SWERVE 2

SWERVE

SWERVE

FOREWORD

online writing communities formed. It was clear that apart from being a creative outlet, writing and sharing was a crucial antidote to those lonely and troubling times. It would not be an exaggeration to say that our meetings kept us sane and a creative community became a lifeline. SWERVE seeks to maintain that feeling of community.

What started as an anthology is evolving into a journal that affirms our vision to give equal weight to the literary and visual arts. SWERVE 2 is packed with wonderful poetry and prose and stunning photographic spreads by international visual artists Krystina Stimakovits and Gérard Rouxel. Belgian artist Willem Boel describes his response to the West Cork landscape from the viewpoint of an Albers Foundation artist-in-residence. Sinéad Fagan, creator of exquisite ceramic art, is interviewed by author Gillian Watt. Kinsale poet, Matthew Geden, is in conversation with artist Jennifer Redmond. We are thrilled to be featuring our inaugural artist/writer collaboration with works by novelist Hannah Hoare and artist Charlotte Malik. Nick and Jonathan Wonham have allowed us to include a series of powerful anti-war poems and images, created in response to the conflict in Ukraine. As part of SWERVE's artist-inresidence project on a West Cork farm, Jonathan Doig (doyen of West Cork growers), Fiona York (actor, writer and grower) and Caroline Boyfield (artist) share their thoughts on organic farming.

SWERVE recently moved to an old medical centre in Skibbereen that is familiar to many residents of the town. The old surgery lends itself as an HQ with an office, studio and accommodation for visiting artists and writers.

There is a small gallery space to show interesting new work that will also serve to host workshops and readings. This summer we welcomed our first artist-inresidence, Caroline Boyfield, a writer and artist based in Brittany, who is also our EU editor-at-large in France. We hope this will be the first of many such cross-cultural initiatives. To ensure that SWERVE is accessible to our international readers we have created an online magazine, available at www.swervemagazine.org. Print copies can be found at Waterstones bookshop in Cork City and in Skibbereen from the Uillinn Arts Centre and SWERVE HQ. SWERVE would like to thank all the wonderful artists and writers who have contributed to the second edition of the magazine and you, our readers, without whom we would not exist.

Cover image: Krystina Stimakovits

SUMMER 2023 NEW WRITING

and VISUAL ART

SUMMER 2023 NEW WRITING

and VISUAL ART

Page Willem Boel

TURNING SAND INTO GOLD AT CARRAIG-NA-GCAT An artist's response to the landscape of West Cork

Mike Guerin

QUARE HAWKS ........................................................................... 14

Mona Lynch

JIMMY ......................................................................................... 18

Catherine Airey

THE PLEASURE CENTRE ............................................................ 20

Lou Hill

THREE POEMS ........................................................................... 28

Jeanna Ní Ríordáin

FIRST TATTOO ............................................................................ 32

Johanna Zomers

TWO POEMS ............................................................................... 34

Maeve Keane

GOOD FRIDAY ............................................................................ 38

Owen O'Sullivan

AN OCTOBER MORNING WALK ................................................ 44

Ivan de Monbrison

THE FIRE THAT FOLLOWS ME ................................................. 46

Marlowe Russell

BANTLING .................................................................................. 48

Gillian Watt

EARTHY ALCHEMY Interview: Ceramic Artist Sinead Fagan ................................... 54

Fiona York Jonathan Doig Caroline Boyfield

A FARMER’S ALMANACK Froe, Rosscarbery, West Cork Artist-in-Residence Project ......................................................... 60

Janet Harper

TWO POEMS ................................................................................ 68

Holly Darragh-Hickey

MOTHER WILD ........................................................................... 72

Paul Temme

TWO POEMS ................................................................................ 74

Paul Temme

BLACK PEACH ............................................................................ 78

Moze Jacobs

LEGACY BURDEN ....................................................................... 82

Sharon Guard

FLIGHT ........................................................................................ 84

Catherine Ronan

TWO POEMS ............................................................................... 90

Fin Keegan

FREELANCING ............................................................................ 92

Hannah Hoare Charlotte Malik

PARAHUMANITY: A Writer/Artist Collaboration...................................................... 96

Mary Mc Carthy

VISION OF THE COSMOS ............................................................104

R J Breathnach

ARDMORE ................................................................................... 106

Image previous page: IRVI

1

Page

ricia Wallace

SYLVIA BIRCH ............................................................................. 108

nifer Redmond

THE CLOUD ARCHITECT Interview: Poet Matthew Geden ................................................ 110

ystina Stimakovits

AGENT CLOUD Photography: A glass and cobweb invitation ............................. 118

nifer Horgan

THREE POEMS ............................................................................ 128

athan Wonham k Wonham

SIX POEMS SIX IMAGES ................................................................................. 132

éad Corcoran

A PLACE IS A RESTLESS THING ................................................. 144

mi George Simpson

SURVIVING THE SOIL ................................................................. 150

uren O'Donovan

INGREDIENTS (FOR A MOTHER) ............................................... 152

eve Keane

THE BOOKSHELF ........................................................................154

nielle McLaughlin

FOUR YOUNG WRITERS ............................................................. 156

rk Jackson

A LOSS OF RESPECT ................................................................... 157

tlin Young

46A .............................................................................................. 163

Egan Reeve

REITRIC ....................................................................................... 169

rcey Dugan

TWO POEMS ................................................................................174

rard Rouxel

TANTRIC SPANDA A Photographic Reverie ..............................................................178

ragh Fleming

AFTER PRAGUE ...........................................................................186

ma Barry

WAITRESS ................................................................................... 190

Frontispiece and End Pages: IRVI Pages:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13

Willem Boel

Pages:

60-67

Caroline Boyfield

Page:

88

Laure Colomer

Pages:

108, 144, 149

Seán Dunne

Pages :

20-21, 26-27, 46-47, 94-95

Lydia Hickey

Page:

150

Jacqueline LeDoux

Pages :

99, 100, 103

Charlotte Malik

Pages:

56, 58, 59

Roland Paschhoff

Pages:

178-185

Gérard Rouxel

Pages:

110-111, 119-127

Krystina Stimakovits

Pages:

48, 53

Unknown Photographer/ Mich Maroney

Page:

7

Alwin Vyvey

Pages:

36-37, 106-107

Nancy Wilde

Pages:

132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142

Nick Wonham

All other images:

Mich Maroney

artist's response to the landscape of West Cork

ILLEM BOEL tist-in-Residence bers Foundation, Carraig-na-gGat, Glandore

IJosef was and invited the house at Reenogreena by the Josef and Anni Albers foundation, and more AnnitoAlbers were absolute giants in the specifically

by Matthias Persson, runs the residency program for the foundation. As it can ruin a art world and far beyond.

Theirwho designs, ideas film to read the plot and the ending before you and teaching methods are so well known thatsee it, I decided to come here with no expectations whatsoever. also really know was expected from me, and that suited me well. I decided most people(Ido notdon’t recognise themwhat as original not to ask.) ideas anymore. They have become common ground. As a boy, I went to art school at the Of course, I was preparing trip to Ireland many people wanted to know what my plan was, and weekends, as and many of the my exercises we did why I were was invited.

What are you going do there, and how will it eventually benefit you or the Albers there direct copies of Josef Alberstoteachings Foundation?

What’s the deal here?

I didn’t want at Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau (DE) or Blackto call it a vacation because that would sound lazy and ungrateful.

And by not defining it beforehand, the idea of my residency incorporated a Mountain College in moreover, North Carolina (US) after the sense of mystery and hoped Nazi regime closed theimportance, Bauhaus. I which realiseI now, bywould match the real experience. And moreover, by about it, gave an importance being mysterious here and reading upI on theitAlbers what thethat I hoped was true. scope of their influence really was, and still is.

ies ophysicist, called ‘Things something to Make he said and about Do, his an view Idealon this place we call home - the earth - caught my ntion.

Book One for all of Boys his classes and Girls’. in college On page was 37, art and a design. For weeks, they had to draw pumpkins. er k, called a few weeks, ‘giving paper the teacher muscles’ gave was them described. a different task: to draw the space between the pumpkins. folding Tyson,paper this was in a azig-zag, paradigm andshift. placing Being it ongiven top this simple, yet cunning task, he started looking hwo new glass eyes tumblers at everything. it can carry Are there a third boundaries? one. The Tyson explains: ‘I just snapped. It was like, wait a ute... ct same Youprinciple are giving was objective describedmeaning in the book to these things we call pumpkins, and now these mpkins Albersareteaching. just the boundaries ‘Josef Albers. of something Art as else that I am giving meaning to, and it is the space ween erience: the The pumpkins. teaching The methods pumpkins of were a Bauhaus now the edges of things, and not the object of what I am ster’ wing.page And 73-74. my brain turned inside out. ... Everything looked different after that. Everything. Neil Grasse Tyson became a television personality and spokesperson, you could say teacher, for rything that has to do with our universe and the endless possibilities within that universe. It was at Bauhaus, when Josef Albers became Junior Master under Walter Gropius that this type of eriment with drawing first took place.

*The diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett episode 205 (1:22:19s)

perceived as a vacation from life. A place where you go to have a moment to think, and act, without boundaries whatsoever. It is your responsibility as an artist to do whatever you want, and a great responsibility, that is. I think about this responsibility a lot. Doing whatever you want is not as easy as it might seem. I try to be uninfluenced by as many things as possible, especially other artists. I want to do something unique, or at least genuine. Over the years, I’ve learnt that you have to be very serious about what you are doing, as insignificantly looking your product may turn out. Art is not a trick, or a joke. It is a way to show to yourself that you are capable of doing something beyond everything you have ever learned to do.

Painting a square, inside a square, inside a square and doing it for years could seem pointless to a critical mind, but so is doing the dishes. Overpainting a painting, by adding a new layer every day, could seem boring to an industrious person, but so is going to the gym every two days. In making our work, we strive for essence, oftentimes more than what we thought we were capable of.

Image previous page: Willem Boel De Nieuwe Molen

As the Anni Albers rain never stopped, usedI exact started repetition, to realise shewhat let the a sequence surprise her. It is in the unexpected that we find beautiful place the this satisfaction is. The of only ‘new’. straight line you’ll see here is the horizon. All else is sloping cracked, I used to frozen swinging, play the andviolin, melted, we diffused had to play by mist. a lotNo of exercises, and I quite hated it. I did not yet understand that mathematical perfection, playing aamusical peculiarinstrument place for isthenot a repetitive thing, although the gathering of musicians Albers’ patterns withoutand an colour audience, systems, is usually one called might repetition. Later, I denounced the concept of exercise say...

Andand yet,tried it istoinbelieve placesthat like there this, in is no times such likething. Everything you do is an action. You cannot copy something, these, that you because have thethis time is this and and eyes that foris the that. This O is not this O. They look the same, but are not. beauty that we have come to think of as unusual normal, or obvious. The colour scheme I remember As I am from myfaced manywith walks ancient is quite rocks, specific: landscape verycarved dark out by millennia and cooling down from social media, Ialmost green, find myself black, coming whiteto understand translucent, that copper a ritual, a habit and an addiction are very close, but not the same. orange, grass Often greenthey — and occur all simultaneously. those colours seem soaking wet, except for the white perhaps which looked ‘raggy’ sometimes, or cottonwooly. Quite a contradiction, for the white was probably and literally the wettest of them all, being mist and clouds. I realised later, what made this palette so powerful, was the exclusion of a colour; one that we naturally and automatically connect with nature.

Blue was left out. This gave me a strange sense of freedom.

walks took me to the Drombeg stone circle, a Bronze Age axial circle, made of 13 enormous dstone rocks. As a sculptor, I have a good sense of the weight of things, and I can tell you, se things are close to impossible to move without a comprehensive plan. Given the topography e, it is an even harder task. The people who made this must have been very much in love with mething or someone, or very much afraid. I do realise that this stone circle is very attractive, but efer the two circular remains of the 3000-year-old huts, close to the stone circle. One of them a very interesting setup which makes you, as a visitor, actually relate to the original abitants. Inside the ring, made of stones and small rocks, there is a square pond. It connects to pring. Behind it, there is a place, perfect for making a fire, and in front there is sufficient space it and cook with at least four people. The stream that flows from the well probably served as wer. I read that stones were heated in the fire, then put in the water basin to make it boil. They e able to make 300 litres of water boil in 18 minutes. As a father of two, who often has to cook t of spaghetti and potatoes, I know that 300 litres is a lot to boil. This whole setup is so perfect, utiful, and real, that I made this place part of my regular walk. I can actually sit where mebody has sat 2000 years ago to cook some meat, and, arguably, you could of course say about many places, but the way this layout is so visible and so relatable, due to its human le, makes it all the more powerful.

