother and now crone and I have planted three magnolia trees, star blossomed.
Morning Rituals I put the kettle on, feed the dog, let the cat in, let the dog out, then coffee and a cigarette. Mornings are slower now, quieter, no children to be called from their beds, no great rush. Twenty five years of days dawning in my kitchen, the urgency of spring, the bitterness of ice, splendid or sorry, arriving through this window, helping to form the shifting pattern of my life. This dawn is a red gash on the horizon, light bleeding through the darkness into a winter’s day, dreams lingering; mist on the hay field, the countryside still half asleep. Hieroglyphs of crows writing the morning
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across the embattled sky; I pour your cup, take it upstairs; one of the small sustaining rituals of love.
Resignation
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When the horse carrying your colours refuses to leave the start gate, what can you do but accept its decision.
What Will Take Me from Here to There?
A fallen log across a stream, stepping stones, a clapper, beam, bow string, box girder, cable stayed or cable tied, cantilever, pigtail, pontoon, suspension, arch or viaduct, stressed ribbon, trestle, truss. Supports and piers, abutments, cofferdams. A structure built to span. * Once I was that and now I am this and the crossing over felt like a bridge to nowhere, like death. I had eaten my world, ingested it, shed my skin five times, five instars.
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Everything slowed, I wrapped myself in the silk of forgetting, lost myself; dissolved inside my cocoon. How could I have known it was a beginning?
The Coriolis Effect
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Terrible night’s sleep; then stunned by Paris sunlight and the notes bouncing around the courtyard as the opera students practiced their arias: all the while the pendulum beneath the dome describing its own ellipse and the earth’s rotation.
Looking Through my Old Photographs
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I’m stumbling over pieces of my soul, re-finding myself, recognising myself all over again in each image through time, and in the sum of then and then and then‌
Comfort Those moments, returning to memory time after time and memory turning to them time after time,
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like prayer beads; smoothed, perfected in the telling
Speaking and Hearing
Using my brain’s left hemisphere, my temporal lobe, my parietal lobe, my frontal gyrus, I will conceptualise, then encode morphologically, phonetically, grammatically. This articulatory score will then be executed by my lungs and glottis, my larynx, tongue, teeth, palate, lips and jaw into overt speech – sound waves moving through the air. These waves will cross the distance between us; enter your auditory canal, strike your eardrum, vibrate through ossicles, stirrup, malleus, incus and stapes; setting in motion the fluid of the cochlea, agitating the basilar membrane, moving hair cells to send electrical impulses to the auditory nerve in your brain, which then will interpret these electrical signals as sound: attach meaning.
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Add nuances of pitch, timbre, body language, context, mood and can I be sure I said what I meant? Can I be sure you understood?
Absorbed I’d take you back into myself, every cell, each chromosome. I’d have you back, before birth, before conception, all
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your future still ahead. I’d hold you as an imagined thing, safe.
Emergency
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Cutting the night to jagged slices, blue lights flash; somebody’s turn.
Wind in the Willows
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Stoats and weasels with their thin hips, swords and neckerchiefs; their brigand ways. You shouldn’t invite them in, they’ll wreak your gaff and refuse to move out; break your heart. Fool. Why wouldn’t you learn to stay away from the Wild Woods folk.
Feeding the Birds Our bird table is an exuberant Babel’s tower of seed and suet, fat throated song and winged plenty. Blue tit, blackbird, siskin, robin, chaffinch, bullfinch, greenfinch, collared dove; then a punch
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of air, as sparrow hawk takes sparrow from in front of my eyes. Breast feathers, speckles of blood on the newly mown lawn.
Bonsai
To find pleasure in such curiously curved potted trees, is to love deformity. Japanese saying Commit to one to the process of deforming pruning wiring branch leaf and root cut tenderly with the sharpest of blades Through perseverance skill and endurance
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force nature to take the shape you desire
Fearful
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Could history be repeating itself in the jutting hip bone of a starved horse?
Spring It’s trespass time. I’ll take my scissors across the fields to where my mother planted her daffodils.
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It’s not really stealing is it? Anyway I feel no guilt, there are so many drifts a few dozen blossoms won’t be missed.
Off the Old Block
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My family tree’s a thorn, all spikes; occasionally a little soft bird nests there.
Casas Del Sol
Nothing is calling. nothing wants fed or loved or let out. There are no lists to be made, no sleep un-slept or dreams to be feared; no secrets here, no bog land of history.
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Nothing is hidden, or unreturned. Nothing is asked.
Companion
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Always there, but living mostly out of sight, randomly glimpsed at the outermost edge of my vision. Shy? Or secretive? An insect I think. Six legs, little horns, black carapace.
Lapsed Long childhood hours of Sunday boredom, staring at the pulpit, its cloth, embroidered with the burning bush, stylised blossoms of fire forever imprinted on me; which might explain
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why I’m so besotted by Magnolia trees, their shape, their cupped white flames, appearing to me as supernatural beauty, as a re-imagining of ardens sed virens.
Biographies
Moyra Donaldson is the author of six collections of poetry, Snakeskin Stilettos, Beneath the
has been exhibited internationally including Circulation(s) 2014: Festival de la Jeune Photographie Europeenne in Paris; Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography at Belfast Exposed and The Mac in Belfast, 2013; the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 2013 in Toronto, London and Boston in which she was a Selected Winner, having previously received an Honourable Mention in Flash Forward 2007; and a recommendation by New York’s PDN in their 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch for 2007. Represented by the Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast), Dean was featured in 2010 at SCOPE New York and in Elective Perspective at Galeria Arsenale in Bialystok, Poland. Winner of the Solo Award from the 2013 Winter Show at Rua Red, Dublin, solo exhibitions have included the Naughton Gallery at Queens University, Belfast in 2013 and the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, Northern Ireland in 2012. Her work is held in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection and a number of private collections in the UK and Ireland.
Ice, The Horse’s Nest and Miracle Fruit, from Lagan Press, Belfast and an American edition of Snakeskin Stilettos was published in 2002 from CavanKerry Press, New Jersey and short listed for a Foreword Book of the Year Award. Her Selected Poems was published in 2012 by Liberties Press, Dublin and a new collection, The Goose Tree, was published in June 2014, also from Liberties Press. She is published internationally and has read at festivals in Europe, Canada and the USA. Her poetry has won a number of awards, including the Allingham Award, the National Women’s Poetry Competition and the Cuirt New Writing Award. Both her poetry (1998) and her short stories (2002) have been short listed for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards. She has received four awards from the Arts Council NI, most recently, the Artist Career Enhancement Award. Her poems have been anthologised and have featured on BBC Radio and television, including the Channel 4 production, Poems to Fall in Love With and she has read at festivals in Europe, Canada and America. Moyra is an experienced Creative Writing facilitator, working with individuals and groups in a wide range of settings. She was a founding member of the Creative Writers’ Network.
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Victoria Dean (b. Belfast, 1980) is a photographic artist based in Northern Ireland. Her work
Project Coordinator/Editor: Gregory McCartney is with the brittle things that break before they turn. Editorial Assistant: Susanna Galbraith is in her second year of English Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her work has been published this year in Icarus and The Attic, both Trinity College publications. She is currently co-editor of Icarus.
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