Live Encounters is a not-for-profit free online magazine that was founded in 2009 in Bali, Indonesia. It showcases some of the best writing from around the world. Poets, writers, academics, civil & human/animal rights activists, academics, environmentalists, social workers, photographers and more have contributed their time and knowledge for the benefit of the readers of:
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Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (1978), The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009) as well as a number of other collections. He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review. He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly Keane House, Arvon Foundation and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He is a member of Aosdana. His collections Pandemonium and Prophecy, were published by Carcanet in 2016 and 2019. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Gallery Press published his essays Questioning Ireland in September; and Carcanet published a new collection, Plenitude, in April 2025.
Thomas McCarthy The Miracle Of Poems Getting Written
The miracle is that new poems get written. It is something for each of us to consider carefully, especially those of us who are aging and subject to moments of depression and dejection about the whole poetry ‘business.’ Yesterday in Dublin we said farewell to the poet Paul Durcan who had just died in a nursing-home. In Ireland Durcan was as famous as our Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. Possibly more famous, or at least more familial, more familiar. His poems ‘The Kilfenora Teaboy,’ The Drimoleague Blues,’ ‘Making Love outside Aras an Uachtaráin,’ The Berlin Wall Café’ and ‘The Haulier’s Wife Meet Jesus on the Road to Moone’ were universally loved and quoted constantly by fashionable commentators as well as devoted followers of the poet. His funeral Mass in Ringsend was a real Dublin farewell, with the President of Ireland and his aide-de-camp in attendance, and Durcan is to be buried with his own people in faraway County Mayo on the West coast of Ireland. His greatest claim to fame may be his nearly four-minute contribution to the superb Van Morrison track ‘In the Days Before Rock ‘N Roll,’ Durcan’s voice intoning a litany of old European music stations, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Armed Forces Network, and his urgent crying of “Justin! Justin!” It is an extraordinary piece of music, more than that, a cultural performance, a cry from the wilderness of youth trapped in old Ireland. It is more Durcan than Van Morrison, and yet the Morrison music envelops the poet’s pleading voice with an uncanny, ghostly power. Listen to this track today, if you can, to remember a great lost poet.
On the day of his funeral Mass in Dublin I was reminded that the world of poetry goes on inside its own world when I attended an exquisite reading to launch three new Gallery Press collections in the Notre Dame University Centre in Dublin’s Merrion Square. A fine, prosperous, enthusiastic crowd, a number whom I’d seen at the Durcan funeral Mass, assembled round the three poets as Peter Fallon introduced them with immense pride: Frank McGuinness, Vona Groarke and Ciaran Berry. Vona Groarke read quietly from what is truly a jewel of a book, Infinity Pool, the title poem itself a gem:
‘And I am folding it now, this pool, corner to corner, line to line, so as to carry about with me its deep blue scrap of lie.
But carrying folded water isn’t feasible. You know that.’
Her writing is precise, chiselled and instructive for anyone learning how to write well. She is a poet of clouds, sea, light, summers and mothers. Her lovely poem ‘Setting My Mother’s Hair as an Ars Poetica’ has the force and delicacy of the best Sharon Olds’ poetry: ‘She’ll sit under hair that’s like corn on the cob…’ And the prose poem ‘Tipping Point’ is a real beauty, exemplary, worth buying her book for this alone, to see how successful a successful prose poem can be. Ciaran Berry’s States is a more widely conflicted and dramatic creature, all the poems stitched tightly into a large Amish quilt of American anxieties – though Dublin-born with Galway and Donegal connections, Berry has made an American life of his adulthood, teaching at the exclusive Trinity College in Connecticut. He tries to make sense of being an ‘Alien’ in a land that always seemed like family territory to Irish people (after all, quarter of the officers in Washington’s Continental Army were born in Ireland, his officer list reads like the Army List of King James at the Battle of the Boyne). In complex, meditative narratives and odysseys Berry outlines how he ended up in Queens, how he cinematically gets ‘lost in the spectacle and miss the allegory.’ He is where Marilyn Monroe’s white dress rises in a rush of air, where he’s watching French films in ‘our fifth-floor walk-up on Amsterdam and 106th, where he is immersed in ‘that horde of Darkseekers’ in more ways than one. His 100-page States is both photography and myth-breaking, a collection that will repay much re-reading; a full summer-long of reading.
‘The children of Pompeii should have listened/ to their elders, if not betters, who preached caution – beware of the god that tastes of goat’s milk, / the milk of that same goat will drench your city…’ writes Frank McGuinness, revered Donegal playwright and equally dedicated poet. His new collection, The River Crana , is dedicated to the memory of two dear friends and admirers, Tom Kilroy and Gerald Dawe. With them he shares a poetry of drama, political commentary and sacred places and The River Crana is heaving with human drama, with drifting desire, impatient love. In the very fine sequence ‘Touch, 1976’ he creates five scenarios of such need and love:
‘Is that all I can tell, the end of a night, fellows in their cups, admitting that once I lay with a man, another man’s arms, A beautiful Yank who asked – will you stay?
Brief encounters and the failure of attachment are crucial obsessions, lovers that a poet watches walking away ‘not looking back, never again looking/ the length of his life and out of my own.’ The humanity, the sensitivity, in these poems is astonishing, nearly overwhelming, but such qualities will not be a surprise to those who know McGuinness’s work in theatre. Precisions and particulars create the propulsion in almost every McGuinness poem; the pleats in his mother’s skirt, the hands of Barbara Warren, the thermals and gloves of Gertrude Jekyll, Eileen Battersby in a UCD Anglo-Saxon class. These are the details that own the world ‘me not the full shilling,/ sentenced to admire the work of giants…’. Such beauty in this book, such challenges and importances in all three collections, launched on a warm day in Dublin, on a day when the poet Durcan went quiet.
These books are sitting on a chair beside me as I write, but for companions they have three other newly published collections by other Irish poets, Afric McGlinchey, Anne Rath and Noelle Lynskey. These other collections are a reminder of how extensive, embracing, individualistic, continuing , the world of poetry truly is. It continues. It continues. Wonderful poets die and are gathered up into the Pantheon of the great, but poetry as something happening in our daily lives continues with an unexpected energy. This creative energy is real, as real as air.
At one time I had a discussion with my son when he was a Short Form Producer for Disney Europe about the possibility of making a short drama, maybe nine minutes long, let’s call it ‘Poemberg News’ or ‘Poemberg TV.’ A fast-paced, hectic-hectic, dynamic cut of interviews, blurbs and sales charts from publishers, with streaming segments/ charts beneath the interviews on the rise and fall of poetic reputations since the 1640s, also panels and arguments about bookshops, agents, readings, demonstrations, protests, reviews, all compressed into 9 minutes like a segment of Bloomberg TV or CNBC. Just imagine how mad that would be. Who is writing the poetry of the real world, who is offering a bit-coin poetry, an ambiguous literary value, who is a fake, who is the real thing, the Warren Buffet of poetic value? I thought it would be a brilliant way to show the dynamism of poetry, at this very moment. A dynamism I felt at the Gallery Press launch and in the lively , scurrilous, gossiping discussions after Paul Durcan’s funeral Mass. it could be done but it would require shit-hot editors and marvellous sound engineers – as well as the oversight of a law firm.
I launched the collection, Ashe and Bone, by Anne Rath (published by the dynamic Revival Press) a few days ago in Cork City Libraries. The new Revival Press design is beautiful, it reminds me of the exquisite collections by Marvin Bell and Bill Merwin published by Atheneum of New York in the Seventies and Eighties. You never saw such a crowd as the crowd at Anne Rath’s launch, such a wonderful, buoyant crowd; and such huge sales of a book. Anne read brilliantly, with that authority and calm she has, as the audience listened, rapt and spellbound, to poems of illness and loss, of attachment and memory, of grief and renewal: ‘Let my prayer be a bowl/ spun from all that is broken,/ braided with sedge and seagrass,/ lined with the luminous lost. Oh, just perfect poems like ‘Twilight Thrush,’ ‘Dear Body’ and ‘The Banshee Wails.’ Afric McGlinchey launched her book at Waterstones in Cork recently, an unusual, amazing work called à la belle étoile; The odyssey of Jeanne Baré, published by Salmon Poetry in a book that must be one of the most beautiful poetry-book designs of the last decade, designed in this instance by Michael Ray. The entire collection is a sequence in celebration and exploration of the life of Jeanne Baré, the Frenchwoman who was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She achieved this feat in the 1700s by disguising herself as a man. McGlinchey’s poems give Baré a voice. In ‘Slipknots, North Atlantic, 1767’ she writes:
‘My neck cloth hides the lack of a throat-ball, I’ve grown goat-solid, the softness has sheered from my voice And, so far, fortune is with me…’
The poems are wonderful, voiced as the ship moves through the Straits of Magellan, the Solomon Islands, Java and Samoa, all the while giving us the physicality and terror of life at sea intensified by the perils of gender. It is brilliant work.