To say modern, post-modern, or contemporary, are denominations of time periods in art history, where we as artists should, could, fit into. I don’t care for these terms. Experimenting and doing, or learning by doing (Werklehre) - as Josef Albers would say - is relevant, always. In my practice, it has been a constant to work with very basic materials. A piece of cardboard, some rope, a few cans of paint, not even a paintbrush, some iron bars. Things like that are enough to make me go wild. Put two materials next to each other, and there you have it: a sculpture. All actions, be it painting, welding, folding, plying, weaving, pouring, cutting are equally important. Each action requires my full attention, but I try to be as fluent and playful as I can. Almost as if working from building as an automatic experience set of actions. Lighthearted, but with careful attention. I am also aware that I am not the only one, or the first, to do anything at all. Social media and internet are so vast, and so full of images of art that it’s nearly impossible, annoyingly, to not come across things that appear, in some way, similar to what you do. A very annoying consequence of evolution. I too want to fold paper, paint the sea, or make a perfect square with a palette knife. All this to justify what I have actually been doing here in Carraig-na-gCat. Image this page: Willem Boel Pare Feu (photo: Alwin Vyvey)

ge nextinpage: Willem Untitled rived Ireland withBoel a brand new set of watercolours. Something I remember using at art school a boy. In my work, I usually do not choose colours, I just open a can of paint, and use the colour presents itself. Since I knew I wasn’t going to have the possibility to make monumental 3D works, anted to try something new. But what to paint? A portrait? Something abstract? A pumpkin haps? So I started testing all the colours in the set, by drawing lines with them. I immediately ced a difference in the colours, in their composition, their deepness and tone, the way they cted with different brushes, or with water, how they dissolved, and eventually how they behaved different kinds of paper.

ing those tests, I could not but think of my earliest works, the series ‘De Nieuwe Molens’ (The new s), where I paint the surface of several pieces of plywood, mounted on a turning easel every day, h a different colour. These are monochrome paintings which I have been making for the last 12 rs. I started doing this as an experiment on time. How long would it take to turn a flat surface into D landscape by only painting one layer a day. This flat surface, smooth and sharp, has now ome rich and voluptuous, with unexpected cracks, hills, valleys and expanding edges. I have ome addicted to it. Whilst drawing these lines with the watercolours, I thought, let’s play a game. w a straight line, as straight as you can, freehand. The next line should follow the first one, as sely as possible, but without touching.

ntinue to do that until the piece of paper is full. Repeat. What happened? Many things interfered h that straight line. My heartbeat, the grain of the paper, the wine I had drunk, perhaps. The first looked straight, but slowly it evolved into a landscape. Magic. Addictive. Soothing. These simple ons gave me the same satisfaction as my daily visit to my studio to paint all my Pare Feu’s and Nieuwe Molens. A simple action gives pause to the brain, allowing it to work better, or work at all. s like a vacation for the brain, a chance to reload. Because you are actively doing something nting lines, painting monochromes, pouring paint, sweeping the floor...) your brain tells you: eat, you are doing something. Here’s a shot of dopamine” In the meantime, you can think of thing you want, while turning sand into gold.

other place close to the house where I love to go for walks is Prison Cove, a bay, cut out by the sea. I don’t know why it is called Prison Cove, but there two small buildings at the entrance of the cove, one is an abandoned se, the other a ruin of what I might assume was a prison. Why there? A on... Such a beautiful place. The window of the prison is facing the bay. Is torture or an attempt to be human? When looking at the composition of place I was stunned by the variety of colours, textures and layers. nding here, in this cut-out landscape, I felt the ages. Round boulders, shed by the water, razor-sharp rocks, split by frost, the roots of seaweed wling their way in, sea scallops becoming one with the surface. I spent me time here, looking around for treasures.

ces like this are perfect for that, because it’s tidal. The sea leaves behind at it does not want, or what it wants to give away. I found a beautiful buoy, a te hard plastic round shape with a hole in the middle. It reminded me of wings of black holes. I found the skull of a seagull, a very elegant and gile little sculpture.

mbing a little higher, something caught my eye that seemed very temporary, but is in fact very old. Strange shapes were carved out, almost ded out, ten metres above sea level. If you look at 3D printing, or the erse, automated 3D milling, it is always done in layers. Every layer is htly bigger or smaller than the next, that’s how you get a shape. If you want mooth result, it will take a lot of sanding by hand to get there. The cut-outs he sandstone looked exactly like a fresh 3D print. Back in the house, the rnet showed me that sea levels could only have done that approximately ,000 years ago.

next objective page: Willem Feu (detail) egemain andBoel an Pare expression that has become almost a platitude he Albers’ world is ‘to open eyes’ or ‘really seeing’. On the first clear day n my arrival here, I realised that really seeing, requires the willingness ook, given that the context is favourable. This simple house, surrounded he Atlantic Ocean, on top of a hill is the perfect context for that.

k at the horizon, see how it changes. Wait for the sun to come up. See w clouds fall on the distant hills and become mist. First you look at the dscape, which is slowly covered by the veil that these clouds are. Then look at the veil. I saw rainclouds in the distance coming my way, mless. When I met them, I had to run for cover. Really seeing is done h all your senses, combined with experience and an open mind looking k and forward at the same time.

me, really seeing is essential and seems natural. Really seeing is a ural part of my art practice. I have trained myself by making artworks. e could say it is my job. I am very grateful for this opportunity, to learn re about my practice, by learning from others such as Josef and Anni ers. After all, it is the void between us that defines our shape. https://www.albersfoundation.org/foundation/residencies/carraig-na-gcat

UARE HAWKS

place with no lack of bleak, romantic landscapes -if you were partial to that sort of thing. He was in his late forties and lived with his father and mother who were in their early eighties. They had a small farm that his older sister had inherited, she had built a massive house in a good field and rented the rest of the land to a neighbour. He pretended to resent this at times, when speaking to neighbours, because it was the done thing, but he would freely admit to his family that he would not have been happy to have the pressure of running a farm on his shoulders. He was supposed to get the family home when his parents passed, so he’d have a roof over his head anyway. Not much of a roof though because it was a bungalow from the second half of the twentieth century; there was a ruin of an old farmhouse amongst the hodgepodge of sheds in the yard and you’d be warmer in there during the winter. He planned to write an honest account of Irish vernacular architecture at some stage, one that would make a fleeting reference to the thatched cottages that were as rare as hens’ teeth but an open exploration of uninsulated iceboxes built by corner-cutting cowboys who hadn’t a clue what they were doing.

Regardless of the house, he liked where he had ended up in the world. He had a National Geographic subscription and experienced schadenfreude when he saw the conditions and climates some people had to put up with. He loved being surrounded by nature. He knew all his local fox paths and badgers’ setts, he’d watched red squirrels and stoats bouncing away down tree lined boreens, hedgehogs bumbling through leafy copse floors, and shrews running circles across his shoes. It was all very idyllic, the nature and the animals; other people were the problem.

Meeting people casually was not Joachim’s strong suit, easy casual conversation did not flow forth when it was required. He particularly hated meeting someone in a field, it was an inherently uncomfortable scenario. An ordinary field now, not a hiking trail or someplace touristy – a standard field.

There’s an initial moment of, ‘Blast it, I’m caught’, after which you start to walk towards each other; it would be odd not to. On one hand it might not be your field, meaning you’re technically trespassing, not that the landowner, your neighbour we’re saying, will mind – much. On the other hand, it might be your field and the other person is the interloper; they didn’t want to meet you and you didn’t want to meet them. There’s also the issue of going for a walk at all. It was acceptable to take a child or an elderly relative for a walk but the idea of walking for pleasure was still not entirely embraced by locals and if you had no other business in the field other than taking a walk you may be embarrassed, people might talk, even if just to themselves: ‘Quare hawk.’

‘Short of a job.’

‘He’s away with the faeries.’

‘I don’t know what he’d be doing on these walks.’

‘Walking!’

If you do meet someone though, you have to suck it up, you have to just walk on over to them because if you try to hide, and then get caught - it’s worse. They see you trying to skulk away and then you see them seeing you and then you have to turn around and do the awkward thing anyway because you can’t just walk away out of a field if you’re after seeing someone. The conversation itself will be a seemingly dry affair but it will be riddled with real, and imagined, subtext. On one occasion Joachim had just scrambled over a briary ditch and tripped into the field not far from the wellingtons of his elderly neighbour, O’Rourke, who was about to replace a fencing post, he held a sledgehammer in one of his hulking hands.

‘Grand day for it.’ said O’Rourke.

‘Oh, mighty day entirely, I said I’d go for a walk. I hope you don’t mind?’ said Joachim.

‘Work away, you have every right - many’s the day’s work your people did in this field.’

The first blow was struck, a reference to his ancestors past industriousness, an industriousness that did not carry on down the bloodline to Joachim.

‘Oh yes, the harvest was a different thing entirely back then of course’ - Joachim gamely trying to encourage reminiscence which he genuinely enjoyed hearing.

Rourke to emphasise Joachim’s lily-livered existence.

‘Simpler times.’ – Joachim, beginning to bow out gently.

‘Ahah, anyway I better not be holding you up.’ – No point in trying to get through to this idiot.

‘Thanks…I suppose I’ll get back to it.’

Joachim was handing his head on a plate to O’Rourke now.

‘Oh do, keep at it.’ said O’Rourke, shaking his red head.

That was bad but nothing would ever eclipse the shameful discomfort of the time Joachim met nton in the Inch field.

He was walking along the bank of a river that an athlete could leap across when there was a ling from the vegetation ahead. He paused in case he was going to have an encounter with wildlife. knew deer frequented this path but had yet to see one in the flesh. It wasn’t a deer that popped out ugh, it was Fenton, in the flesh - and naught else.

Fenton lived in a new bungalow built on his uncle’s land. Joachim knew from listening to stories Fenton’s uncle, Moses, used to do something like this – bathe in icy water once a year, it was mething people liked to talk about regularly when Moses was mentioned. Joachim also knew that re was another step to this process, this physical tonic. Moses would, by all accounts, beat his ed body with nettles after emerging. This was not a sex thing; this was a folk-remedy thing chim was pretty sure of that. There’s a lot of strange folk remedies out there, like if you cut a hole in middle of an ash sapling and crawl through it you can sort out a dose of impotence which proved Joachim, if proof was needed, that impotence was mostly a mental issue.

Fenton saw Joachim seeing him. There was a tableau moment; options being weighed; tactics led on. Fenton seemed to decide that attack was the best form of defence and in a defiant move put arms akimbo. Joachim was glad that the frigid water had left him reduced, he presumed, for if mething had been dangling it would have been impossible to avoid a dip in his line of sight. For now, was able to look Fenton square in the forehead.

‘You’re on one of your walks again, are you?’ said Fenton, a barely disguised shot.

‘Yes. I am. You’re…am…taking the cure, is it?’ said Joachim.

‘My uncle Moses swore by it, he never gave a day to the hospital as long as he lived. He wasn’t reat man for walks though.’

At this point Joachim thought it was very ungracious of him not to appreciate his affectation of chalance when he was being faced with a scandalous scene, so he decided to give as good as he

‘What age was he when he died again?’ asked Joachim.

‘Late fifties.’

‘Mmm.’ ‘Did you see anything interesting on your walk?’

Joachim managed to keep his eyes on Fenton’s forehead.

‘Am…I saw three herons flying together earlier.’

‘I see them around too. The chick is slow in leaving the nest I’d say.’

Joachim was trying to give subtle backhanders but the living at home dig rattled him out of oring the bizarreness of the scenario.

‘I better let you finish yourself off, you’d want to be careful though, going around naked like that wadays, I think it’s illegal.’

‘Fuck that, no man will stop me from bathing as God intended - wherever the fuck I please.’ said nton. He then thumped his chest twice with his fist and nodded slowly. The machismo irked Joachim.

‘They wouldn’t be mad about it in the hotel swimming pool.’

fool.

‘Do you know this is the longest you’ve ever stopped to talk to me, is it that you’re enjoying the view or what?’ said Fenton.

The locally held belief that Joachim was homosexual reared its head. In a place like this if you’re one sort of queer they think you’re every sort of queer. He decided to play to it.

‘Believe me, there’s nothing spectacular to be seen here.’ said Joachim.

‘Be on about your business so’, said Fenton, seemingly put out. Vanity knows no boundaries.

Joachim had him on the run now and decided to stick in the boot.

‘I’ll let you get back to your sadomasochism there so.’ Said Joachim.

‘It’s traditional medicine.’

Fenton was scrambling.

‘It’s a sex thing and you know it but your small man doesn’t seem to...or maybe that’s him angry…’

Joachim started to walk away delighted to have used the slang of an older generation against Fenton who was fuming.

‘It is in its hat a sex thing! My uncle had no interest in sex!’

Joachim looked back over his shoulder and smirked a casual, ‘maybe not with women.’

‘Give over your shit you dirty devil, tis well known that tis you have no interest in women - and I have no interest in men - that’s why my lad is small!’

Fenton was dancing with temper whilst spitting insults and excuses, he might have given chase only for being naked but you can’t be seen running naked in a field without being put away for a while – also, he had yet to beat himself with nettles. Joachim wondered what Fenton would tell people. Would he be able to cut Joachim when the story started with Fenton emerging naked from a river or would he just have to hold his tongue?

As Joachim heard the yowling, which announced the next phase of Uncle Moses’ process, he resolved to gossip unreservedly about Fenton and to stop considering himself the only quare hawk around.

cottage above the road.

MMY garden higher again.

dled with currant bushes ck and red, gooseberries too. nshine blazed as h rhythmic strokes lifts the spade aring the drills, ng to the spuds. gimental rows of cabbage eckled with ravenous caterpillars. nlike foliage of carrots ng juicy tubers.

sit on upturned drums, ching up with our worlds. athing in the fresh scent of the earth. scrapes his plug tobacco, his pipe, and puffs soul at one with his garden, low world of dignity, respect. at by his bed on his ninetieth birthday, d him of the huge beetroot as given that day by a neighbour. h eyes closed he whispered o beetroot should be bigger than an eating ple”.

His cottage above the road.

JIMMY His garden higher again. girdled with currant bushes black and red, gooseberries too.

Sunshine blazed as with rhythmic strokes he lifts the spade clearing the drills, rising to the spuds.

Regimental rows of cabbage speckled with ravenous caterpillars.

Fernlike foliage of carrots hiding juicy tubers.

We sit on upturned drums, catching up with our worlds.

Breathing in the fresh scent of the earth.

He scrapes his plug tobacco, fills his pipe, and puffs his soul at one with his garden, A slow world of dignity, respect.

I sat by his bed on his ninetieth birthday, told him of the huge beetroot I was given that day by a neighbour.

With eyes closed he whispered “No beetroot should be bigger than an eating apple”.

HE PLEASURE CENTRE

ages: LYDIA HICKEY

legs in the water at the edge of the jungle rapids, bored out of my mind, when one of the lifeguards came and crouched down by my side.

‘I should put out an announcement warning all the kids that there’s a leopard on the riverbank, waiting to pounce.’

I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘You know, because you’re wearing a leopard-print bikini.’

He was way older than I was but I’d never been chatted up before and I didn’t think he’d actually remember my number when I recited it to him. *** I didn’t tell David that I was a virgin until the last moment, when he was just about inside me and I couldn’t keep it in anymore. He was nice about it.

We watched movies in his bedroom and smoked weed with our heads out the window. We took a daytrip to Bettystown and I demolished him on the dance mat in the arcade. He had a tabby cat called Dune and liked playing long strategic board games. We had pretty much nothing in common and it surprised me how little this seemed to matter.

David wasn’t my boyfriend and I didn’t really want him to be. We talked about the fact that I was so much younger and he would get emphatic about how important it was for me to live my life and find out who I was and not have any ties.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be your boyfriend,’ he’d say, often.

Maybe he was hoping I’d say I’d love that too. *** I had moved school for my leaving cert and I wasn’t really making friends. There was a girl called Orla in my English class. She was new, too. When I caught myself staring at her I tried to stop, but my eyes would always end up back on her again. I think it was because we looked a bit alike but everything about her was a slight improvement. She was smarter and funnier, definitely prettier, with a smile that could get her a job in a toothpaste advert and hair that always fell in the right place. Her school tie was perfectly straight and her blazer actually sat properly over her shoulders. She didn’t seem to get spots and she hardly wore any makeup. I noticed that she had neat handwriting and would wait for whatever boy was talking shite to finish before she’d make a better point that would leave the whole class speechless.

Orla had already become best friends with a girl called Amy who was retaking the year. Amy was overweight and obviously a lesbian. She was the kind of fat girl who had become hard as nails at a young age to avoid being made fun of. I couldn’t understand why Orla was friends with Amy when she could have been friends with anyone. Was it just because Amy had claimed her before anyone else could? *** When he wasn’t working, David would pick me up after school and we’d get McDonald’s drive-through.

Every single vanilla milkshake that I ordered tasted like banana. I’d talk to him about Orla and Amy, how their friendship didn’t make sense to me. He would listen to my schoolgirl psychoanalysis and make it all seem simpler than I knew it really was.

r school one day.’

‘We’re not little kids, David. We don’t go over to each other’s houses for dinner.’

‘Don’t overthink it. You’re grand. You seem to think she’s grand. What’s the problem?’

‘The problem’s Amy. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

*** saw Orla going into the toilets I’d walk in a couple of minutes later and sit in the next cubicle. metimes I’d hear the rustle of a tampon wrapper or a sanitary pad being ripped open. I walked past locker every morning and would try to get behind her in the queue for the vending machine at break. tesers or Minstrels. Amy would often ruin these moments by running up behind Orla and trying to hten her, or putting her pudgy hands over Orla’s eyes and yelling ‘Guess who?’ in a aggressively d voice. I’d be thinking: Why does she get to be Orla’s best friend? When I thought through the wer to that question I came to the conclusion that Amy had a certain energy I lacked. It killed me ry time I saw Amy’s lumpy arm scooping Orla away.

Then Orla and I got partnered to give a presentation on Frankenstein. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

‘I dressed up as Frankenstein once for Halloween,’ David said to me in the car, after I had told the good news.

‘No you didn’t,’ I said.

‘I did. My costume was gas and all. Me and –’ I interrupted him. ‘I bet you didn’t dress up as Frankenstein.’

‘Why’d you say that? I did so.’

‘Everyone thinks Frankenstein’s the monster but he’s not the monster,’ I snapped.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘I thought you were happy about being partnered with Orla for the project.’

‘I am.’

‘So, are you going to invite her over?’

‘No. I need to play it cool.’

‘Did you play it cool with me?’

‘Huh?’ *** a and I worked a dream together. We stayed late after school working in the library and lost track of e. It was like our brains worked at the same speed. Sometimes she’d get messages from Amy asking ey could hang out. After this had happened a few times, Orla put her phone on silent and put it in her . Then Amy decided she’d do her homework in the library too. She said Victor Frankenstein was a -absorbed wanker and a misogynist and that Mary Shelly was a genius, born before her time. She read the book even though she wasn’t doing Honours English.

‘You know I have to actually work if I want to get into Trinity, right?’ Orla said to Amy. ‘Oh, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity. Where you’ll go to fancy dinners and get date raped by lads who went boarding school in England and no one will believe you because the crusty old white men are too up r own arses protecting their precious institution.’

'Stereotype much, Amy,’ Orla said.

‘

‘Oh, I’m not as smart as Orla is,’ I said.

‘You’re blushing. Has someone got a little crush?’

‘Stop it, Amy,’ Orla said.

‘Sure, look. Orla’s sadly straight as a poker,’ Amy told me. ‘Little heartbreaker.’

‘I’m not gay,’ I said. ‘I have a boyfriend.’

‘Sure you do.’ Amy rolled her eyes.

I do. He’s picking me up after this.’

‘He has a car?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Could he give us a lift?’

‘Amy!’ Orla elbowed her, hard.

‘I think that would probably be fine,’ I told them.

*** We walked across the staff carpark to where David’s car was. Amy took the passenger seat. Orla and I got in the back.

‘Where to then, ladies?’ David asked.

We gave them lifts quite regularly after that. I saw the outsides of both their houses. Amy lived in a tiny terrace in a council estate. Orla lived in a semi-d similar to mine but in a more expensive area.

Amy did most of the talking, telling David where to go and making jokes about him being a paedophile.

David did try to bring Orla into the conversation, but Amy would usually answer questions for her.

‘Orla’s mum is a lawyer, so you’d better watch yourself.’

Once, when she was getting out the car, Orla put her hand down on my knee for just a second, like she’d done it without thinking and didn’t have time to stop it from happening. *** The next time we were all in the car together, David invited Orla and Amy over to play Catan.

‘You need more than two players, really, for the game to work,’ he explained.

‘We’re not supposed to go home with strangers,’ Amy said.

‘Well, I guess you shouldn’t have got into my car then.’

‘Alright, paedo. You can abduct us. Seeing as it’s Friday.’

When we got back to the flat, David went to the off license down the road to get beers while the three of us decided which pizzas to order. Amy had picked Dune up and was holding him too tightly so he couldn’t get away. When David got back he rolled a joint and started to explain the rules. I forgot them every time.

Orla coughed when she took a drag of the joint. It made her eyes water. Amy inhaled deeply. The end of the joint was wet with her saliva when she passed it on to me.

As we played, the names of the resources on the board started to sound like they weren’t real.

Sheep. Rock. Wood. Wheat. Whatever. Amy was trying to make the longest road. I wanted to block her progress. Orla was holding her cards close to her chest and concentrating hard. Her brow furrowed and the tip of her tongue came out between her lips when it was her turn. Her beer bottle erupted when she put it down on the table, foam spilling out over the top and onto the map.

I ran to the kitchen to grab a tea towel. My legs felt wobbly, like I was on a boat. When I got k, David was making a joke about how the world had been flooded so now his wood should be th more because it would be needed to build an arc.

Orla won. David said she was a dark horse, because it seemed like she hadn’t even understood rules for half the game. She put it down to beginner’s luck. Amy asked if David had more weed and all continued drinking.

David’s housemate, Benji, worked as a Deliveroo driver and was hardly ever in, so David offered a and Amy his room. He’d had too much to drink to drive them home. Orla went outside to call her ents. Dune made a dash for the door.

‘She’ll say she’s staying at mine,’ Amy said. ‘Her parents are strict.’

I couldn’t sleep all night knowing Orla and Amy were next door in bed together. When David ted trying to have sex with me I told him I was too tired and turned over.

*** e Easter holidays came around. David was working extra shifts. I was supposed to be revising. There s a chance I could do well. Orla and I had got A1s in our coursework on narrative structure. I told my ents Orla was going to go to Trinity and that I was thinking about applying too, but they were too y worrying that the twins might be on the spectrum and arguing about whether you should put coffee nules down the sink to pay me much attention.

We had only been out of school for a week but it felt like an eternity. I was having daily driving sons that were supposed to guarantee I’d pass my test in only a month. It was called a crash course. en I would be able to drive the twins to their piano classes and karate practise and chess mpetitions. Since David drove me wherever I wanted I didn’t really care about getting my license. I nt most of the time during my lessons hoping to see Orla, driving even slower than the speed limit checking all my mirrors.

I was in the Pleasure Centre carpark reversing round a corner when it happened. She was with vid, standing by the fire exit. He handed her his cigarette. She was wearing a short skirt and her long nde hair was blowing about in the wind. She was laughing at whatever he was saying. She dropped cigarette and put it out under her Doc Martens. *** sked David how his day had been and he said nothing about Orla. We watched Guardians of the axy on his laptop and ate Phish Food ice cream. Sometimes I pretended I didn’t know what was ng on in the films David recommended because I knew he liked explaining the plots to me.

‘I was thinking about coming to the Pleasure Centre with Orla and Amy,’ I said, after he’d shed reminding me about the importance of the infinity stones. ‘Do you think you could get us free ses?’

‘Yeah, I reckon I could sneak you in.’ He kissed the side of my head. ‘I’m glad you’ve made nds, kiddo.’

I crunched a dark chocolate fish between my teeth just as the pina colada song came on. ***

even though she had a perfect figure. A tiny gap between her thighs and a stomach toned from playing hockey. Amy was wearing a Speedo costume, stretched over her tummy.

‘Jungle rapids, let’s go,’ she chanted, grabbing Orla’s hand.

David waved when we passed him, the three of us carried by the current through the wave machine into what was called the crocodile lagoon. The paint was chipping from the plasterboard so that the crocodiles’ jaws were ghostly pale under the water. They used to snap shut and make a splash but the mechanism must have broken.

‘I swear it wasn’t this dirty when we were younger,’ Orla said. ‘You can hardly see through the water.’

‘Maybe you weren’t so stuck up when you were younger,’ Amy said. ‘Come on. I want to go down the slides.’

We climbed the steps to the highest flume. Orla’s bikini bottoms were right in front of my face. I imagined David pulling at the ties that went over her hips, connecting the front bit to the back. I had spent the last few days imagining all kinds of things, letting my head run wild, making my heart race so hard I couldn’t sleep, blood pounding in my ears.

When we got to the top, Amy told Orla to go first. Orla got into the water at the top of the flume.

There was a traffic light system to tell you when to go down so you wouldn’t crash into the person in front. The lights turned green. Orla let go and disappeared. Amy turned towards me.

‘There’s something I think you need to know,’ Amy said. ‘About Orla.’

I climbed into the slide, ignoring the red light.

I could see Orla coming up for air as I hit the water.

‘Come on,’ I said, when I surfaced.

‘What about Amy?’ ‘I told her to meet us back at the top.’

I grabbed her hand like I had seen Amy do a million times. It was wet. When we reached the landing we were both out of breath.

The light was green. I didn’t have to stand on my toes to kiss her. We were the same height exactly. Everything about her was exactly right. Her face improbably soft compared to David’s scratchy stubble.

I felt her hands touching my shoulders, but they were pushing me away. She was laughing, then deadly serious. ‘Is this about David?’ she asked. ‘Did Amy tell you?’

‘Hey, let’s all calm down now, shall we?’ It was David’s voice. I turned around. He was standing at the top of the steps. Amy was behind him.

‘Go away,’ I shouted, feeling something rise up in my chest.

‘I told you she’s obsessed with me,’ Orla said from behind me. It wasn’t clear if this was directed at David or at Amy. I turned back to face Orla. ‘I thought we were –’ ‘Just let me go, ok?’

I hadn’t realised I had her cornered on the platform, that it looked like I was standing between her and the others. She had her arms crossed, like she was getting goosebumps.

‘Come on, don’t be dramatic now. I’m supposed to be down by the rapids.’

Perhaps it was David mentioning the rapids that made me lose it.

Amy’s witness statements say exactly what d. It still doesn’t make sense to me, how I naged to push her off the platform when re were safety railings in the way. I member Amy screaming, and David shouting my God’. I remember the green of the traffic t and lying down at the opening of the flume, ng the water carry me away from the scene he crime. I didn’t get to see Orla’s body, her cked skull on the concrete, blood pooling und her head like a halo, but there was time me to go around the rapids one more time ore the guards arrived.

I spent four years in Oberstown. Some of girls there reminded me of Amy. None of m were like Orla. I was tested for a ton of ntal disorders, only to be told that I was mal.

When I got out I logged into my ebook account. Amy had gone to Trinity to dy Law. When I Googled her name on a new I found an article she had written about a’s murder, how it had inspired her to live her t friend’s dream and work in the criminal ice system. David was still working at the asure Centre. I laughed out loud in the ary, then started searching eBay for a pard-print bikini.

and Amy’s witness statements say exactly what I did. It still doesn’t make sense to me, how I managed to push her off the platform when there were safety railings in the way. I remember Amy screaming, and David shouting ‘Oh my God’. I remember the green of the traffic light and lying down at the opening of the flume, letting the water carry me away from the scene of the crime. I didn’t get to see Orla’s body, her cracked skull on the concrete, blood pooling around her head like a halo, but there was time for me to go around the rapids one more time before the guards arrived.

I spent four years in Oberstown. Some of the girls there reminded me of Amy. None of them were like Orla. I was tested for a ton of mental disorders, only to be told that I was normal.

When I got out I logged into my Facebook account. Amy had gone to Trinity to study Law. When I Googled her name on a new tab I found an article she had written about Orla’s murder, how it had inspired her to live her best friend’s dream and work in the criminal justice system. David was still working at the Pleasure Centre. I laughed out loud in the library, then started searching eBay for a leopard-print bikini.

HREE POEMS

because they think about death all the time & so - black coffee, an apple, three Marlboro Reds then give their body to making their bones scraped clean of fat scrape palette knives moving white in concrete basement studios canvas picked up a single slant window of white chased set down across four breathing walls of daytime racing the hot blood of light with parted lips & a just struck match

hey you ever noticed you get more of first conversation something mutual friend’s kitchen if you slice it diagonally? I say ere the two of us cut carrots & cucumbers pping for the party like cheese? you said yeah. cheese. & happiness with the right kind of knife vie Nicks cuts up dreams dly from the living room little slant slabs of the stuff I say doorbell rings in the hallway ..sorry, I didn't catch that what were you saying? your left ear ring its oversized hoop carrots are cut look for more …more of something diagonally like two blades of grass I say angled in the breeze their lapped shadows stretching beyond themselves in orange slant

for bragging rights our sweat in hot ovens our nightly beauty regimes soaked in bathtubs of vinegar the stinking varnish rubbed into our skin before bed hardening for a year or two how quick we were to strip our soft green cases shed our boyishness how quiet we were a trembling oxblood et cetera how quiet when threaded by that knotted string swinging from a rough hand ready to smash into each other break ourselves apart on a playground floor

RST TATTOO

Sitting in the tattoo parlour, Waiting to get my first tattoo, I was presented with a giant folder And a myriad of possible designs I could choose something biblical Like a prayer or a line of scripture Or something prophetic and futuristic Like a cosmic symbol or a star sign I could inscribe my favourite place name, A date that holds some private meaning, Or write the name of a past or current lover, A celeb crush, or just someone I admire I could go for something soulful like a verse Of poetry, a song lyric or a movie quote; or I could pick something fun and playful like Paw prints or a picture of my spirit animal Faced with so much choice, I could not decide What to have inked on the blank canvas of my skin.