Arlen House recently published Noelle Lynskey’s Featherweight, a beauty of a collection from a really accomplished poet who I met briefly in the churchyard after Paul Durcan’s funeral Mass (Ireland is, after all, a small place and the poetry community even smaller). The poems here are absolutely sure of their ground, poems of Portumna, of music (music is a crucial presence in the book), grandmothers and funerals, including the funeral of Edna O’Brien. But Lynskey is the poet of craft and music:
‘On Thursdays, the day for New Inn, with imperfect perfection my trio pours into the car, violin, viola and cello in a weekly divining at the musical well.’
The metaphor is one of music and communal value, key components of Lynskey’s world view and a moral value that saturates this vibrant, life-affirming collection. Such jewels of poems: ‘Brown Coats,’ ‘Reeling Her in’ and ‘Carmen Cygni,’ it would be difficult to choose which one to love the most.
But six collections, and there are others, ones I haven’t brought upstairs to my library yet. I need to read more of the new Patrick Cotter collection, for example, and a new collection by the poet James Harpur, The Magic Theatre from Two Rivers Press. But these six new collections right now on the chair beside me, still un-shelved, they sing of a summer of high creativity. They are a reminder of how living, how breathing a thing, poetry is – it is as thistledown in the sunlight, or whitethorn blossom with which the hedgerows of Ireland are currently smothered. It insists itself into life with a circadian ferocity and certainty. It will not be silenced, especially by those who believe in just one canon of poetry, those who believe they should issue licenses. Our attitude to new poetry books should be one of welcome: a child has run in from the battlefield of this life, welcome, poet, sit here awhile beside me.
Available at: https://gallerypress.com
John Philip Drury. Photo credit: Tess Despres Weinberg.
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.
Encounter on a Barrier Island
Looking for wild horses on Assateague, we slowed down for a red fox crossing the road as wind-blown sand was moseying along. It looked directly at our gaze, our braking Beetle, and told me, prophesying, You’re not a we, but I will always be the fox you lucked into glimpsing. Half that we has now dissolved, but the broken, bleached blacktop of a road beside the ocean just beyond dune grass will always hold a fox, pausing, daring me to ease my foot off the worn brake pedal, which I can never do. My only fox, my distant, cold, and fiery scold of a muse.
Immigrants from Outer Space
(Imaginary Movie)
Ranking the traits of drama, Aristotle put spectacle dead last. Who could foresee the future that approached in motion pictures, big scenes of action and explosiveness?
A spacecraft, big as a continent, is cruising through galaxies—it’s easy to imagine unimaginable speeds—and enters the Milky Way (so fast and yet so graceful), breaching our solar system, zooming in on our blue planet. We can hear what sounds like beeping on a video game and wind-chimes but see subtitles flashing on the screen.
And then we see the crew: big heads whose eyes are multi-faceted; metallic tunics; prehensile tentacles or tendrils busy at banks of instruments and screens and buttons.
Aliens invading! Parasites from outer space who want to suck our bodies, pollute the planet even worse than we have! Several have gathered in an air-locked chamber where we can see their personalities: gruff leader, wily first mate, taciturn explosives expert, sweet clown, jolly cook. Who knows what sexes any of them are?
They board a pod and launch themselves toward earth, floating to a clearing in a forest— some boulders, Spanish moss on trees, a pond. When they emerge, it’s quiet, at least at first. They burble in their native tongues (except they have no tongues), the captions quick and witty. We’re waiting for a fisherman to blunder into the clearing, scream, be zapped by blasters.
But the surprise comes when a little creature lifts its long neck from the watering hole and shows us what it is: a dinosaur. They’ve landed in the Cretaceous Period!
They make a pet of their first saurian and bring it to the spaceship. High jinx follow on board—they’re racing down curved corridors— but further scouting expeditions find Tyrannosaurus Rex, and then it’s war.
Our sympathies are with the aliens. Will they succeed and one of them, a freak, become the common ancestor of humans, evolving past the compound eye and feelers? Of course not. They are just too alien.
The mother-ship, which really is enormous, is running out of fuel. And when it crashes, it is the meteor that brings destruction, exterminating all the dinosaurs.
Special effects are paramount. It’s really a silent movie when it comes to language, though full of noise that hurts us in the gut.
Now all you need is Aristophanes or some archaic, obsolete enchanter to write subtitles. That’s how to humanize the monsters, integrate what’s alien, and start repairing what blockbusters crush.
Catechism of Grief
What did your mother call eyelashes? Winkers.
“Honey, I’ll get it out,” she said, “hold still” when one came loose and needled my inner eyelid.
What did she tell you when you woke up sick? “Honey, you’ve caught a bug, you’ve got the grippe, the creeping crud.” She covered me with mounds of blankets so I’d sweat the fever out.
How did she treat a cold?
Doses of beef wine and iron, plus Coca-Cola syrup, and spoonfuls of Vick’s Vap-O-Rub—thick gobs, cool, burning down my gullet, even though directions said, “Not for internal use.”
What did she do in winter?
Make snow-cream during a blizzard, sugar and vanilla mixed with the cups of snowfall. How I hated when clouds of nuclear fallout made the snow too dangerous to treat as a dessert!
How did she deal with lying? She declared, “I’ll never spank you if you tell the truth.”
How did she think of you, her only son? She claimed, “I think of you as more a friend.”
How do you miss her?
Exponentially. She’s like a famished ghost who won’t let go.
Richard W. Halperin. Photo credit: Joseph Woods.
Richard W. Halperin was born in Chicago, holds U.S.-Irish dual nationality and lives in Paris. His work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. This year Salmon Poetry/Cliffs of Moher will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, which draws upon four Salmon collections and sixteen shorter collections via Lapwing Publications/Belfast & Ballyhalbert. In 2024, Lapwing brought out two additional collections: The Painted Word and Three Red Hats.
Poem in Tempore Belli
Breaking glass. At seventeen I was given a summer job in a factory in Chicago breaking defunct florescent rods. I did not wear a mask, but here I still am.
The noise of shattering. London, Dresden, Nagasaki, Kiev. When I once asked my great-aunt Julia what had happened to the Halperins who had not emigrated from Elisabethgrad to Chicago in 1900, she said ‘They were all killed in Stalingrad.’
Shelley thought the entire universe was glass, one death can shatter it. One death does shatter it.
For the end of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov specifies the sound of a string breaking. A great Madame Ranevskaya –I was lucky enough to see Helen Hayes –doesn’t need that. One hears without that.
Heart string.
Whatever It Is
In my day, in my culture, it was Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. A little earlier, it was Our Town. Much earlier, in another culture, it was Electra. What made people cry, if they were a certain kind of sensitive. What made some say ‘That could be I.’
What it is now, via new artists, I do not need to know. I was devastated, and still am, by those I was devastated by.
There is, for some, a play, a piece of music, a painting, which one can relate entirely to in a world of horrors. The world of Il Trovatore, where a gipsy throws the wrong baby into the fire, as opposed to the right baby. The world of current events.
In this midst, the kindness of Arthur Miller who, after all, didn’t have to write anything. The generosity of my parents who decided to have a baby, and so to continue whatever it is. The kindness of Alice B. Toklas who entitled her book of letters Staying on Alone.
Staying on alone. Continuing to live in whatever house one lives in, with whom or without whom, through courage or inertia or whatever it is.
Collage
There it is on my wall. Six inches by ten inches. I just noticed that she, the collagist, used a little twist of paper to close off one side of a square. That she used blue dots to surround a brown dragonfly. The weightlessness of it!