Growing impatient, the tattoo artist waved me off The chair and said: Darling, you can come back again, But first you must get out there and LIVE!!!

WO POEMS

age: NANCY WILDE

CAILLEACH I am the Cailleach, she said when we were drinking red wine on her back veranda, looking at the phallic rhubarb shoots in spring, at the deep shade in summer, the crimson fall.

I am the Cailleach, said it as if she knew how it would end, bone bare, sallow, breathless with pain.

Life gathered itself into wholeness in that house, in talk of hens, and cooking and meditation, pieced and stitched into place.

I am the Cailleach, she said sharp edged, weary.

Alone in rain pocked Dublin, by the grey waters of the Liffey I walk into understanding.

OTHER VERSUS MEMORY

ther wearing her pyjamas de out, knows the looks they e each other, the nods e stove-side huddles.

ds the burner knobs r they leave, notes to self about missing fuses. dles vanished o dark drawers.

e calendar is fuzzy again. e month argues with her e doctor. The optometrist. e driving licence appointment. n the page.

nly the blue and green days ld hold forever: summer hens and the cat ng about their own affairs e of them caring a whit ut a blessed g outside of this moment.

MOTHER VERSUS MEMORY Mother wearing her pyjamas inside out, knows the looks they slide each other, the nods The stove-side huddles.

Finds the burner knobs after they leave, notes to herself about missing fuses. candles vanished into dark drawers.

The calendar is fuzzy again.

The month argues with her The doctor. The optometrist.

The driving licence appointment.

Turn the page.

If only the blue and green days could hold forever: summer and hens and the cat going about their own affairs none of them caring a whit about a blessed thing outside of this moment.

OOD FRIDAY

I catch the miniature statue and in she goes. She used to come out with us all the time – the Blessed Virgin and a digital camera – posing for photo opportunities beside a row of shot glasses or a handsome pint, or, occasionally, a small bag of pills. To be fair, she doesn't get as many outings as she used to. We were in college when she started going on the lash, and now we are somewhere else.

Jobs acquired. Playing at being adults.

It’s the in-between times. We are beyond shithole student houses but before mortgages. PostNokia 3210 but before iPhones. After the great friend bubbles have formed but before the long drifting apart of life.

We think we have problems.

“Do you think it’s ok…” I start again. Stuck on a fucking loop.

“Stop, will you?” he says. “It’s grand. Good Friday belongs to everyone. Hasn’t it always?”

“Yeah, but it’s her house.” And I haven’t seen her since, I think. I pick up the bag of cans all the same, uneasy but ready to leave. “Do I look alright?”

Cian inhales deeply on the end of his cigarette and puts it out in the ashtray on the coffee table.

He gives me a squinty eye. “You look like shit.”

We both laugh.

He’s sitting there, watching me. He checks his watch. “It’s a bit early yet.”

I sit back on the couch. The skin around my thumbnail is sore and bleeding. I hadn’t noticed I was picking at it. I put the thumb in my mouth. Sour iron.

Cian glances at his phone and cracks open a can. “Billie’s on her way here now altogether.”

“Grand so,” I say. Safety in numbers. I pull out a can too. Crack. Fizz. Sup. “Will I…?”

“Do,” he says.

I pull some papers and tobacco out of my handbag, and a little jar that once held oregano but now stores other herbs, and I start rolling a joint. We’ll have that, I think, the three of us, before heading over. Grand.

The buzzer goes as I put the final twist on my creation, and I hear Billie’s laugh before Cian is even at the door to let her in.

“Well, if it isn’t Mrs Billie Big Balls!” he exclaims, “back from the big smoke!”

Billie is the only one of us who has arguably got a real job, even if it is in Dublin. It’s a real pay cheque anyway, though she keeps spending her new riches on stupid things like a second-hand violin she can’t play, and a punching bag that doesn’t stay upright.

“The door was open below,” she tells him, depositing her own bag of cans on the living room floor. “Were ye making curry?”

“Nah, that’s just what the apartments smell like,” Cian explains with a shrug.

Billie hugs me. She laughs again, “you knew I was coming, so?” She picks up the joint and I hand her the lighter.

“Spark it up, sure.”

We are transported back to a time when this was the norm. “Do you remember,” Billie says, passing me the joint, “the day Gerri burst in the door because she thought she saw smoke above the house?”

“God, she was some nutter of a landlady,” Cian shakes his head.

“I nearly shat myself,” Cian says, taking the joint, “she just barged in! ‘Gerri O’Connor here!’ I ldn’t even talk.”

“And you!” still laughing, pointing at me, “telling the bewildered woman it wasn’t smoke at all, maybe she’d seen a cloud!”

“Sure, it couldn’t have been smoke, there wasn’t even a window in that vile room to let it out!”

We’re in hysterics, and for a moment I forget that we have to leave.

“How are we getting up there anyway?” Billie asks. “Taxi?”

“Taxi?!” Cian is mock-outraged. “The extravagance! It’s Mrs Billie Big Bucks we should be ing you.”

I shake my head. “Hannah said she’ll collect us.”

“Like old times! So long as she’s not threatening to drive off the roof of the multistorey tonight.”

We’re all laughing again.

“Nah, she’s leaving the car over.”

Cian’s phone buzzes. “Speak of the devil.”

We pile into the car, bags in the boot.

“Hannah, how many times have you been to the Drive Thru this week?” Billie asks, kicking ers out of the way.

“Shut up, will ya?” Hannah says, like she saw us all yesterday, and not months ago. “What did bring?”

As she drives, we each recount our travels of the day before – to Tesco, or the offy, or that fancy ce on North Main St – and the various alcohols we have stocked up on. Holy Thursday. The day of great pilgrimage. This year we each made the journey solo. We worry we are under-prepared. re probably over-prepared. The bags are heavy. The pubs are closed. The cans are the same, but can afford brand-name vodka now.

“I’ve a bottle of Jäger,” Billie whispers loud enough for us all to hear.

“Oh shit!” Hannah shouts from the driver’s seat. “Shots!”

Laughter once more.

We pull up outside and the laughter dies. My stomach drops.

It has been four months and sixteen days since we last broke up. For real this time. The final e.

The first was in tears in the Crawford. I thought children should be brought to art galleries. She n’t.

The second was in Berlin, after a week of cocktails and carpet burns.

Third time’s the charm.

“Will we be ok?” she whispered one night as I slept.

I answered.

No. The door opens.

Elle.

A glass sloshing pink in her hand, she throws her arms wide, flinging them around Billie, who ngs her and the remaining liquid round in circles. I see her dizzy eyes land on Cian, Hannah... Me. “Hey,” she says, barely missing a beat. “Welcome."

the how-are-you and the smile. The ‘you know yourself.’

We make our way inside. The house is full of people and pulsing with music.

I pull out the BVM and nudge Cian, ready to hand her over. He looks at her, and then at the fullsize Mary standing in the kitchen, bejewelled in fairy lights, offering the huge bowl of pink punch with open arms. He frowns.

Elle’s housemates are sitting at the table arguing good-humouredly. Two joints are on the go.

Billie hugs them all in turn and sits down.

Hannah is somehow already on a second glass of the punch and roaring laughing with one of the Dubs that Elle has imported for the occasion.

I feel like a lizard and look for a rock to crawl under.

Cian hands me a can.

“It’ll be grand,” he says, looking at me sternly.

He’s right, I know. It will be like it always is. Good Friday.

More of our friends appear, from other rooms and outside. I talk to one of the girls for a while about the vat of yakka she has brought. A sugary lemon film of it coats the hall tiles after a fall. No one cleans it up and later it will make cartoon sticking noises as feet traipse across it from the kitchen to the sitting room and back.

Cian disappears and reappears with the air of a wizard. He gathers us to him. Elle, Hannah, Billie and I. He unveils a tiny bag of pills. “Kevin,” he says by way of explanation. We nod knowingly and each swallow one.

Everything is normal for a while, and then suddenly it is wonderful. I’m hit by a wave of love for everyone at the party. Community. Hope. Friendship.

The night fragments, like shards of coloured glass in a stained window. Vignettes. Drunken moments in time. A glow of ecstasy.

This is our religion. Our yearly worship.

Who knows what shite we are talking, but everything is easy now.

We disperse, we regroup, we scatter, we merge.

I am dancing and dancing and dancing.

A curly-headed cherub accidentally headbutts me on the kitchen dancefloor. We laugh and hug.

She introduces herself as Elle’s girlfriend. Unexpected relief. She’s lovely. We speak for a long time about Barbara Streisand.

Cian is face deep in some short lad’s beard.

I laugh.

Billie is arguing with one of the housemates. “Ah fuck off.” I hear her laugh.

I wander.

I get into a singsong on the stairs. There’s a guitar. The Smashing Pumpkins. A second guitar.

David Bowie. The Murtaghs out-doing one another.

Hannah is in the living room talking about The Hours again. A bad sign? She’s doing her best Meryl Streep for the Dubs. “I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course, there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.”

ment. Her pupils are massive.

I find Billie having commandeered the singsong on the stairs. A blast of Here I Am Lord, for the that’s in it. The Murtaghs are outdone.

I’m having chats with Elle. We are crying. We are laughing. Billie joins us. She pulls me away to k for Hannah.

I see Elle and the cherub reunite half-way up the stairs. I wonder if they are gone.

Cian is still in the kitchen, but the bearded lad has vanished. Instead of man-mauling, he is in smoking and nodding in violent agreement with whatever one of the Kevins is saying.

I’m back in the living room. Hannah is on about Muriel’s Wedding now. She shouts at me: “since et you my life is as good as an ABBA song!” She’s gone slightly off script, but I smile and sit down.

I realise I must have dozed off when I next look around because the living room is almost empty, de from the bearded lad who is snoring on a beanbag, and two Dubs lost in a circular conversation, ds pressed together.

“I love you.”

“No, I love you.”

“No, I love you.”

God, I think, making a face at the BVM in my lap.

I get up and make my way back to the kitchen. I put Mary down beside her giant counterpart the now drained punch bowl. There are cigarette butts in with the swollen fruit.

Most people are gone but the music is still vibrating through the building. The housemates are r present, stoned and solving the world’s problems and conspiracies. I’m about to sit down when I the back door is open.

The air coming in is so fresh. I stick my head out for a breath of it.

The music pours out the open door and follows me like magic as I step outside. The grass is stalline white with frost, glowing under a horizon just beginning to blush. Four fairies are dancing in fading starlight. I watch them for a minute, spellbound.

Cian. Hannah. Billie. Elle.

They are in a circle which widens as they see me. They pull me and the flowing music close. are laughing and dancing and the music changes and we are dancing and singing with Joanna wsom.

“This is unlike the story it was written to be!”

Dancing. Singing. Holding hands.

“Peach, Plum, Pear. Peach! Plum! PEAR!” How could I have thought anything would change?

I close my eyes and sing louder.

The sun cracks and fizzes at the edge of the world.

So, this is the beginning of happiness.

krock had slept well and was in no hurry to open

N OCTOBER MORNING WALK

October sun shone with a most admirable passion, ring the instincts of all the present songsters.

umn dressed trees waved above school children, ir magnificent foliage finding gloved fingers and nature tables

I walked the marina intoxicated by this beauty, riendly as you please with absolutely everybody.

Blackrock had slept well and was in no hurry to open

AN OCTOBER MORNING WALK

The October sun shone with a most admirable passion, Stirring the instincts of all the present songsters.

Autumn dressed trees waved above school children, Their magnificent foliage finding gloved fingers and nature tables And I walked the marina intoxicated by this beauty, As friendly as you please with absolutely everybody.

reshold anger wind you don't speak you don't say anything the

HE THAT FOLLOWS rld FIRE is made up of little things ME we've forgotten everything you don't

eak you don't say anything the sex is open time is wounded there's more fire someone has stolen it there is no longer a house age: LYDIA HICKEY meone has burned it down there are no more days there are no re friends you have forgotten everything about your own childhood ence is black like a painting the thought is hanging upside down in void nothing just hold your dick in your mouth forget everything u don't know anything anymore your sex is open thought is dead I n't know you anymore you're not going anywhere I don't know you ymore thought is dead your sex is open your bloody sex is open u don't know shit you're ain't going nowhere you've burned erything down you've burned your house you've burned your dog u've burned your dead you've burned your body you've burned your ldren you've burned your wife you've burned your memory you've rned your past you've burned your future you've burned your death u've burned the end and the beginning your sex is open you're ain't ng nowhere you left the house in ashes nothing remains but black nt on an empty canvas and yet there is a white line that indicates ere the windows once stood and where the front door was and ere was the room where you used to sleep with always open eyes d the white bones of your own thought that you've burned the pse of your shadow that you've killed and the corpse of oblivion t you've burned you are no longer anyone you don't have anything human in you anymore silence is blind but death has always been nd I don't know your name anymore I don't know my name anymore ence is burning red tonight in the dark someone is speaking but it's you someone keeps on speaking in your head but it's not you meone is screaming in your head but it's not you someone is telling u that you're crazy but it's not you now time is a hole closed and wn up an open sex time is closed and bloodless silence time is od silence sex absence time is suicide sex knife wound oblivion e and banishment,not to be.

Threshold anger wind you don't speak you don't say anything the THE THAT FOLLOWS world FIRE is made up of little things ME we've forgotten everything you don't speak you don't say anything the sex is open time is wounded there's no more fire someone has stolen it there is no longer a house Image: LYDIA HICKEY someone has burned it down there are no more days there are no more friends you have forgotten everything about your own childhood silence is black like a painting the thought is hanging upside down in the void nothing just hold your dick in your mouth forget everything you don't know anything anymore your sex is open thought is dead I don't know you anymore you're not going anywhere I don't know you anymore thought is dead your sex is open your bloody sex is open you don't know shit you're ain't going nowhere you've burned everything down you've burned your house you've burned your dog you've burned your dead you've burned your body you've burned your children you've burned your wife you've burned your memory you've burned your past you've burned your future you've burned your death you've burned the end and the beginning your sex is open you're ain't going nowhere you left the house in ashes nothing remains but black paint on an empty canvas and yet there is a white line that indicates where the windows once stood and where the front door was and where was the room where you used to sleep with always open eyes and the white bones of your own thought that you've burned the corpse of your shadow that you've killed and the corpse of oblivion that you've burned you are no longer anyone you don't have anything left human in you anymore silence is blind but death has always been blind I don't know your name anymore I don't know my name anymore silence is burning red tonight in the dark someone is speaking but it's not you someone keeps on speaking in your head but it's not you someone is screaming in your head but it's not you someone is telling you that you're crazy but it's not you now time is a hole closed and sewn up an open sex time is closed and bloodless silence time is blood silence sex absence time is suicide sex knife wound oblivion time and banishment,not to be.

om BANTLING, a novel

The sweet soapiness of her nightie and the lovely warm smell of her. The up-down in-out breath of her, in-out up-down, the same as his, his breath for hers, hers for him, her front touch-touch-touching his back. They are one and the same. He is a leaf and she is the tide and they are bob-bob-bobbing towards the secret island. His magic shoes will take him to the castle in the sunny patch, where Ma and him will live, and Bertie and Doris can come and visit and they’ll all eat jam roly-poly and chicken every day. But for now, it’s as good as it gets, just being here with Ma, thumb in mouth, safe between her and anything horrid, and on guard too, against wicked shouting giants and smoky dragons.

Violet Southampton 1923 Southampton 10 January 1923 Dearest Stel, Four months or so to go & the Wriggler gets livelier every day. The festive holiday was not very jolly for me. I could not help thinking about Christmas a year ago, no clouds on the horizon back then & of course next year was on my mind too. All I could see was a dirty, lonely garret. To tell the truth, I understand why a girl might find a soft & comforting pillow, have a sleepy cup of cocoa & put her head into the gas oven. Don’t get me wrong – I would not be that selfish nor do anything to hurt the Wriggler.

Yet some nights, lying in my bed, I think that if I was never to wake up again it would be the easiest thing for all concerned. But every morning I get up and I go on, though who knows where. I wish I could see what the future holds. Then again, which of us knows what lies ahead? Nothing fits me, least of all coats & waterproofs so I am hardly going out & you know how I turn sour when I am cooped up. If I do manage to do a bunk for an hour or two, I look like poor Mildred, who we used to laugh at along the front in Shanklin, all shrammed up against the rimey chill, layered & bundled in never-mindwhat or how it smells & just be grateful if it keeps out the wet & even if it don’t. On my bad days I think of her and those luckless souls like her & find myself weepy about life’s injustices. I picture myself & the Wriggler sleeping in doorways and under carts, though I know full well that Mim & Da would not see me get that low. But how I am to look after the two of us I have only the faintest notion as yet. Who wants a book-keeper with a brat – which is how people will think of Wriggler, though I hope I never will.

On the brighter side, these people here are likely sending me away to London before too long, to some place they know that will help me with my ‘pie in the sky’ (so almost everyone else tells me) idea to support and bring up the Wriggler by myself. They say it is about the only place in the country to have that sort of scheme. Perhaps there are not so many like me who are set on keeping their child. Most of the other girls here will stay here until the birth, then give their babies up for adoption. But if some folk in London will help, surely it is not as impossible as all that to do it different? Do you remember how we used to talk about London? Like they say, be careful what you wish for. You must think me ungrateful not to have mentioned your kind parcel. The olive oil works a treat on my poor itchy skin.

Thank you also for the writing set. I shall take the hint & do my best to stay in touch, come what may. I will send you a postcard of Buckingham Palace too, where I will be expected for tea from time to time, don’t you know. It’s a funny old world & the gentle rain & frail moonlight fall on us all just the same.

Here’s hoping 1923 treats you as well as you deserve. Keep your fingers crossed for yours truly.

Always with my warmest thoughts, Violet. P.S. If you bump into you-know-who (fat chance!), you can tell him what you like, I don’t care, but not a word to Stan. I’ll deal with him as & when.

cold,’ whispered Ellen. ‘Put your arm around me. Please.’

From Felix, a sound, more than a breath, less than a sigh.

If it’s your own husband, does it count as begging?

‘Just a tiny cuddle, that’s all. Nothing more, unless you …’

He shifted away, just a tad, as if only fidgeting in his sleep.

She was marooned. She was cast adrift, here, in this high, chill bed on its sea of boards and leum.

She turned her back to him, rolling away from the soft, saggy middle of the mattress towards its d edges, her nightdress dragging and winding around her waist and legs. A draught seeped down neck. In the morning, she must ask Mrs Dawson about airing a second eiderdown for the bed. She uld do it first thing, as soon as Mrs Dawson arrived for work. Small mercy that her mother could not her own daughter reduced to a single daily woman to help her run Felix’s household. And that with hat being a vicar’s wife implied.

She tugged the neck of her nightdress closer.

Felix had a nerve. Lying there for all the world as though he were asleep. He could not possibly k he could fool her. Far from it. He was an open book. He would pass wind horribly as he woke up dip toast fingers into his breakfast egg forty-five minutes later. He would deliver an impassioned mon on Sunday about love and duty while she sang and bent her head and thought about shopping s and which rugs needed to be beaten on the Monday. Then he’d come back home to collect gravy is moustache as he ate the roast.

This was what passed as marriage. A jumble of courtesies and banalities. They lived with each er respectfully, politely, cautiously, forever circling one another at a measured distance. They were careful that Ellen had lost track of who she might have been.

She was like a shipwrecked sailor in this marriage, words becoming rusty, her tongue swollen clumsy with disuse, and every now and then still dreaming of rescue.

When Felix had settled again to that rhythmic snuffling of his, she got out of bed. She could see faint embers of last night’s fire in the grate on his side of the room. Nothing seemed to warm the r where she stood. Her feet were chilly already, which reminded her. She must speak to the coalrchant tomorrow about the next delivery.

Here was the door. She ran her hands over it. The handle had disappeared into the shadows, sn’t where it should be. There are sprites that play in the dark and they amuse themselves by king mischief for humans.

Her fingers closed around the handle.

Move gently, Ellen, move as smoothly, as quietly, as your breath.

The latch clicked as it turned, the door caught for a moment on its frame. She must ask Mrs wson to oil all the latches and hinges when she had a moment. She opened the door only as much she needed to slip into the passage.

She picked her way along the landing, staying away from the walls with their traps of small es and trinkets. Sprites and goblins had stretched the space while she was in bed and played who ws what other tricks. Perhaps she was no longer in the upstairs hallway of her own home but mbling into a faerie place and time.

Better a goblin’s malice than the thoughts running round her mind.

The newel at the head of the stairs appeared under her hand. One stair, two stairs, three stairs, r. On the fourth, she found the landing in its usual place. A softening in the shadows ahead must the glass in the bathroom door. She opened the door, the click of it loud into the silence. Her feet ned on the cold tiles.

streetlamp beyond. The hem of her nightdress and the skin of her feet were mottled blue, grey, yellow by the weak light. For years, when she was still a little girl, she would creep secretly out of bed in a similar darkness and quiet and watch the gas lamps being turned off in the street at dawn, one by one, the day starting before the night was done, with Ellen the sole witness. The magic and the solitude had made her special. Perhaps she had had only done it for a few weeks. Mother had put a stop to it quick enough.

She sat down on the floor, pressing her back against the bath, wrapping her arms around her knees, her eyes adjusting to the dark, feeling the cold behind her, beneath her, all around. Greys and browns, slightly lighter, slightly darker, spread like lichens across the floor. Shadows shifted just out of sight. The nightdress’s thick material held back some of the chill, but not for long. She waited until she shivered and could not stop shivering, the iciness touching the skin of her back, her feet, her face, her arms, spreading up her thighs, reaching her bones, numb and not numb all at once.

She pinched and twisted her nipple through the flannelette, hard, harder. As the pain rose and seized hold, she greeted a familiar friend.

She was standing on the edge of an abyss. She peered deep into it. There was no end or bottom to it. The abyss was inside her. Her foot was slipping. Any moment now she would keel over into it and be lost for ever.

This is no way to live.

You cross a line when a thought finds words.

This is no way to live.

You frighten yourself.

There was a towel hanging over the bath. She pushed it against her nose and mouth. It was damp and musty, overdue for a wash. She whispered into it, muffling the words, wanting, not wanting, to hear them. This is no way to live. She was shaking. She was a marsh, she was quicksand, shifting, deep and treacherous.

She said the words softly into the dark. This is no way to live, the words just as powerful for being in the open. They were outside her, invisible in the dark, and they were straining inside her. She said them again. She tasted them in her mouth, their strangeness, their rightness, their heft. Words that undid her moorings. Words that spirited away her marriage, ridiculed her future, unravelled the present. They were the fairies and goblins come out to play.

A light knock on the bathroom door.

‘Ellen? Are you in there, dear? Are you all right?’

He would not come in without her say-so.

‘Go back to bed,’ she called. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

Her eye had grown used to the dark. She stood and watched the ghostly face in the mirror.

Herself and not herself. What was hidden in the mirror, looking back out? She splashed cold water over her eyes. The pipes shuddered when she turned off the tap. She must remember to ask Mrs Dawson to arrange a plumber.

Felix had left a lighted candle for her in the hallway. In its flicker, she saw streaks on her nightdress bodice. Blood from her breast or a shadow masquerading. She held the cloth away from her body to prevent more chaffing. She let it drop again. Her bare feet felt like glass, heavy and clumsy, about to shatter and splinter against the floor.

In the linen cupboard she found her medicine, took a sip and felt its warmth blaze in her mouth and trickle down her throat until it reached her stomach.

p of water, swilled it round her mouth, swallowed. Cold as it was, it did not quite quench the earlier t, now reaching her head. He lifted the eiderdown for her and she got into bed. Her place was ady cold. He patted her shoulder.

‘Chin up,’ he said.

She put her glass feet against his for warmth. He shuddered a little and pulled away. She ned on her side, her face away from him, and pinched her hurting breast with one hand to keep the evolent sprites at bay. There was still the faintest taste of brandy in her mouth. The bed creaked dipped as he shifted about. She felt his warmth at her back. With a little snatch of breath when r bare skin touched, he placed his feet around hers and so they settled to sleep.

Violet Southampton 1923

uthampton January

ar Mim & Da,

m keeping pretty well, all things considered, though I had a rough patch over Christmas & was much ed, which is why you did not hear more from me. I am better now. I missed you all terribly & hope had a fair enough time in spite of everything. They are decent Christians here & will see me on my again. They are trying to find a place in London I can go to, where I will be looked after & able to p the little one also. It would be with a Christian fellowship. They set up such a scheme a few rs ago, so I would not be the first. I am scared to think of going that far away to strangers, but if it mes off, it’s the best offer I am likely to have. There would be a weekly charge for board & lodgings, I can pay for most of it from my savings until I get another position, which they will help me do as l, so I do not think there will be a problem there. You have done so much already, but if you could your way to helping me out with the doctor’s & midwife’s fees & other necessities, I would be rlasting grateful. I have gone over and over the figures & I will be short about ten pounds & seven lings all in. I know it is a lot, but I will pay you back as soon as ever I can, I promise. I don’t like to you this on top of everything else, but there is no-one else to turn to. The clergyman who delivers letter to you will explain better than I can about the Fellowship. Please do not blame Stan or take inst him. It is not his fault, not in the slightest. I have let him down too. My predicament is because my own foolishness. Please do not say a word to him if you can help it. Of course, I cannot ask you o against your consciences, so you must do as you see fit if you run into each other. But as Da ays says, I should do my own dirty work. I will write to Stan in due course but have not the foggiest at to say to him just now. If he asks after me, please just tell him I have gone to London because I nted a change. It’s true. A clean break & fresh start will be best all round. I would say sorry again & in until my voice goes hoarse, but it would not change a thing. But I am your sorry daughter & send sorry love to you, Violet.

frothing white in the hedgerows and primroses pushed through a field encircled by tall trees that swirled and bent in spring gusts of wind. Hers is not an urban environment, and this is congruous with her art.

After graduating from the Crawford College of Art, Sinéad was Student of the Year at the Lavit Gallery/ Cork Arts Society in 2011, and had her first solo show at the Lavit Gallery, Cork in 2012.

In the meantime, Sinéad has shown and sold her work regularly. In 2021 the potter Nicholas Mosse wrote a piece about her work in The Irish Arts Review. She won the Sculpture Prize, also in 2021, in Belfast at the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts annual exhibition. In 2022 she was interviewed by a journalist from The New York Times for an article that came out in the same year.

Her star continues to rise. She is one of six Irish artists to be chosen to exhibit in Greece as part of the Irish Wings festival, with a reciprocal exhibition at Lismore Cathedral in 2024. She will be part of the summer 2023 shows in Lavit Gallery, and Cahir Arts, and in West Cork Creates in Union Hall in August. We sat down to talk over a cup of tea by a warm stove with two cats, a black and white and a ginger. A plate of buttered slices of brack loaf.

“When you started the night class in 1993, was it immediately clear to you that this was your life path?” I asked, “The night class in Ballymun in 1993 was great, but there was no ‘eureka’ moment — I can only say that I found I liked working with the malleable clay and making something in 3D”, Sinéad tells me, “In the period of time between 1993 and winning the Lavit Gallery Student of year in 2011, I worked as a teacher´s assistant in the clay department of a Dublin school, did the Craft Council of Ireland pottery throwing course, worked in various potteries, taught clay to adults and children in hand building and potter’s wheel then went as a mature student to the Crawford (CCAD) in 2008”.

Sinéad is deeply committed to her creative process and like many successful artists is hardworking and patient. Her work creates abstract landscapes on clay forms in earthy colours. She uses white stoneware clay, bisqued, (or biscuit-fired, both are correct), to a low temperature to keep the work semi-porous. This is important because the method of colouring the work does not depend on slips or glazes but rather allows fumes and smoke to penetrate and colour the bisqued clay surface through Saggar firing.

The technique of Saggar firing uses a Saggar, a strong clay container in which the biscuit-fired pieces are placed alongside any number of organic materials. As the organic materials burn, they leave marks and colours on the surface of the semi-porous clay forms. In her own words from her website: “There is a beautiful dichotomy of carefully creating a smooth, blank canvas of clay, and then giving away any control of the finish to the whims of the kiln firing. You are setting up all the right conditions for pattern and colour to emerge, but depending on how the wire moves, or the coloured fumes combine, the results will always be unknown. This anticipation is a constant inspirational and motivating force for me.”