Looking, I can put aside the day’s news – the crushing weight of it: the crushers, and the crushed.
I didn’t want to listen to it anyway. I could say I have already paid my dues. But, I haven’t.
Weightless light things. A friend’s poem. Very brief. To close it, he puts a cat in the last line. I like things which close with a cat.
In a tormented world, it is the peacemakers and the artists to whom I relate.
In a radio interview in French, Isaac Stern when asked if he thinks about his future reputation said that while one is here one plunges one’s hand in the river, changing a tiny part of the flow for a while.
Painters of Light
after the exhibition Sargent/Sorolla: Peintres de la Lumière, Petit Palais, 2007
Two women in white summer muslin walk by the sea in Spain.
Mother and daughter, perhaps, or sisters. The veils of their hats – we are in 1909 –
flutter in the breeze. Disorder, mine, is nearby, but they don’t seem to notice.
The light is luminous everywhere. My recent grief, luminous everywhere.
Light is not peace, but this light is. A red sun hovers on the horizon.
Copernicus says the sun does not move. For the first time in my life, I believe him.
LaWanda Walters earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Nine Mile, Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, poet John Philip Drury.
The Grotto in My Bedroom
Some nights the moon would fasten her reflection, wavering like some live thing in water, upon my closet door. I was afraid a vision, like one of the Virgin Mary, might gesture toward me if I looked. I had just seen The Song of Bernadette on the television set, there in my room which once had been the den. Even though I was thirteen and Southern Baptist, God might be interested. I was terrified to look at that shimmery orb on the door of my closet— what if it commanded me to be a saint? I pulled the covers over my head, even though I’d sweat.
I stopped watching movies when they starred Jennifer Jones, disliking her goody-goody, bovine eyes that saw my sins.
What, to Any Sane Being, Is the Fourth of July?
(borrowing from Frederick Douglass)
The etymology for fuck is “strike.”
And it’s strike, hit, bang all night tonight, as if this were patriotic.
Our neighborhood resounds with its hill and ravine like an amphitheater.
Our dogs, our cats, our birds must think it’s Halloween twice a year. What I hear
are the pows and bangs Roy Rogers and Roy Lichtenstein put into their art. Exclamation points
everywhere, the decibels high and sudden, like bombs must have sounded in London. It’s the night to play war
and if you’re only far away enough to hear—not to see the fountain splashes in the sky, you can see it this way—Bang! Thwack!
Pop, pop, pop! When Lichtenstein tried to make fun of war his art looked ugly— not swooning, curvy, love-hungry girls
but machine guns—un-curvy, spitting out inky blotches on the canvas, jagged edges, pointed spikes, viruses.
It doesn’t stop until way past two a.m. And what I hear, mostly, is the rat-tat-tat and whack of a whipping, of that scene in
The Misfits when the old man in the Reno bar gets Marilyn Monroe to try his grandson’s paddle ball. She’s good, she’s really into it, and her drumming serve, over and over, repeats the polka-dot pattern of her dress— the camera shoots her rump
as she wiggles to keep that ball in the air and a leering old man has his hand right there like he’s spanking her. That scene is what I hear, and what, I think, our dogs must hear. The world is beating and we’re being beaten, that’s all.
Grant Wood’s Portrait
What came first into his mind?
The minor Gothic aspiring of a window too proud for a small house in the country? The medieval allegory unconsciously framed into the American pattern? And then his sister and his dentist the only arbiters, there, in the shrinking town in Iowa, which he was too noble to desert?
He’d been to Europe, got on there, had friends. But his mother wasn’t well. He returned to his home, to his judges, their supreme distaste for his kind. A little German castle in the cornfields swept by rake and broom.
“American Gothic” by Grant Wood (American, 1891–1942), Oil on Beaver Board. Photograph courtesy: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6565/american-gothic.
Finbar Lennon is a retired surgeon. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of three collections of poetry published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast (2021/2022). He is a member of the Bealtaine Writing Group and has had poems published online in Live Encounters, Planet Earth Poetry and Viewless Wings. Two of his poems have been published in a new Anthology by Amos Greig “When the Lapwing Takes Flight” in 2024. Some of his early poems appear in his late wife’s memoir “The Heavens are all Blue” that he co-authored and was published by Hachette Ireland in 2020.
A Gaelic Farewell
It was his turn to go - with gritted teeth he went hoping he had done enough to enter no longer in control – his body in the hands of others his mind lying alongside but not in touch was happy all had gathered to bid him bye sad though it was - adding woe seemed thoughtless his wake was full of blessings and glad tidings weeping was for later when the soul had flown left all he had to half divide in thirds and quarters was not his fault they had to wait so long his strength of will detained them time first for dark ill-fitting crumpled suits to join ‘soutanes’ in prayer with oil and incense bless and bury him with grace and favours sing a dirge or two with hoary voices out of tune their debts and what remains borne to the grave in cortege - home to church and then to earth family males each in turn a shoulder under casket a measure of his weight, esteem and fortune for discussion with the bearers later on women in their lives looked on and prayed short interlude for Mass a mention of his name final steps to empty plot beside a mound of soil and clay - grass and dandelion on top laid him low and covered gap with sod and sheet one decade of rosary by rote for passing soul gravedigger standing by to plug the gap and close a chapter in a Gaelic life of joy and toil before tea and pints of ale to cap it all brew mixed with tears for one they held in thrall.
“Beckett on Stage”
Pale gusts of darkness its outer skin parting opening and closing for pleasure as he sits and stands as he sits and stands no hesitation no pauses no full stops brimming with exactitude and repetition master’s tone matched by acoustic perfection a stage show of sorts celebrate night of sorts of culture in Pavilion just as the ship sets sail just as the ship sets sail.
The Landline
Curly cords coiled and tangled dangling from handset on a rack handle with care - dialer is there in line of sight – ears in walls press numbers learned by heart private for two – public for all alive at night when parents about lone ring - call for teens to meet off to phone box down the street dial a boy or girl from school ten pence for start-up chatter extra coins if ardour mattered when all the news of day relayed time to play with words and patter while pursing lips to blow a kiss how sweet to fall in love on phone!
Homeward Bound
Strut, shimmy, shuffle legs last one standing night before taxi-drive on sultry morning for airlift home with aching bones I go back in time to sixties well past myths of Greece and Rome love songs comfort driver who does not speak my tongue lyrics sound like cruise in desert they just flow on and on diary space for two more lines on day in month a year ago.
Amanda Bell is an award-winning poet, writer and editor. Her publications include Riptide and First the Feathers (poetry collections from Doire Press, 2021 and 2017); The Lost Library Book, the true story of an ancient book missing from Marsh’s Library (Onslaught Press, 2017); Winter Heliotrope, a collaboration with Donald Teskey RHA (Fine Press Poetry, 2023), and Revolution (wildflower poetry press, 2022). She transcreated Gabriel Rosenstock’s book-length sequence Sasquatch into English (The Loneliness of the Sasquatch, Alba Publishing, 2018). Her collection Undercurrents (Alba Publishing, 2017) won the Kanterman Merit Book Award and was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. A section of it, featuring the River Poddle, has been used as a sound walk by Dublin City Council’s Biodiversity Artist in Residence, Rosie O’Reilly, and is available on the ‘Dublin City Trails App’. Amanda’s work has been broadcast on Sunday Miscellany, Lyric Notes, Keywords, and podcasts for the Royal Irish Academy’s podcaster in residence Zoe Comyns. An assistant editor of The Haibun Journal, she is currently working on historical fiction, and received Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland in bursaries in 2020, 2022 and 2023. She is a professional member of the IWC and the AFEPI.
Before I knew things ended
(after Brendan Kennelly’s ‘Begin’)
Taut from the stretch, this middle bit: half-drawn curtains could mean dawn or dusk, traffic hum an endless drone along the city streets. Every midpoint marks a weakness strained to breaking; caught between hanging on and letting go; propping up the faded plants, not sowing them anew. In the middle, blurred and open-pored, reflections on the green canal might seem like missing friends, and absence keeps us clinging to last straws, afraid to face the chuckling gulls atop the chimney stacks, new tenants moving in by dribs and drabs, as if they had invented coupledom. In a world that feels poised on its fulcrum doggedly standing its ground, something waits for a rush of abandon, to sheer off, relinquish the hold.