The forms Sinéad throws are simple and uncluttered.

“I keep the forms I use quite simple.”, she tells me. “I’m continuing to explore the use of found objects — recycled wires from household appliances at the local dump/recycling centre; beer caps even; copper and iron wire, (I use a jeweller’s rolling mill to flatten them); seaweed soaked in oxides. Even after ten years of Saggar firing, I’m still surprised at the variety of results — the depths of colours, the unknown elements that create the lines …”

Sinéad thinks the markings she gets from the Saggar technique look best on curved forms: “There’s a softness in a curve— as there is in nature—you don’t really get angles in nature. When I throw the vessel shape in my work, the shape is not made for the reason of holding a liquid but for the reason of the lines of the form.”

I tell her I find her work quite magical, alchemical even. I love the way she takes fragments of nature, of organic found objects, objects that are discrete and separated from the holism of the natural land, and through the elemental process of firing —fire, water, air, earth — she re/creates landscapes of ethereal and exquisite beauty on the stoneware discs and vessels.

She says, “Yes, I’m pretty in awe … I look at some pieces I’ve made and I’m amazed at the result.You don’t ever know what it’s going to be like, maybe something moves in the kiln for example. What I’m finding just now is that the flattened copper wire is actually like covering a line, so that instead of getting a black line I am getting a white one.”

acting as a shield to the fumes, and so leaving the clay´s natural white colour, creating white lines instead. And this is really fascinating to me because it is opening up new potential. I am constantly surprised even after all this time.

I started experimenting with Saggar firing in 2010. It’s a curiosity of not quite play, rather an exploration of found objects, collecting things like a piece of iron ore on a beach or something… or using different bottle tops … So, it’s the constant learning and experimentation that lead from one area into another, and this mostly by chance…”

I asked Sinéad if there was any spiritual element to her work, as to me the images are almost mystical, reminiscent of the parallel realms of say Philip Pullman’s books or the other worlds referred to in the Irish Manuscripts “Well, no … no not really” she says, “It is more for me about nature, and the lines in the landscape, like the hedgerows that bound fields, the visually changing sky, clouds being rushed along with the winds … nature growing on stones, lichens, mosses … the rolling horizons of sea and land, the growth of branches in response to the southwest prevailing winds …”

Sinéad is deeply aware of the natural world and the threats to biodiversity through pollution and industry.

She uses what she finds to make both subtle and dramatic colours for the pieces and then she uses unwanted sail canvas for the hanging mechanisms on the back of discs.

“It would just go into a landfill otherwise and it is ideal for purpose,” she tells me.

She has a wildlife camera outside where for some years foxes or badgers have roamed at night. She hangs bird boxes and feeders from the trees.

I asked Sinéad whose work she has been most influenced by.

“Monica Young was a great influence; she was a French artist living in the UK. She´s an inspiration because of her beautiful large sculptural curved vessels. They were so big she could stand in them. She did everything herself. There is not so much about her. I know because I have looked! But she really was amazing.”

Sinéad’s work is not burnished. Burnishing is the compressing of the clay surface using a smooth stone or the back of a spoon, resulting in a shiny surface.

“I deliberately choose not to do this, as by compressing the surface you are closing off the porosity of the clay, and I do not like a shiny surface. It creates a hardness, like a covering with a glaze. I want the natural softness of the clay body with a more painterly colouring on the surface, that is, so that the colouring looks more painterly.”

I asked Sinéad what were her favourite colour outcomes. “Well, it seems that blues are very attractive to other people, but I prefer the warmer autumnal colours. I started working on warmer colours last year in response to the summer wildfires and the heat. raging around the world, so I suppose my favourite colours at the moment are the more fiery ones, like the oranges and the pinks, rusts, and dark yellows” It is a fact that many artists work long hours alone, immersed in the creative process. What keeps Sinéad motivated?

“I think it is that each piece is a one-off and you never know what the result might be until you see it. Each form is like a canvas for the Saggar-fired colours, and each one is different.” She says that this constant unknown result is the impulse and the excitement that keeps her going.

What are your aims and ambitions at this stage? I ask.

“I have a couple of shows I am preparing for in the short term. More generally I would like to move on further with the making as I get more and more comfortable and have some years behind me with using Saggars to colour and make marks on clay. I’m more confident now to go on to make more complex forms. There are so many factors to be aware of, just one example would be the weather conditions, humidity etc., but I would like to come to a place where every firing I do has a successful outcome.”

We went to look at her studio together. Shelves of many pieces of her work finished and unfinished (see photo); lists of things to do with time deadlines, images of work she has admired. A black and white photo of Monica Young — a tiny woman by an enormous vessel nearly as tall as herself; sketches, notebooks, her potter’s wheel. A bright cave of creativity.

and find out more about her work. She also has a pop-up shop that opens a few times a year. Her work sells quickly so it is best to sign up to her newsletter to be notified of the time and date of the shop opening. She also sells in galleries, usually in Ireland but also in some international galleries, and works towards exhibitions and shows throughout the year.

Sinéad Fagan website: https://www.sineceramics.com

Irish Arts Review: https://www.irishartsreview.com/

NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/fashion/craftsmanship-pottery-sinead-fagan-ireland.html

oe, Rosscarbery, West Cork

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Froe, Rosscarbery, West Cork

For the Here we last are!forty Two years friends, I have one been still aproducing commercial vegetables organic vegetable grower, organically on a few the acresother on a hillside no longer in West commercial Cork. The land but producing slopes gently for to home. the south Over aincup sight of tea, of the we start sea. to Moreover, think about it’s where organic sheltered from production the raging is westerlies now, andand whether bitterhere northerlies. in Ireland But it Words: JONATHAN DOIG is important the landscape to hinders people. as It iswell important as helps. to us, When eventhe after damp all these days FIONA YORK years,the come butclouds it mayhang be that between it is the being hills overshadowed and envelop the by holding current trends in a persistent such asgrey re-wilding. mist. Nevertheless, The figures this for small organic patch farms of land and commercial has been extremely enterprises productive in the Republic over the of years.

Ireland Withare thenot help very of Images: CAROLINE BOYFIELD encouraging,itbut polytunnels regularly it is theproduces plan thatbetween the current six and figure seven of 2% tonnes will rise vegetables of to 7.5% by and 2027.herbs Let’s hope annually that happens. for local We shops import and a massive amount of vegetables, both conventional and organic, restaurants. and this the potential to be so Theisland land’shasfertility is sustained by much trailermore loadsselfof sufficient. manure, heaps of compost from the crop residues, farmyard and sowings It’s notof easy green though, manures growing (plants organically. that are It rotovated requires back a lot of sometimes into the soil). As very well tedious as building work,a and healthy verysoil, little rich time in microbial off. Pests can thrive and fungal –activity, crops can the fail organic and approach, do – and sales with can its avoidance be difficult. of The publicpesticides harmful can complain and about herbicides, high prices, has given another thatimportant there is a premium, relating environmental aspect principally – providing to thea additional safe habitat labour for birds costs and lower yields. insects.

It’s Then a labour-intensive there is the paperwork enterprise, and the relying standards on required to berather wheelbarrow certified, thanwith tractor, visitsconcentrating from inspectors on during high-value the year. But crops likeit is cherry rewarding tomatoes and, in and oursalad opinion, leaves worthwhile. that are timeconsuming Heretoisharvest. an account by the grower himself. It paints a picture of the day-to day-running of an organic smallholding, staffed by himself, one other worker and part-time helpers.

They work a small amount of land that manages to produce a continuous supply of vegetables for local shops and restaurants.

getable ly sowings growing of the year. indoor The crops, propagation germinated tunnelin isa full of nverted mise, packed airing with cupboard a mixed in array the house of seedlings and then and young nts ved in outvarious to benches shades heated of leafy by soil-warming green, with patches cables of red a d propagating yellow too. But tunnel. outside it’s often a different story. Fingers numbed picking over-wintered kale and trimming late ks.

vegetable early sowings growing of the year. indoor The crops, propagation germinated tunnelin isa full of convertedpacked promise, airing with cupboard a mixed in array the house of seedlings and then and young moved in plants outvarious to benches shades heated of leafy by soil-warming green, with patches cables of red in a propagating and yellow too. But tunnel. outside it’s often a different story. Fingers are numbed picking over-wintered kale and trimming late leeks.

elate tomatoes, April and aubergines May, withand the courgettes longer and are warmer beginning days, the to bear tunnels fruit. ere herisand timehold to weed the and heat. side-shoot.

The blocks Theand workload avenues reaches of greenery a peak in e come July,taller August andand denser earlyday September. by day, well-established Much time is spent and seemingly harvesting, d stoppable. demand inOutdoors, high summer a blustery is strong.May can surprise. Courgette nts are buffeted, and sometimes uprooted. A wet May, and the quitous slugs will devour the early outdoor lettuce.

Thelate By tomatoes, April and aubergines May, withand the courgettes longer and are warmer beginning days, the to bear tunnels fruit. gatherisand There timehold to weed the and heat. side-shoot.

The blocks Theand workload avenues reaches of greenery a peak in become late July,taller August andand denser earlyday September. by day, well-established Much time is spent and seemingly harvesting, unstoppable. and demand inOutdoors, high summer a blustery is strong.May can surprise. Courgette plants are buffeted, and sometimes uprooted. A wet May, and the ubiquitous slugs will devour the early outdoor lettuce.

urgettes ared fromand thethe tunnels tomatoes, and the areyearly in decline, cycle begins and look ravaged. ain emholiday with season theJonathan’s planting is over, texts, and of demand of Other Fiona and Ithousands knew has thatdropped. the erwintered ps, as indoor rocket lettuces. and mizuna so seasons quick towould go to seed in the uralsuch world and the rhythm of –the mmer – as well as leeks, come into their own. uence my creative direction and build on

vious work.

I decided to use a site-specific approach by ording the smallholding at Froe in West Cork ough drawings and photographs. I developed the rk in the SWERVE studio space, producing small nts from in-situ drawings, combined with gments of sentences and visuals. The result is a ll-size installation of drawings and prints in a omatic wheel that takes the eye through the sons. I valued making connections between the wer's almanack and my own creative practice, ding on the imagery of roots, seedlings, growth d decay and the cyclical rhythm of the natural rld.

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cleared fromand courgettes thethe tunnels tomatoes, and the areyearly in decline, cycle begins and look ravaged.

The again with season theJonathan’s planting is over, texts, and of demand of Other Fromholiday Fiona and Ithousands knew has thatdropped. the crops, such overwintered as indoor rocket lettuces. and mizuna so seasons quick towould go to seed in the natural world and the rhythm of –the summer – as well as leeks, come into their own. influence my creative direction and build on previous work.

I decided to use a site-specific approach by recording the smallholding at Froe in West Cork through drawings and photographs. I developed the work in the SWERVE studio space, producing small prints from in-situ drawings, combined with fragments of sentences and visuals. The result is a wall-size installation of drawings and prints in a chromatic wheel that takes the eye through the seasons. I valued making connections between the grower's almanack and my own creative practice, feeding on the imagery of roots, seedlings, growth and decay and the cyclical rhythm of the natural world.

The SWERVE residency enabled a personal and intuitive connection with natural time, a space to dream and to be inventive. Away from day-to-day concerns, a new process was initiated. I was able to absorb different creative inputs and to reflect on my own practice, continuing to grow unimpeded, to create biodiversity in my work, to let seeds take hold and roots dig deep and to find my own way through the cracks in the pavement.

after Tony Hoagland WO- POEMS

tch as she goes out

hang bunting

ting with it in the wind

hing back, she ties string to rock

uring it with something

m the rubble at her feet

ch how the cold

t burns her hands

sn’t stop her

w flags fly

se against the sky heart pulled tight across the garden

after Tony Hoagland TWO- POEMS Watch as she goes out to hang bunting fighting with it in the wind pushing back, she ties string to rock securing it with something from the rubble at her feet watch how the cold that burns her hands doesn’t stop her how flags fly tense against the sky her heart pulled tight across the garden

NG LOVE ON A WINTER'S NIGHT

midnight steals closer, invert

yourself up, point your toes

ward, pirouette, trapeze

oss the globe

snowy embers winter fire settle

not to freeze wild nocturne blooms

ding from black

unar blush

st-white mist of candles

mbling in the dark

earn cataclysms

old, of cold

e love

SING LOVE ON A WINTER'S NIGHT As midnight steals closer, invert tip yourself up, point your toes skyward, pirouette, trapeze across the globe let snowy embers of a winter fire settle try not to freeze as a wild nocturne blooms seeding from black to lunar blush ghost-white mist of candles trembling in the dark unlearn cataclysms of gold, of cold seize love

reaths, steps

OTHER g a verdantWILD artery.

ughts labour forgotten muscles, surface his savage somewhere.

re is sky-space to open, and close nimal hurt, hing from the roots into light.

manmade floors nag my steps, attern madness, room by room.

l these cramped and bleeding limbs, l and rage in solid green— is my only witness.

e, distance have no metric, e, my compass is my body, ds the parameter of my mind.

es breathe cold truth, r the scars of many storms, and pain in parallel.

oat recalls the pull of metal, dant dangling, settling into stride, alesce a fluttering memory—

her fly m the blind dark his indentured mind.

her fly gleaming lines of light, er striding with my pride.

s beacon that binds us— m her mother.

in breaths, steps MOTHER along a verdantWILD artery.

Thoughts labour like forgotten muscles, surface in this savage somewhere.

There is sky-space to open, and close an animal hurt, flushing from the roots into light.

No manmade floors to snag my steps, to pattern madness, room by room.

Hurl these cramped and bleeding limbs, bawl and rage in solid green— this is my only witness.

Time, distance have no metric, here, my compass is my body, bends the parameter of my mind.

Trees breathe cold truth, bear the scars of many storms, love and pain in parallel.

Throat recalls the pull of metal, pendant dangling, settling into stride, I coalesce a fluttering memory— Let her fly from the blind dark of this indentured mind.

Let her fly on gleaming lines of light, silver striding with my pride.

This beacon that binds us— I am her mother.

WO POEMS

FALLING I formed while he slept.

That first morning I watched fluttering lids, his nakedness at peace, naming nature in his dreams.