One for Sorrow
To invoke the household gods requires a lidded pot for keeping incense sweet, an airtight tub for salt that it may flow, a receptacle with pouring lip for wine, a shallow dish to proffer gifts of incense, resins, powders, herbs; a burner filled with sand, a sacred light, and likenesses of ancestors.
Will these appease the chimney sprite –this air-light totem, trapped behind the baffle, wings held high, with black-pierced eyes and bare-skinned skull as fragile as a puff-ball?
I held him like an infant, laid him out beneath the trees, half hoping he’d ascend. But next day he lay there, limply, souring on the dew-drenched lawn.
Labyrinth
Just you and me, Mother, on a trip to Knossos Palace; leaving father and brother at the beach, we bussed from Heraklion in crackling heat, to marvel at amphorae, crystal vials, and Bronze Age plumbing.
You bought us postcards as mementos: frescoes of blue dolphins, athletes goading a piebald bull, gold pendant flanked by bees, a battered ivory statue –his remaining arm extended in a never-ending fall.
I knew of the Minotaur held captive in the cave, the fourteen sacrificial tributes sent from Athens, but had not considered how to navigate a maze or the vital role of Ariadne’s spool of thread –
granddaughter of the Sun God, herself a Goddess of the Moon, though little we knew of that, then.
Lincoln Jaques
Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in Aotearoa, the USA, Asia, the United Kingdom and Australia, including Landfall, takahē, Live Encounters, Tough, Noir Nation, Tarot, Burrow, Book of Matches, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Blackmail Press, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem. He was Runner-Up in the 2022 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and was guest editor for the 2023 and 2024 Live Encounters Aotearoa Poets & Writers editions. He won the 2025 International Writers Workshop (IWW) Ekphrastic writing competition.
Rushdie
I sat in the hospital carpark waiting for you, listening to Salman Rushdie, a story about Miss Rehana being swindled.
The trees dripping water from leaves like giant metronomes. Counting time.
The next day Rushdie is stabbed while talking at a Writers Festival.
All the anticipation that accompanies waiting. Miss Rehana to not join her husband in Bradford, me waiting for you to come out of the hospital with the result.
All waiting to see if Rushdie pulls through
Birthplaces
A suburban stop on the South-Eastern line. I step off the train to a cold platform. Rivets loosely hold memories together in precarious rust-stained images.
The rain doesn’t cease. Slick wet concrete slips under soles. I was a child here once. When Dark Side of the Moon was released. The year the IRA bombed London Victoria.
I escape the station. The train rolls away into forgotten dreams. Fog sutures the ear drums, I can hear only numbness through which the homeless man prays.
There’s no time for homesickness: Homesick for another home, not this one. This one without a house, a windowless shelter with chill winds blowing up collars.
I remember the reflections in cracked shopwindows businesses boarded up, signs for the disenfranchised. Feinstein called migration a “…split between loneliness and disloyalty”. A place where we make ourselves strangers.
I’m 13,000 kilometres between lives. Country-less. I’ve forged a new empire within the wet curb. I keep walking, through the pouring rain, through eternities that shift from moment to moment.
Through the Poundlands, the Primarks, the Godless 99p stores. In the Eltham High Street a dreadlocked busker sings Bob Marley on a 3-string guitar, a shoeless foot pulsing a pedal in time with our arrhythmic hearts.
Here the starving winter ate up our fathers’ jobs. The double-decker prison cells transported us to factories and office shackles where the sun set at 3pm. We hurried home in the dark to fried chips and gameshows.
And I pass, finally, the playground, still there where my brothers sneaked cigarettes, the library where I discovered Le Guinn and Lewis, the old brick house where we lived like Dickens’ scared children.
I’d not returned home. I’d merely crossed a border into an open hand that would soon clench shut. Before I turned back, I thought I caught sight of my father rounding a corner, pulling up his collar against the rain.
Saturday Afternoon, Zagreb
We take the kids to see a show at the Puppet Theatre on Zagreb’s Baruna Trenka. A puppeteer’s sick, the show cancelled. Out back is a playground where we sit drinking coffee while the kids glide down slides. The families all stay put, we refuse to let the cancelled Puss in Boots show get to us. Later I walk out from the alleyway of the theatre and am surprised by your brother who drives up in his Škoda. He parks at the curb and gets out, waving. I turn and stroll down to the nearby Tomislav Square where I sit and watch the trams filled with afternoon shoppers empty into the train station. It is one of those calm afternoons in Zagreb where everyone seems to forget they have lives waiting somewhere, like any Saturday afternoon, anywhere.
Travelling with Mountains
The world cannot go back to itself again the dead fires wave to me through the distances I’ll never negotiate; the mountains remain silent, they dread winter, the grey city ahead bitten by autumn’s thorns the thinning sky a vein about to burst.
My heart is not here for it never returned being lost between the mirror of stars. We could walk forever but our footsteps would never make an imprint. For the road reinvents itself as roads do holding us in its recurrent wonder.
We grip onto the past like the weakened edges of mountains. At the end of the highway sits a blind eagle sniffing for its prey, seeking to become itself once again, while we travel those immeasurable distances.
Peter A Witt
Peter A. Witt is a Texas poet and a retired university professor. Peter’s poetry deals with personal experiences, both real and imagined. He is a twice published Best of the Net nominee. His poetry has been published on various sites including Inspired, Open Skies Quarterly, Medusa’s Kitchen, Active Muse, New Verse News, and Blue Bird Word. When not writing poetry, Peter is an avid birder and wildlife photographer.
Mid-chore Invocation
It comes, like a sparrow crash-landing in your chest, when your hands are full of grass clippings or you’re knee-deep in yesterday’s trash.
You curse softly, as if the wind will wait, as if words won’t dissolve like sugar in rain.
The mower sighs in protest behind you, the garbage bag slouches in defeat.
You drop everything, because your muse is a fire alarm in your ribs, a siren that won’t be ignored.
You sit, dirt on your shoes, bones bleeding stanzas, and let the words burn their way out.
In the Shadow of Orchids
In the corner of my room, where the sun spills golden light, they linger — those delicate ghosts of orchids, petals like soft promises, unfurled yet unreachable, fragile as a moonbeam cast on water.
I offer the elixir of life, neat measures of hope and water, their roots nestle like hidden stories in the cool depths of well-drained soil, but still they conspire to wilt, an unbroken silence, like the stillness before a storm, as if my hands are foreign to their yearning.
Light pours like liquid gold, bathed in the warmth of love and care, yet they wear their fragility like armor, draped in hues of fateful indifference, as if they dance just out of reach.
Each bloom a sigh, each drop of dew a farewell. I stand, a gardener of longing, an architect of green hopes, watching the wild ballet of their defiance, clutching my wishes in the delicate folds of their shadows, wondering what language they speak, what invisible thread binds them to the essence of life that eludes my grasp, like a fleeting wisp of cloud drifting past the moon.
Brenda is Wiradjuri writer living in Katoomba NSW. She has published three poetry collections and two chapbooks. Her poetry and literary reviews appear in national journals and anthologies including Westerly Issue 64.1, 65.1 and 68.1 westerlymag.com. au, Southerly Vol 77.1 and 78.3 southerlyjournal.com.au. Best Australian Poems 2013 and 2015 www.blackincbooks.com.au, Best of Australian Poems 2022 www.australianpoetry.com, Best Australian Science Writing 2019 www.unsw.press.com, Best Australian Prose Poems 2023 www.mup.com. Going Down Swinging 2023 www.goingdownswinging.org.au, and the Joanne Burns Award Anthology 2013, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2024 (Prose Poems) www.spinelesswonders@shortaustralianstories.com. Brenda has also won several prizes and fellowships including the 2014 Scanlon Book Prize (australianpoetry.com) for ‘Looking for Bullin Bullin’, hybridpublishers.com.au, the 2016 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize, queenslandpoetry.org and in 2018 the Joanne Burns Award spinelesswonders@shortaustralianstories.com. She is currently writing a collection of prose poems and memoirs.
Bush Music
I listen to the lilt, the rise and fall around me. Each leaf holds a note, each shadow a rest in this sound-scape intimate yet vast.
Beneath the seeming stillness tiny creatures tinkle in a microcosmos, well out of sight.
Every moment a heartbeat flickers into life.
At each turn, the forest teems with sound. I hear the crackle of heat on dry leaves — red ants in a line of staccato dots.
A breeze rushes through, soft shuffles high in the canopy, branch to branch. Emu grass shimmers a light glissando.
Trees reach out to each other, share a song of their own. Some cry in distress, others send healing along spreading roots.
I walk at a steady pace, keeping time. Hear the beat echo under my feet — my tread deep as a bass drum sounding.
Smoke
For weeks now the gauze sky stretches white, holds the smell of fire. Lost in the haze, streets are strangely silent. There is no wind. Day and night our houses fill with smoke. It searches for cracks, gaps in the skirting. Doors once open to a summer breeze barred against it. Everywhere, a hint of gum leaves lingers, the scent of a campfire trapped indoors. Blackened embers line our windowsills. Unseen, lighter than air, the distant fire floats freely among us. Every breath leaves us light headed. Smoke catches in our throats, settles inside, a living part of us.
In the time before the forced forgetting, we breathed freely. Moved keenly, alive to change. Knew the meaning of every scent carried on the wind. The time to move, the time to stay. We carried firesticks with us to heal the land. The right time for burning passed down in stories. After morning rain, the grass tall, ready for smoking.
Karin Molde feels at home in Ireland, Germany and South Africa. She has published in numerous magazines, both print and online, like Skylight 47, Honest Ulsterman, The Wild Word, Live Encounters, Drawn to the Light Press, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dreich, and in anthologies, e.g. Everything that can happen (Emma Press, 2019), Identity (Fly on the Wall, 2020), Remembering Toni Morrison (Moonstone Press, 2020), New Beginnings (Renard Press, 2021), Ukraine War Special Edition (Poetica Review, 2022). She is a member of the German Stanza, associated with The Poetry Society (UK). Their collaborative anthology 13 Waves Poets from the German Stanza was published in 2024. Her chapbook “Self-Portrait with Sheep Skull” came out with Moonstone Press, 2023.
Power Cut
after Don Paterson
This is what I’ve come to, this pink soft tissue of skin, this scar, a memory of heat, of burn, this infected sting of this and of that; this long night of cups of tea, chamomile and valerian, this unrest, this clinging to hot water bottles,
this insomnia, too heavy a blanket, this nightmare of children, cheeks glowing from lack of sleep, full of foreboding, doomed; this nightmare of an apparatus that blinks and bleeps, a doctor with syringe, huge hands
that stick a plaster on both my cheeks, they sting, cannot be ripped off without bruising skin. Remember the visit at the taxidermist’s, raw hides, salted, skulls and horns separated, this is what I’ve come to, this deconstruction, skin, bones, and flesh, this is what I’ve come to, this charred inside, this burnt-out mind, this: me.
black dog pulls on the leash
a golden shovel after Bashō my house a square box for my being, but my dwelling a shelter inside the body, heavy as moon’s pull of the oceans. not square but rounded are the corners of my heart, and frayed, so light shines in, and out. like moon at night when heart drives the wave of cloud past my window.
Love Note to the Ibis
At nightfall, the air is set in dark blue motion. Meru rests his black bulk. Ibises tuck themselves in for the night. Their last screeches fade in, fade out with cicadas and night birds. Nature perfects her scratching technique.
I store the sound in the bass of my body. The moon chooses a blue hue like a disco ball in the small hours; Ibis’ wings glisten in the dark. I close my eyes, and lashes, long like bird tails, lie on my cheeks.
This morning, as I rake leaves, oak and beech, bright red and orange, I balance dew drops on sun rays. I listen to the geese sing their farewell in a crisp Northern sky, as they head south, and so do I,
send a note to the ibis, my words and wishes rolled up in autumn dew. A memory cupping my face.
Dianna MacKinnon Henning
Dianna taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program, including Folsom Prison, and runs The Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop. Publications, in part: The Power of the Feminine, Vol. II; One Art Poetry, 2024; Mocking Heart Review, 2024; Poet News, Sacramento; Worth More Standing, Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees; Voices; Artemis Journal, 2021 & 2022 & 2023; The Adirondack Review; Memoir Magazine; The Tule Review; The Lake, UK; California Quarterly; The Plague Papers, Blue Heron Review, and New American Writing. Nomination by The Adirondack Review for a Pushcart Prize, her seventh nomination. MFA in Writing ’89, Vermont College. She recently read with poet Lara Gularte, Poet Laureate Emeritus of El Dorado County. Recently nominated by Blue Heron Review for Best of the Net Anthology for her poem “In the Collage of my Mind/I’m a Simple Design.” She has a new book “Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat” accepted by Finishing Line Press. Nominated by Blue Heron Review Nov. 2024 for a Pushcart Prize.
Childhood
When prayer was silk coating my throat
When the sky was a circus tent, clouds on its canvas top, lions and elephants and a flame-eating man
When the cyclist zipped along the tightrope, slid and regained composure
When a strain of St. Cecilia’s Mass by Gounod convinced me I should become a nun
When sister and I awakened, walked by moonlight to the outhouse while the loons ladled songs lakeside
When her hand was a branch that kept me from drowning as we spilled from the leaky boat
When I woke up screaming from a nightmare, sister blowing help me bubbles
When the octopus strands of her long hair went dipping into the deep
When waves returned me to shore, I awakened gasping for air, my sister nowhere in sight
Who opens the day to a tree is without remorse
Even the Western Wood-Pewee that erratically flits about knows maps have nothing to do with catching insects, knows that harmony is more than singing for one’s supper
Oh, to be a bird in a tree, and lap the gold of sunshine and know without a doubt that wingspan is only evidence of feathers and not the feathers themselves
Thomas Seán Purdy is a poet, author and storyteller with citizenship and sensibilities in both Ireland and the USA. His narrative nonfiction piece “The Last St. Patrick’s Day” first appeared in The Mayo News on March 17, 2021. The Irish Community Archive Network, a project of the National Museum of Ireland, published an expanded version soon thereafter. He later contributed several poems, a second non-fiction piece titled “St. Patrick’s Day Reborn,” and a video tribute to a County Mayo cillín (sacred burial ground) titled “Honour The Children: A Rededication,” to its website OurIrishHeritage.org. In 2023 and 2024 he was a featured speaker at the Síamsa Sráide Street & Arts Festival in Swinford, County Mayo. In October of 2024 he presented “Meet Me At The Veil,” a discussion of the folklore of Halloween and the Irish holiday of Oíche Shamhna or Samhain, to the Shamrock Club of Wisconsin. He also wrote stories for The Connaught Telegraph and IrishCentral.com. He has served as a guest co-host for the internet radio show Good Morning Ireland, on Global Irish Radio. You can visit him at www.iamliminal.com.
The Nurse Abroad In Wartime
There is no oath
To an ancient Greek, Physician and philosopher That would prepare me for this.
No teacher whose encouragement And skills bestowed Would help suture this rift
Between neighbours, countries And the roof on this hospital now Torn asunder by a device dropped from the heavens
Meant only to demean Humanity and Love.
So I clutch the Sacred Heart Badge
You gave me in Hope and Faith
As I look at my patients
Tossed about these crumbling halls
In their cots and stretchers
Pleas and pain soaking through Their eyes and garments, As shrapnel sneers through their bodies.
I cling to the gift of your memory, I pray you to mine
And if the procession should arrive soon Of lilacs, daffodils, an elm box and polished brass —
Keep the remembrance lighthearted, The clay pipes lit, Any keener or choir will do
So long as above my resting place
You stand clutching the Sacred Heart gift That arose from this rubble
To find its way back to you Like Healing on a morning in Spring.
The Dustbin in the Square
Palace guard of the market square – Yes and servant –
Here for the noble child who catapults
The packet of cheese and onion remnants Into my waiting turret And for those young ones Who stoop to retrieve Their miss from the cobblestone moat I will forevermore seek To tidy this realm for you.
Tourist, cousin seeker
Connecting as best you can Placenames and townlands
The dropped pins of emigrants and urgencies mapped on hotel stationery now soggy and disposable – Good thing you took a smartphone photo Before the clouds
Peeked and leaked
Over your shoulder –Not every natural element is into genealogy.