He woke to me eclipsing the sun, clothed in dew we walked forests, saturated, pungent with life.

But what if I said I’d splintered from him long before any apple?

Lonely and accusing, he blames me, while I blame a notion that slithered on scales.

The story says I fell first.

It’s true.

Under fists the bruises are green and yellow, like the flesh of fallen fruit.

Tonight, we lie leaf-clad, under the arcing sword of a banishing angel, I rest my head on his thigh.

He sleeps.

Everything is falling.

day, breast feeding was as lonely as e swing in the February back yard. pburn eyes scan corners of cupboards easy-to-open jars, her day a t of one-armed feats and scrolls. r thumb prints emojis crying with laughter.

patch of out – of – reach blue scurries by ping she’ll notice. She remembers e scent of dog rose and the left side her heart swells large, for one beat only. night she hides beneath the quilt sewn by women o also, out loud, couldn’t unsay their wedding vows.

Today, breast feeding was as lonely as the swing in the February back yard.

Hepburn eyes scan corners of cupboards for easy-to-open jars, her day a list of one-armed feats and scrolls.

Her thumb prints emojis crying with laughter.

A patch of out – of – reach blue scurries by hoping she’ll notice. She remembers the scent of dog rose and the left side of her heart swells large, for one beat only.

At night she hides beneath the quilt sewn by women who also, out loud, couldn’t unsay their wedding vows.

ACK PEACH

It’s May. My favourite month. The days stretch towards midsummer. Fields, gardens and woods teem, confident in warmth and sunlight.

The hotel restaurant is busy but not overcrowded. The sun lowers in the sky soaking wooden tables in apricot light.

My father with his back to the window leans his slight frame towards me studying the menu. It’s extensive with all our favourites. I’m years away from becoming vegan so it’s steak for me. Rare, with hand cut chips and peas which I’ll probably leave.

For him the choice is limited. The vegetable soup for starter is the best option but only if it’s smooth.

Lumps are problematic, so we will need to double-check. For the main course it will be the crab.

The waitress is attentive and tells us the soup is Garden Vegetable all sourced from local organic farms, each vetted by the chef.

Can the thoop be purayed?

His tongue seems too big for his mouth. She thinks he’s drunk.

It won’t be a problem at all, sir.

My father shows his appreciation.

And for main?

He hesitates about choosing the crab. Can’t risk the shell fragments. We go over the description again.

Fresh white crab meat mixed with mayonnaise, lemon, desiccated red onion, tomato, spring onion, smashed avocado, served with green salad and home-made tiger bread.

He decides to risk it and I agree to have the bread and anything he can’t press to a paste. ______________

Each meal is a battle for life, and he is losing the war. Underweight, each item of clothing sits loosely on him. He’s eleven stone, possibly less. The last time he was like this he was a teenager scoring goals for Sheffield Boys. He was fast, especially over the first twenty yards where it really mattered, when you left the defender for dead. But the big clubs weren’t interested. He would talk about those who went on to play for Nottingham Forest and Derby.

Tuff lads, Paul. Hard. Like boot nails in a coffin lid. I were never like that. If these blokes took yer standing leg you might nivva walk again let alone play. Back then, if we were awarded a corner, it were as good as a goal. Ball, ‘keeper, defenders, they’d all end up in back o’t’ net. No’ like today. Rules has changed. Games gone soft!

Bundling a ‘keeper into the back of the net was nothing, particularly if they played for a southern team like Southampton or, God preserve us, Ipswich. The referee would never have dared give a free kick.

The crowd wanted goals, he just wanted to leave the ground alive.

Those were the terms, take them or leave them.

That was after the war. The city had been blitzed. Ripe for a socialism forged in steel foundries and fuelled by mines through men whose sole duty was to rebuild the city, the country. Everyone had lost something; limbs, homes, loved ones ...

kids’ toy wheelbarrow and the next moment he was lying on the crazy paving, blood pouring from shin. s not so young as he was, we said to ourselves. _______________

beers arrive, golden in their tall glasses. We clink glasses and sip. I guzzle greedily but it takes four mpts for him to down a small mouthful and another minute for him to clear his throat properly. I ch this micro struggle, unnoticed by everyone else. ere is a wild fear in his eyes. hes gud! ow he’s lying because he can no longer enjoy the taste of anything but, perhaps he is recalling the asure from the past, cosy corners of saloon bars, noisy New Year’s Eves, or just a sneaky half ore bed. ce he came back from the Railway Tavern too pissed to walk up the stairs. He tried hauling himself he bannisters, mum shoving from behind. He was talking funny, and I couldn’t make out what he s saying. t like now. _______________

e second symptom was his inebriated stroll to the garden shed one Sunday afternoon. He andered drunkenly off the stone slab path and fell by the Cana Indica. Over the next few months rways became difficult to navigate, stumbling more frequent, cups of tea spilled more often. nfidence waned. e doctor arranged urgent heart tests and an X-ray. ______________

soup arrives. It is steaming, rich, overflowing with ingredients ready to restore body and soul. He hes his plate of warm, granary bread to me. h yourths lad. spoons in tiny amounts, but each swallow is a focussed concentration. He gags frequently, utters. There are dribbles on his chin. The heavy coughing draws attention. _______________

e mass was so large on the X-ray that I didn’t see it at first. Being no expert, I mistook it for part of brain. Once the doctor traced the outline with his finger, I saw it was the size of a peach. Black. w is my father not dead already? e options are stark. Binary, in fact. her operate or do nothing. The operation is high risk. Death or brain damage very likely at your age. ou let the tumour grow however, it’ll squeeze the areas of the brain that affect sight and speech. You lose the ability to swallow. Regrettably.

coughing where it has dripped into his trachea. Dad holds the napkin to his mouth.

Luffly tha’.

I admire the dignity of a man living with a death sentence.

He survived that operation. Just. They opened up the back of his head, scraped the bad stuff out and sewed him up leaving an eleven-inch scar. The weeks after were full of infections, hallucinatory dreams, and a feeding tube to his stomach. He overcame it all.

But I suspect it’s grown back, the Black Peach.

Doth it thound like I’m thlurring? He says thickly, mouth overflowing with spit.

I don’t think so Dad. I lie.

Iths jutht I can’t really thell.

How Dad? How can you not tell?

The two courses take him three hours. For the last two we have not spoken. There’s been a complaint about his coughing. A couple have walked out beaten by the phlegm.

Deep down I know this can’t go on much longer. _______________ The food kills him three weeks’ later. It’s an infection, begun by a little vegetable soup being swallowed into his lungs that eventually stops his breathing. He’s so light by then. When the ambulance finally arrives, I could have lifted him onto the stretcher unaided. The medics attach an oxygen mask and I see those wild blue eyes are staring up at me, blue lips moving.

I can’t make out what he’s saying.

aved into coloured shards metic glow, transparent.

GACY BURDEN

an purple, saffron, indigo ntis green, bluebonnet, carmine ntaloupe melon, gunmetal nt umber, honeydew

alien sun illuminates -zero temperatures

sting away in white plastic ienic to a T ting for the human touch.

not forthcoming. e's no idea ers exist.

t hint of magic. olding arms n on skin.

cleaved into coloured shards hermetic glow, transparent.

LEGACY BURDEN Tyrian purple, saffron, indigo Mantis green, bluebonnet, carmine Cantaloupe melon, gunmetal Burnt umber, honeydew An alien sun illuminates sub-zero temperatures Wasting away in white plastic hygienic to a T waiting for the human touch.

It's not forthcoming.

She's no idea others exist.

First hint of magic.

Enfolding arms skin on skin.

IGHT

skittering in and out of view. The plane banks: the pilot skews his charge for optimal landing and I sit, arms rigid on armrests, fingers clawed, feet set firm. A stance I realise is habit.

Squat on my lap, my handbag is half-zipped, a slither of blue lining, stained warm beige with concealer, opened thoughtlessly minutes ago. The tube exploded and I hastily scraped errant liquid with a finger, patted it gently on stung cheeks. Looked at my reflection in the tiny compact, imagined your eyes on me, your studied air. I thought the past weeks would show, but the mirror revealed only an ordinary human.

Wheels hit tarmac, the plane reverberates. I look normal. I am normal. Another traveller sliding with the melee, displaying documentation automatically. Another face worn flat by the trudge of air travel. Another head filled with scurries of thought. Forming, norming, evaporating.

Waiting for a taxi, the air clingy with summer, I turn on my phone, send you a text: Landed. A hulking ground official pushes a rude hand to halt as I reach the top of the rank. He motions to an elderly couple in front, designer bags and powdered swagger, and I watch, incensed, as they take a cab which should be mine.

‘Hey! I was first.’ I say.

‘They are old’ the man says, sliding a fattened hand into his pocket, casting an unbothered glance at my scatter-weary appearance: the t-shirt, the jeans, Converse, dirty.

His indifference is a thrill. As he ushers me to the next car, I realise I am anonymous here. All the emotion, the problems of us, feel reduced. I hug the thought, taste its round possibilities in gulps of petrol damp air, as we speed towards the centre. A dot in a car on a motorway on a planet swirling in space. *

I have stayed in the Nyhavn 71 before, several times. Sinead knows it is my favourite. She booked it specifically, a kindness that made her look good, feel better, because I am clearly out of my mind to be working at all.

‘It’s too soon, love’ she said.

This ‘love’ ends all sentences now: a plámás, a patronage, a self-pat on the back for the sayer. Evidence of their beneficence. The girl who thought she had it all brought low. Some of them are getting satisfaction from it.

My mother, slick with concern, an oily overcoat of compassion. Pinched pearly ‘I told you so’s’. I strayed from the path she set, into the brambles. Overshot my capability. She wants to tend my wounds, steal my agency.

Others, too. The ones who dare.

‘Oh my God, Nora, you’re so brave. How can you stand it.’

Pure rubber necked wonder. Eyes that don’t blink in case they miss something. As if by functioning, I am doing something extraordinary. Impolite.

Standing in this room now I breathe deeply. My pocket is alive with texts. I look at them, indulge a moment, cauterize it, open the dressing table drawer, drop the phone in, shove it shut. Sit, boneless, on the bed.

The click-hum of an electric ceiling fan marks time, underscores an emotion so nebulous that at first I don’t recognise it as loneliness. I have been desperate to escape. And now that I am here, solitude is unbearable.

‘You did this!’ The noise I emit is scratched, feeble, incommensurate with my intent. My sense of you is shifting. Lifting. The night we first met, at Jane and Peter’s house. You talked at length, passionately, captivated the room. In the infinitesimal space of a moment, I understood charisma. Lauren, beside you, a fithery young thing, an accessory. David knew immediately. Watched me watching you, watched me leave him as I sat there, politely eating vegetarian enchiladas. Watched me help you with Lauren when she drank too much, tanked into a taxi.

Understood the look that passed between us was more than gratitude.

I shift my legs with sudden energy, heave to standing, as if a switch has flipped and I need to move again.

Find a way to fix this awful feeling, this enveloping dread. I pull the small Samsonite onto the bed, mentally check its contents. It will be a piecemeal affair: the jeans I have on, which are sweaty but skinny, and therefore will do.

A vest top, the black suit jacket, high business heels. It is already 10pm. I shed my day-stained t-shirt, the underwear, lightly on the floor, like gauzy reptile skin, and I shower. Too late to bother now with washing hair, I let the spray damp it, haze it fresh with an apologetic bathroom dryer, tethered by a fragile accordion hose.

Dublin seems far away. Long ago.

er came here together. Here is a standalone me I can re-visit. A me I can re-inhabit. A me that has nothing do with you. I apply makeup mindfully now: red lips, patted dry, reapplied, glossed; mascara in swoops, eyes d heavily. The act feels inappropriate, a ‘fuck you’ to the glances, a liberal spray of perfume in the eye of wellhers. Look. Judge. Judge more. Do your worst. You’ve all been watching for this - waiting for me to blow.

In the mirror, I allow the protective glaze of what-I-think-I-look-like slip a moment, take fearful stock of actual image: the damage you have done. Older. Cheekbones jutting like birdwings beneath translucent skin. face a clamp, tight and smothering, something I live beneath, within. I realise controlling my expression has n imperative.

Blink. Breathe. Open the drawer. Retrieve the phone. Type: At hotel. Exhausted. Talk tomorrow. Put ack in, slide shut, a decisive bang. Remember the days when our texts would overlap each other with urgency, feral need to connect that drove us. *

agine you watching me as I walk through the dimlit reception, its polished greys and oranges, heavy wood, tle, expensive, Nordic style. Imagine you taking in the minute changes as I walk tall and confident past the suit eception. The weight loss, the roots untended. But this man at the desk doesn’t register me as remarkable, risome. I look like I can mind myself. You said that once, in a fit of pique or passion. You said I look like a man who could lay waste to lesser mortals. And at the time it scared me. And excited me. This me I didn’t see. could do that. Pull me out of my small self, make me think I was extra, interesting, sexy. Flood me with amine. Became my drug of little choice.

I leave the warehouse district behind and make my way down the cobbled boardwalk of Nyhavn, saltfish ts of sea mingling with spices from the kitchens of restaurants and bars. An undercurrent of beer. A tang t of vomit. Eighties pop beating time to a complicated negotiation of heel and groove until I arrive at my tination, a small basement bar. This is a place I have been to before, a fabled haunt of the well-to-do tourist, merchant visitor looking for mischief. A transient hub. I sit on a stool, slide thigh-dense denim under thick od, order a vodka and tonic. The barman is a neatly angled Danish type, sharp hair shot with premature grey, d eyes reading more than I want to communicate.

‘So this is work?’ the you in my head says.

‘I asked you to come with me. Often. You were too busy. Seminars, lectures, exams – always some use.’

‘I doubt you missed me.’

‘You weren’t stuck for company at home.’

Towards the end of the third drink, which is hitting none of the recognisable spots, two backpackers ve, all southern hemisphere air, something anachronistic about their style. Nineties Home and Away. They’re be early twenties, both blonde, one curly, one straight. Kids on the hunt for an adventure, a story to recount r future barbies.

‘Neanderthals.’ You’d never say this, but a thought trace on your face would betray you. If they were ale, of course, your expression would be different. A pang, a surge of bile rising, and I hear myself say: ‘Would you like a drink lads?’