And I am here too as vault and confidant for you, young woman Fresh and flush and hurrying Tossing the bourbon creams wrapper Along with the breadcrumbs of a postal receipt tracking number Deferring interest in The story arc’s endpoint –You are no one’s paramour, anymore.
And to you the modern bard Damp and unsure from A night of overthinking at the pub I am the primary chamber That will keep your cryptic beer mat between us, to be burned Then as carbon and ash to rise again, Swirl and sparkle as fairy dust, Settle for you to sprinkle on a future muse.
Kate McNamara
Kate McNamara is a poet, playwright and critical theorist. She also works as an editor. Her plays have been performed internationally and she was invited to deliver the opening address to the 4th International Conference of Women Playwrights in Galway. She has recently returned to her first love: poetry. Her works have been published in a range of formats. A founding member of the Canberra Surrealist movement, Aktion Surreal, she lives in Ainslie with her sons, cats and a menagerie of wild birds.
Drought
All omens shall be stayed until the rains come the thick softness of wet leaves.
I work in the glass house in the universe of plants pulling weary vegetables from the clumping soil. We are all a subject of the sun.
In the seasons turning around me I learn cold is the greater teacher ice and the stars of winter the killing frosts the naked trees that shine butterflies slaters worms bees the blood and the bone and the seaweed old hands that sew the seed.
I would be warm again by fires and the Equinox dancing the Harvest Queen a spiral waiting for water beyond me the God of thunder clouds nameless and indifferent so pitiless in the sky-kingdom near the sun.
And we knowing like animals like prey like thorny husks perennial that to move is certain death to stay in gravid constancy is the certainty of life.
The City of Desire
Memory alone preserves the journey I travel out of stone mountains where the wind dances like a cantata whirling in the hollows of night my empty heart thuds far from the winter city and warm rooms curled asleep like cats dreamless until the light breaks into a morning of shattered glass and broken crockery the remnants of rage and lust and drunk with a bad desire the city was my last defense a succession of walls fantasies measured silences that encased my exiled heart til I could neither speak nor hear now there is no place to hide like a season of death I move for movement’s sake over these grim broken plains.
Summer hounds me like a blind snake sloughing skin and furious our love grew wild panting hungry uneasy that old city still calls for me I yearn for it the green gable attic the daisies that glow beside Lethe water dark water near burning hell where Orpheus still mourns for his lost love O Orpheus you were such a fucking fool.
I t was lethal to me that love it flew into my heart like the feathers of a bright bird and I forgot the city and its cold masters that sit by the glass lake I forgot them all as the water filled with light luminescence shone over you I could not see you monster of caprice. I was young and laughing at it all we had hunted for the magic of the witch Goddess one too often the city had its way with us like lace blossoms which always falls in the late heat of summer and the curse it came upon me like the Lady of Shalott.
How I waited in the room we made in autumn where the window faced the Sunne and red blue leaves veins like spider’s legs the wind blowing through me and the curtains red velvet dusty a bordello we said.
My heart beating a rag doll a clock a worn-out cliché waiting Eurydice again watching you your freedom as you fled down the street.
The caged birds would no longer eat tearing their own feathers and mine you brought them for me you said I thought of Da Vinci buying pigeons in the Palazzo each morning to set them free to see the miracle of flight.
I could not see how the room was bare aching the spring summer gone the smell of bad wine days tottering into night and you you went back into the labyrinth of back lanes a panther doing drugs selling guns out of Somalia the city took you back again.
Grey came into my eyes fading I stroked the dying birds they would no longer drink I cut their throats beaks raking the floor threshing in their own blood I had no tears for you for anyone.
It was a necessary sacrifice in the temple of our love the air cooled against the windows rattling like claws and the city waited for me and I fled the city I was dying from it and you were dead.
Now I am the last listener in the darkness pursued by phantoms mythical children and the birds they haunt me still hunting my heart I killed their kin I murdered them for love for love
Memory is hazardous Mapless the moon like a tiger’s eye when sleep comes so do you I see you in that perfect room holding the slim golden feathers tenderly as if you could bring them back defeat death’s dark thresh-hold only for you a monster
Who do you think you are: a God Morpheus?
So I set your city afire a bonfire at mid -day flames crackle invisibly outside our room and you can no longer move.
overleaf...
Winter comes for me daily I hide from it as the city burns within me I could not see myself there I was so gone from you now the birds have pecked out my eyes like Oedipus’ wretched wife.
I know the night must end it always does in fairy tales light coming like an oyster shell glistening it will come for me with the first suggestion of a lapwing’s flight.
The Eagle
But for the vernacular of thought I would take the wind as the Eagle fly alone above the long sea where it curls like a glass cage. Fish and the memory of the Antipodes all creatures turning to the spinner of light of light and dark.
The Eagle and I describing an arc language in the hollow of bones and shamans we would make speech making an escape like myths without words to ensnare us.
Calling up the wind to catch us in order to shape breath the moon bird turning and burning in flight beating the air I would hold the darkness of a predator in my throat.
Charting our path over the sands shifting in time in stars high above the sea we would ride mapping a path to a place of peril in our hearts joyful and screeching.
I would take that journey.
Terry McDonagh, poet and dramatist, has worked in Europe, Asia and Australia. He’s taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at Hamburg International School. Published fifteen poetry collections, as well as letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. In March 2022, he was poet in residence and Grand Marshal as part of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Brussels. His work has been translated into German, Indonesian and Arabic. His poem, ‘UCG by Degrees’ is included in the Galway Poetry Trail on Galway University campus. He’s been a voice and narrator on several RTE radio dramas (All Points West production) for young people. In 2020, Two Notes for Home – a two-part radio documentary, compiled and presented by Werner Lewon, on The Life and Work of Terry McDonagh, The Modern Bard of Cill Aodáin. His latest poetry collections: A) An eBook ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Not Dead’ – Live Encounters Publishing. B) ‘I Write Because’ –Calendar Road Press. After more than thirty years in Hamburg, he returned to live in County Mayo in 2019.
Stephen Haven’s fourth book of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published by Slant Books in February 2025. In earlier form, The Flight from Meaning was a finalist for England’s International Beverly Prize for Literature. His earlier collections are The Last Sacred Place in North America, winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread, for which Haven was awarded the Ohio Poet of the Year prize; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, North American Review, Image, Salmagundi, Arts & Letters, The Common, The European Journal of International Law, World Literature Today, Blackbird, and other journals. His book-length memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press. With Wang Shouyi, Li Yongyi, and Jin Zhong, in 2021 he published the 300-page (Mandarin and English) anthology of collaborative translations, Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China (Twelve Winters Press). He has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. More details at www.stephenhaven.com.
Terry McDonagh A review of Stephen Haven’s The Flight from Meaning Slant Books
February 2025
The Flight from Meaning can be purchased here: https://slantbooks.org/books/the-flight-from-meaning/
At first glance, a title like The Flight from Meaning, seems somehow inappropriate and not quite fitting in the context of this magnificent collection by American poet, Stephen Haven. This work is no flight from meaning – it’s the exact opposite – no ambiguity – it’s a headlong flight into meaning – an escape from one-dimensional thinking – outlined so succinctly in the title poem, The Flight from Meaning. We are invited to turn our backs on all things distasteful and concentrate on the double rainbow/ the street musician/our still capacity for wonder/ Gothic architecture/and it hardly ever rained. But, in the words of the poet: in the flight from meaning no one fully escapes/The mass of humanity neither innocent nor guilty. It’s as if he’s entreating us to be realistic and understanding – the human is not only good.
The true meaning of The Flight from Meaning becomes clearer when we immerse ourselves in a child crying/ Old Church Photographs. Iowa City, 1983 – I couldn’t stop reading this poem. It’s got that chaotic illogicality that comes with its time – expressing young emotions and the richness of human experience. The second last line, I remember best the cartography of each failed kindness.
I turn to the first poem in the collection, Rope Tied to a Song, April. 10, 1975 and read, The war goes on… and Somewhere in Saigon there is singing…The killing still goes on. This poem is disturbing and infectious – hard to leave. It has to be read aloud – a kind of mantra. The killing goes on. The war goes on. I am many miles from that place, and yet I feel it/ as a kind of home, the thick hemp tied to a song. The church bells ring and the war goes on. This is the place I choose to raise a ceremonial glass/The body remembers water, win/the near stillness. We celebrate with the celebrant and all the while the turbulences, meaningless wars, disturbances and shenanigans with ‘filthy lucre’ carry on unabated. We encounter human experience on and between every line.
The book bulges with lived experiences as the poet celebrates the experience of travel, past and family. He flees from the so-called true ‘meaning’ of life into the really-real search for the role of Homo Sapiens in a complex world, and he achieves this in richlycrafted language. In Solo we’re in Dresden; a communist-bloc city; there are drinks in Macedonia and we go belly-up in Ubud but home and family are ever present… Home seasoning where you tithed…Happiness a loaf of bread, the oven not yet cold… His language shines and dazzles; it pushes at the outer limits of meaning. Happiness a loaf of bread sums up family values without need for further explanation. He switches little lights on and we are enlightened.
In some ways, you could conclude, Haven is taking us on an American social history trip while, at the same time allowing us, in faraway places, to become fully engrossed in every aspect of his journey. We want to read on – to relive our own experiences with him.
In the final poem in the collection, Three Stories that House Us, Stephen Haven sums up – not just this his stance on life and poetry – but his entire philosophy and outlook on what it means to be truly human, we are always only becoming, we can never quite become. We must stop and think, immersed as we are in this richness of human experience, in beautifully crafted, accessible language.
A review like this this can be nothing more than a prompt. Each poem is an experience in itself. The book is a must read – reading takes time, but it is time well spent.
Dirk van Nouhuys
Dirk van Nouhuys publishes regularly in literary and other magazines to a total of more than 100 items. He writes novels, short stories, experimental forms, and occasionally verse. You can learn more at www.wandd.com including a complete list of publications at https://www.wandd.com/literary-publications.
The Waitress
Two men in overcoats walked downhill toward a main street late at night with their shoulders hunched against rain and fog, not driving rain, but large drops that splashed one by one against shop windows. The gutter was full to overflowing and rushed scraps of plastic and other flotsam to unknown destinations. A metallic scent hung in the air. One of them remarked it must have been raining harder during their meeting. They saw a sign over a cafe, “Burgers and Beer”. The interior was lit but not brightly. Through the splattered windows they could dimly see a figure sitting at the counter reading a newspaper and tables illuminated only enough to make out grayscale, not color, by muted ceiling light.
Unseen behind the louvered door to the kitchen, the waitress and young wife, Jessica Georgiou, stood at a counter slicing onions. She paused to look at her fingers. They seemed beautiful to her. She lifted them to savor the fresh scent. She loved the smell, but she wondered whether anyone else might do so. Her husband, Christos, was asleep on a La-Z-Boy in an inner room before the flicker of an endless Netflix download. She stopped her work, wiped her hands, and picked up her phone, where she began stealthily swiping though a singles site. She checked out only the pictures, never the stories. For her it was like solitaire. She always swiped from person to person in the silence of digital anonymity, never approving even though he was asleep. She paused over one young man. Bare from the chest up he did a bouncy dance from side to side holding a rose at first against his chest, and then reaching out toward her eyes. She watched enchanted as he danced through a brief .gif and then she replayed it. She slid her tongue between her pursed lips and swiped on. Soon she heard voices muffled from the street.
‘That must be some cops going home from their union meeting,’ thought the waitress, for ‘waitress’ was how she saw herself though her husband owned the shop. She had been a waitress for a chain when he came in for a burger & fries. Sometimes she thought that’s why he’d married her. She had mixed feelings about cops. They threw their weight around, but young men in uniform both calmed and excited her.
continued overleaf...
Soon their figures emerged from the fog. Drops splashed against the glass of the door. One bulky and tall, the other thinner and shorter. As they approached the small cafe, they walked more slowly than ever and breathed deeply.
“Maybe it’s open,” the burly man said.
“I can’t tell,” the slighter man said.
The burly man put his face close to the glass with his hand over his brow as if he were staring into a bright distance. “Hard to tell.”
“Where are we? Do you think we could get a drink?” asked the slighter man.
“We’re on Davis Street. We came the other way,” the burly man answered. “I’ve eaten here. It’s a decent place.”
“Can we get a beer?” asked the slighter man.
“The waitress is a babe.”
“I smell burgers.”
“I ate here one time. The fries are too.”
“Do they have wine?”
“Beer. I don’t know about wine.”
“Is she in a relationship?”
“She’s married. Her husband flips the burgers, but he looks like a toad.”
The slighter man laughed. “Could she love a toad?”
“No, she probably doesn’t love him,” sighed the bulky man. “I bet the poor guy doesn’t know how lucky he is. Come on, let’s go in. Maybe she’ll show.”
“It’s late, are they still open?”
“You can see a guy at the counter.”
“If you like. . . .”
The waitress heard the bell chime when the door opened and then shuffling. She looked round at her husband, who was smiling and snoring sweetly as before. She slid her bare feet into slippers and hurried into café. She was wearing her regular uniform: a tight white blouse, a mid-thigh black skirt, and black yoga pants.
The two men in overcoats were hesitating in the doorway.
The waitress turned up the overhead lights and said, “Anywhere you want,” An old man at a table by the door reading a newspaper in Chinese in the half light did not look up.
The two chose a table near the warm smell from the grill and took off their overcoats. They were in uniform, with duty belts and armed. The waitress took their coats and hung them on a coat tree by the outer door. They smiled at her and she returned their smiles. She was a slender young woman with soft muscle tone, black strait hair close to her head, large black eyes, and flawless skin.
“How about a burger medium rare,” said the burly man, who was a sergeant.
“Hey, I’d like one too, rare” said the other who was a lieutenant.
“Everything?”
“Hold he onions,” the sergeant said.
“Everything.” the Lieutenant said. She thanked them and started away.
continued overleaf...
“Doesn’t your husband grill them?” the sergeant asked.
“I’ll be serving you tonight.”
As she was walking away the two cops glanced at one another. “A babe,” the one agreed softly. “And fries?” The other called out.
The waitress didn’t hear them, or pretended not to, and eagerly returned. She noticed there was no salt cellar on their table. She wondered if it had been stolen.
“We’d like fries too,” said the Lieutenant.
“I’ll have to heat up the grease. It’ll take a couple of minutes.”
The men glanced at one another. “No one’s waiting for me,” the lieutenant said. “My old lady will wait the hour,” the sergeant agreed. “We’ll wait.”
The waitress started back toward the kitchen.
“Nice ass; small but tight,” said the Lieutenant softly, then loudly. ”Hey, one more thing.”
The waitress returned, picking up a salt cellar from another table.
“And a beer,” said the Sergeant.”
“What kind?”
“Whatch ya got?”
“Bud, Corona, Miller, Natty, light if you want”
“Stella?” asked the Lieutenant.
She shook her head and put the salt cellar on their table.
“Bud light” said the Sergeant.
She stood by, looking at the Lieutenant.
“Do you have white wine?”
She nodded.
“What kind?”
“I’ll check for you.” She smiled and went back to the refrigerator under the counter. Her husband still slept. She found a bottle, picked it up, walked back by the grill, flipped the burgers and put on the buns.
“Did you hear about the case Hank is working on?” the Lieutenant was saying.
“No, which one.”
“The one with the flowerpot.”
“Flowerpot? No.”
“It’s a shit pot,” the Lieutenant said.
“Oh yeah?”
“There was this white girl involved with a black guy,” He would have said,’ ‘fucking a black guy’ but was mindful of the waitress overhearing. He liked her.
She returned with the bottle and a glass in her hands.
“To each their own,” the Sergeant said, what he did not say was, ‘Some women want black cock.’
continued overleaf...
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, painting by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) oil on canvas height, 187 cm x 116.5 cm
She poured a sip for the Lieutenant.
“That’s good.” He nodded at the wine and smiled up at her almost forlornly.
The smell of the burgers began to warm the air. The waitress had caught the beginning of their story and wanted to hear more.
“Pretty too.” The Lieutenant said. The waitress wondered whether they were talking about her or about the girl in the story.
“How do you know? “The Sergeant asked.
“Hank had a picture.”
“How did he get that?” The Sergeant asked just as the waitress formed the same question in her mind.
“From the paper. She was a blond, sturdy but not fat, curly hair.”
The waitress doubted the girl in their story would be as pretty as she was. Still, she wanted to see the picture. Would they come back and bring it with them some night?
“Did you read it in the papers?” The Lieutenant asked the waitress.
She shook here head. She felt a little guilty she had not seen the story.
“Yeah. They were engaged, it turns out, but she didn’t tell her bothers.”
The Sergeant made a gruff noise of assent.
“He worked for them.”
“What was their business?”
“Beer distributors. They’ve got those trucks with the low floors in the middle.”
“What’s their name?” the waitress asked.
“Martinelli’s.”
“They deliver here!” The waitress exclaimed.
“How do you know it’s them,” the Lieutenant asked smiling up at her as if she had given him a little gift. “You can’t see their name on the trucks – they’re all covered with adds.”
“I see the bills,” the waitress said. She couldn’t remember a black driver. “Is he a driver?” she asked.
“No, he managed their warehouse.”
The waitress retuned to the counter to assemble the burgers and dropped the basket of fries sizzling into the oil. The old man at the table by the door continued to read a paper in Chinese. The Lieutenant wondered if he could understand English. The waitress wondered if she should take them their burgers now or wait for the fries to be done? If she hadn’t had to heat the oil they’d be done.
“She was their receptionist,” the Lieutenant continued. Then he looked at the waitress and said, “They look great. Do all your burgers smell this good?” The buns were toasted, the lettuce chopped, the tomatoes & onions sliced on the burgers, all on a plate with a slice of pickle and chips unless you ordered fries. “These are not McDonalds’ Burgers,” she said. She thought people who settled for chips were not really eating.
“So, what’s the case? We don’t arrest people for being engaged.”
“They found out.”
“How did they find out?”
“The usual way, pictures on her phone.”
continued overleaf...
“I knew it!” the waitress exclaimed.
“They didn’t do anything right away,’” the Lieutenant continued.
“They must have done something, there’s a case,” the Sergeant said.
“A couple of months later they drove with him to the woods above Pennyshaw.”
‘Maybe they told him it was some business trip.’ The waitress thought.
“Pennyshaw,” The Sergeant mused, “What jurisdiction is that?”
“Unincorporate Jefferson county. Yeah, they killed him there in the woods.”
“They killed him?” the Sergeant exclaimed.
The Lieutenant nodded as if he wanted to shield the pretty waitress from his words.
“Maybe it was like shooting a burglar,” said the Sergeant, “How did they do it?”
The waitress hurried back and lifted the fires from the oil, but she heard the Lieutenant answer. “A G19. Two bullets in the back of the head.”
“Sometimes men go crazy about what their women do,” the waitress said.
She only then realized she had imagined a handsome, clean looking black guy sitting at a desk in a warehouse, then getting up and coming toward her with some gift in his hand.
“They’ve found the body?” the Sergeant asked.
“She found it,” The Lieutenant corrected
“That’s why they didn’t kill her. She’s family,” the Sergeant said.
The waitress brought them the fries in stiff, waxed-paper boats. She pictured the girl, strong, not like her, on her hands and knees on the forest floor tearing the earth with her nails.
“How did she know where it was? did they tell her?” the Sergeant asked.
“We don’t know how she found his body. But she went with a friend and partly dug it up.”
The waitress pictured her studying a map on her phone. The map she imagined was wispy white lines on a dark blue background like a wind chart.
“Who says?” The Sergeant asked.
“Her friend.”
“What kind of friend is that?” the Sergeant asked. The waitress imagined being the girl’s friend. Her imagination was not a picture, but a warm familiarity shared with the sturdy blond woman.
“They tried to dig up the body. It was buried shallow. They couldn’t get it all. So, she cut off his head and took it home.”
“She took it home?” the Sargent said.
“I told you this was a shitter,” the Lieutenant said.
“Did she show it to them?” The waitress asked. She imagined a scene like Judith and Holofernes.
“No, she hid it. She put it in a big flowerpot. She covered it with earth and planted geraniums.”
continued overleaf...
“The
Chemist’s Wife.” A Short Story by Anton Chekhov/youtube
“Geez,” said the Sergeant. He shook his head acknowledging the range of human possibilities. Tears welled in the waitress eyes.
“What happened to her,” the waitress asked.
“She kept hanging around the pot and grew paler and thinner.”
“Did it smell bad?” the Sargent asked.
“How do we know?” the Lieutenant said and continued, “Her friend said she wasn’t eating. And kept the pot on the windowsill in her bedroom. So, they got suspicious and checked the pot. Then they skipped. Cleared their accounts and fled.”
“What about her?”
“She killed herself. OD’d on opiates.”
“When they skipped!” the waitress explained. The Lieutenant looked up at her and nodded respectfully. “Yes, she waited till they skipped.”
Admiration and sorrow filled the waitress. She stood resting her weight on her fingers spread on their table.
The Lieutenant continued looking at her, “What would you have done?”
She glanced through the door to where her husband had not moved in the finger light of the TV. After a long pause to empty her mind, she said: “I wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in anything like that.” She gathered their empty plates and carried them behind the counter to the dish washer.
“Have they caught them?” the Segreant asked.
“No, but you know they will.”
The waitress had drifted back near their table. “What will happen to them?” she asked.
“That’s premeditated. That’s first-degree murder,” the Sergeant said, “because they planned it and took him to Pennyshaw. Maybe it’s a hate crime. They’ll get life.”
The waitress wanted to believe they had not premeditated, that maybe they had taken him to talk, to try to get him to break it off, but he had stood up for his love and...
“What would you have done,” the Lieutenant asked again, “I mean when they were gone.”
“What I said,” she snapped.
“How much?” the sergeant asked. As she ran the bill on the calculator on her phone he added, “Your husband must be having lovely dreams.”
“How should I know,” she said.
She told them the total and walked way. They were discussing what to do, decided to leave, left cash on the table including a generous tip. They took their overcoats from the hall tree.
She saw the door close behind them and went to pick up the cash and wipe their table. She had not noticed that the old man reading the Chinese newspaper — he was a regular — had left money for his coffee and donut and departed while she was following the story.
She walked back to the inner room and sat for a moment beside the La-Z-Boy. Figures in armor were struggling on the dark screen. Her husband stirred a little. She got up and went to clean the grill. Nobody else would come in tonight.
continued overleaf...
Through the window she could see the two cops walk slowly away twenty paces; then stop and begin talking with their heads together. What about? Was there a funeral service for the girl who had died? She could feel her heart beat as though those two outside were deciding...she did not know what.
The burly man parted from the slender man and went on, while the other came back. She watched him walk past the shop turn and pass again. He would stop near the door and then take a few steps again. The bell chimed when he opened the door.
Her husband heard the bell. He rolled off the La-Z-Boy and shoved his feet into his slippers. He was a burly man but with thin arms and legs. He had a round head on a thick neck. A grizzled beard surrounded his wide mouth. He hurried into the café where the Lieutenant looked at him and paused confused. “Could I have a bag of chips?” he finally asked.
Her husband nodded, gestured toward a wrack where different brands hung on display, and said, “Take your pick.”
He hesitated a long time, then suddenly grabbed a bag.
“How much?”
Her husband named the price. The slender cop reentered the night carrying the bag. Her husband stumbled, still half-asleep back to the La-Z-Boy, where he turned off the TV before he settled down.
She asked herself the Lieutenant’s question, ‘What would she have done?’ She wished she could ask him. He knew the story.
“I forgot that guy’s money,” muttered her husband, pulling a quilt over his body, “Get it and put it in the till.”
She walked to the counter and gathered the money in her hand. She watched the slender man pass into the rain. She imagined his uniform under his overcoat, his leather duty belt, his weapon He dropped the chips unopened into the gutter. The rolling water would breach the bag, soften the chips, and suck out the salt.
Note on sources: The inner story is loosely based on The Pot of Basil from the Decameron. The outer story is more loosely based on Chekhov‘s The Chemist’s Wife.
Cover artwork ‘Dark Sky’ by Irish artist Emma Barone