I watch them take me in. Steady stares from enlarged pupils. I’m playing a part now. For you. The ion of you that exists in my head. An ‘I-can-do-this-too’ game. They nod. And I nod again for them to order. I gine you struggling to control your expression. Amusement or disgust? Jealousy or pity?

They are from Brisbane, they tell me. On their gap year. The straight-haired one, the chattier, something thin about his mouth, not matching the chunk of the rest of his features, tells me. They’ve finished college, he , with a slide eye to Curly, are seeing something of the world before they get jobs, settle down. I tell them a of my own, which is mostly true: I’m here on business, a conference in company headquarters, two nights . The names I give are vague, not intended to stick. They come out in a strange Dublin accent, a mad nod to flutter of guilt that rises and squeezes my lungs.

uncertain, vision impaired. A horn blows. I lead them towards the hotel, the canal a scumble of night colour, the air cooling and delicious. Breathable. Outside the sliding doors of the hotel foyer, we stand in a shredding of pretence, bereft of a plausible story: two almost children and a woman almost old enough to have birthed them.

‘Classy’ I hear you say.

‘Like you know about class.’

I see your face. So clearly. The twitch at the side of your mouth, a tiny heart breaking shift of eyebrow, a childhood scar turned feature, cutting to the core of me. The smile you gave me on our wedding day, when you caught my eye and made me tingle, think I was unique. When I didn’t realise this was a trick you’d perfected.

I falter. Say: ‘Right lads, that was lovely. Thanks for seeing me home.’

And the look on their faces is a mixture of relief and disappointment, as if they are making their way back from a precipice, a thrill they were unsure about. A realisation all is not lost. A story is started, sprung, and will grow. Embellished and better in their imaginations, as it is in my imagination, when I indulge in a safe game of what-might-have-been on the hotel bed, touching myself in a way they never would have, a practiced route to a white space, a haven where thought disappears. Where, for a moment, I am alive. Where, for the briefest of moments, I don’t even think of you. * In the morning, I dress in the suit, the slim cut trousers, the heels, a blouse now under the jacket. The outfit is a little old-fashioned, austere, but business casual has never been my thing. I consider myself a woman of rules. The other guests go about their breakfast, lost in their heads, an automated ritual of bowl and plate, cereal, fruit, yoghurt, bacon, egg, sausage, bread, cheese, croissant, jam. No eye contact required. A polite nod as they wait for the jug of juice, queue for the coffee machine. Ethereal, repetitive, replaceable creatures. Fast fading imprints in air. Unreal and ultimately insignificant, but in this morning minute alive and vibrant, consumed with electric intent on their different days, the events that are anticipated – and those that aren’t. Spread before them like blankets, the weft and weave already set.

I am adrift in the theatre of it all when I spot a face I know. Anna Maija, a colleague from Finland, soft cream skin, blue ice eyes, approaches. An involuntary shortcut of breath, a painful pull to reality. I search her face for the settling of knowledge, the familiar flexing of muscles, the rearranging. But the people I will meet today are transient, not everyday friends and colleagues, and therefore only privy to the piece of myself I show them during these few days once a year.

‘Hei Nora. Nice to see you’ she says.

We chat about how long it has been since the last time, the plans for the two days, where we will go, where we will eat, the weather, ordinary things. I am so used to Dublin, the pervasive undertow of gossip, that it is an relief to realise these people don’t. Know. How would they? We are joined by Terje from Norway, Shoko from Japan, Marlene from Sweden. I relax, a little, handle dangerous questions deftly, with expediency, and I find I am, if not happy, then something close, in the flow of good company, a return to something that feels like a normal state. Enjoying the façade. Varnishing the cracks, appearing whole.

In some of our many awkward moments, you told me I was a show-pony, too concerned with image, others. And maybe this is not all of it but the crux of it: my pride. The public nature of it. How I have been flayed, hung there, skinless, my inner workings exposed for consumption and comment. All the words, all the back-andforth talk, the counselling, the hope and disappointment, only to go back to the beginning: ‘I thought you were stuck up, frigid, when we met.’

‘You’ve said.’

‘A babe though. Most presentable.’

‘My mother always said you were full of shit.’

‘She wanted you to marry an accountant.’

Image: LAURE COLOMER

‘Naysayer extraordinaire, your mother. Why didn’t you listen to her?’

‘I thought it was love.’ * On the bus to the conference centre I sit beside a Canadian colleague, Mike. I’ve met him before, only vaguely, but I like him. He seems a straightforward type. Tall, attractive in a horsey way, all teeth and grey coiffure. An ad for men’s hair product. There’s frisson between us; that initial moment where the potential nature of the relationship was thrown in the air and the dice landed in a way that indicated ‘sex is possible’. We smile and chat, inconsequential stuff, politics and the like. The vagaries of Justin Trudeau. There is no wedding ring. He mentions a daughter but not a wife. I casually let it slip that I’m single.

‘Jesus, you’re like a bitch in heat.’

I burn, check my phone self-consciously. Fuck you, I type.

Mike and I are led with the other suits by the smell of coffee, the stickiness of pastries, the fingertip comfort of linen tablecloth beset with pragmatic Danish delft. Mugs without handles, beverages tepid enough to negate the need for them. The coffee is thick and strong and I take it black, taste it on my tongue, inhale it. I feel so familiar in this place, the scratch of carpet tile on the soles of my shoes, the bubble of voices rebounding from smooth oak-panelled walls. Chairs that mould the small of a back. We totter in lines to our places for the first presentation.

In the wide high space of the auditorium, you are not here at all. Not even a whisper.

‘Did you see they are looking for a Senior Lead in the new Global Digital Division?’ Anna-Maija’s face is set with significance. ‘I think you’d be fantastic.’

And I haven’t seen the position advertised. I am a little out of touch for obvious reasons, but immediately I’m alert. A job. Here. In headquarters. A move and all that would entail. Starting over. The presenter shuffles at the lectern, a grey guy dressed in black adjusts his mic, and we shift in our seats, my brain teasing possibility.

‘You’re too much of a home bird.’

Instantly you are back. Something in the shoulder movement of the man on the seat in front, the shape of him, a side swipe of jaw, is all it takes.

‘You think this would be a big deal? After everything else?’

‘Lauren was always there or thereabouts.You knew that Nora.’

‘I didn’t … I mean, nobody did …’

My fault line. Exposed. Proven. You shrug. And I realise this is exactly what you would do, if you could. A shitty irresponsible shrug. Depend on the cute quirk of the oh you’re so bourgeois eyebrow, the soft fuzz of stubble, the twinkling arrogance of the poet. Of course Lauren was there, on and off, all along. Ego food. Why would you give that up if she was willing to continue? So crazy about you she tore herself up. And would I really hurt so much if it hadn’t been so public? If it hadn’t been her car, you a passenger, three am, your luck run out under a truck, me left standing for the judgement …

‘Nora?’ Susan, from the UK office, a late arrival, sits beside me, her face hot, infected with concern. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t think I would see you here … I mean, I heard … I heard about what happened to your husband.

Oh Nora, I’m so very sorry, love …’

WO POEMS

FUTURE I hear you wolf Bristle perfect Skulking beneath My skirts I see you midnight Raise you one moon Dream about your lair Bursting with sordid tales I smell you temptation Smoke rises Feet in ashes Ready to dance I taste you bonfire Liquid tongue Flames touch glass Crackling smoky future

t fox has a cool night air out him as he wet noses d crumples his latest work rying messages in cutlery guests arrive with secrets

e gras toasted is always a scream ncerre smiles with his thin lips e and camembert of virgins ke air in perfect tall hedges rts crack - marking territory

t fox always returns neath my sill breathing new words ck and white partners to dawn wing to sew tomorrow in new seed ling asleep on the wind

N KEEGAN

e beggar of morning I rise sterday's coin on yesterday's thread. age: LYDIAofHICKEY he draught my departure e city's voices sing: ase leave a message after the beep.

FIN KEEGAN The beggar of morning I rise

Yesterday's coin on yesterday's thread.

Image: LYDIAofHICKEY In the draught my departure The city's voices sing: Please leave a message after the beep.

a sculptor asked to collaborate with writer Hannah Hoare,

first response was a panicked ‘but I’m not an illustrator!’ ords: HANNAH HOARE ce disabused of this idea, and encouraged to respond to the from PARAHUMANITY, novel sense ting in whatever form I liked, I found aawonderful

reedom in the work that emerged.

As the layers in the short stories and novel revealed

ages: MALIK mselves, I CHARLOTTE began to see so many connections to themes in own work.

The top layer presents as dystopian science SOFT SCULPTURE

ion, and below that I found emerging images of painful nnection and the relief of separation, consumption and ding, parasitic devouring and nurture, reproduction and truction.

There are images of futuristic loneliness in a vast pty universe, terrifying touch with alien species, and often scommunication. The lasting echoes are of the discomfort iving as an alien in your own world, of different sensory cessing, of the heightened perception of neurodiversity.

My work in response explores these themes, with a t of shapes and creatures, which could be planet sized ens, or the microscopic nerves and fibres of our brains, ding from and connected to each other, playfully eracting in what could be a tender touch or a prelude to ack.

ARLOTTE MALIK will exhibit an installation of her soft sculpture he SWERVE Gallery, Skibbereen, Republic of Ireland in 2024.

enclosing an identical yard. In one of these yards was an orange tree.

I would have preferred meat. Still, a guest on foreign soil must take what is offered. Only polite.

I jumped the barrier and landed on my hands and feet in the yard, then picked myself up, remembering – and I was proud that I had remembered this – to rearrange my skirt in a way that would seem socially acceptable to the people of the Civilised World. When I had done this, I reached up, plucked an orange from the tree, and sank my little yellow teeth into the skin.

The sweet taste of nourishment filling my mouth was extremely welcome but short-lived.

“Hey! What in the Hell do you think you’re doing?”

I stopped eating and turned. A large woman in an apron was standing in the doorway of the house, bristling as if she wanted to attack me. I took a few steps back but kept the orange in my hand.

“You think that belongs to you?” She pointed a stubby finger at the orange. “Huh?” My hand froze into a clamp around the orange and wouldn’t let it go.

The woman stepped forward. “Get out!” She looked over my shoulder. “The rest of you, too. Go!” I looked behind me. A small group of young people, all long hair and dirty, colourful clothes, had assembled behind the barrier to watch this exchange.

“You’d better watch out.” The woman turned back to me. “You dirty little tree-hugger! The police might have no power these days but come here again, eat my fruit again and so help me God I’ll-” “Hey! You should lay off her, lady,” one of the people behind me – a girl, in a rolled-up green Tshirt and shorts – interrupted. “Seems she just wanted to get some fruit. Fruit belongs to everyone.”

“No,” the lady corrected her. “Fruit does not belong to everyone. That fruit is off that tree – that tree belongs to me!”

I turned again to see the group recoil in horror at this assertion, as if sacrilege had been committed. The girl who had spoken, in particular, appeared genuinely upset. Her mouth was open.

The lady continued. “What is it with you people, anyway? You’ve had your party, wrecked the beach, ruined the neighbourhood, now you’re leading the polls, isn’t that enough?” Anger was building within her. She let it out in one final burst. “I will not be dictated to in my own front yard by a pack of selfrighteous little bastards young enough to be my goddamn grandchildren!”

There were two boys in the group as well as the girl. One of them put an arm around her naked waist. “Harsh," he said. With that, the group drifted away, disappearing into a gap between two houses.

The lady called after them. “Goddamn kids! Think everything belongs to you, just because the government’s gone far-out senile? My God, this country’s going to go to Hell with the likes of you in charge of it! And you,” she said, turning back to me. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I did not know what the question meant, so I didn’t answer. Then a thought came to me. I began to understand where I had gone wrong. “Oh,” I said. “Is this your territory?”

“What?” The lady gawked, open-mouthed. “Yeah. This is my garden. What, you thought it was a public park or something?”

“You haven’t marked it clearly,” I explained.

The lady pointed a trembling finger at the low, white, wooden barrier. “What do you think that fence is for?”

“I don’t know.” Some of the videos in the Edu-Centre were damaged, concepts lost, words missing from my vocabulary. Then it came to me. “Oh, you put that there?” I nodded to show my understanding. “I assumed it was growing.”

and, maintaining eye-contact throughout, backed off at a slow and respectful pace. I hopped over fence and carried on my way past the houses.

Posts sprouted from the middles of lawns and coloured cards winked in windows, blue, red, en. Those houses marked as red or blue were often tainted somehow, with broken glass or black nt dashed across the grass. The green-card houses remained unscathed.

As my legs began to tire, I found myself standing on the outside of another fence, staring into ther garden. This garden was different. A tangled mess of foliage. Somebody had painted designs r the walls and a hole the size of a fist gaped in one of the windows. An image had been burnt into grass, a circle, a triangle within.

Movement and heat beside me. People. Without looking, I could tell there were several. I ened, forced myself to remain in place.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” A female voice.

I flinched, then swallowed, ran my tongue over my lips. Creepy. It was different, wild, and, yes, a e unsettling. The marks in the grass, on the walls. The chaos of the space within the fence. But then, rything I had seen today was different.

“It was Helen Monroe’s place.” A male voice. “You know that?”

The inflection made it sound like a question, but the phrasing was a statement. I didn’t know ether or not to reply so I tried to change the subject. “Why did she make it look like that?”

“Oh, no.” The girl gave a light, tinkling laugh. “We did that!” From the corner of my eye, I could her raise a hand, gesturing towards the window, the cracks spreading across the murky glass.

“That was where they found her body all those years ago, in there, see? No-one’s lived in the se since.”

I squinted. Couldn’t see anything through the glass.

“Wait a second,” the girl said. She stepped back, looked me up and down. “It’s you – the orange Are you alright?” Her voice was like pleasant, scented smoke, and her breath matched it.

I turned away. I had no idea what to say in response to this.

The girl followed, walked around me, and positioned herself where she could see my face. “Hey e you okay?”

Again, I wasn’t sure how to respond to this but, seeing as my path was obstructed, I stopped had a go. “Yes,” I said. “I am okay.”

The girl smiled at this. “That lady back there was so mean,” she said. “I mean, you can’t, like n a tree!”

"Really?” This concept intrigued me. “Not even if it’s on your territory?”

Somebody laughed: one of the boys - he was wearing jeans with a scarf tied around the waist no top; his healthy, muscular body baked a light brown by the sun. “Are you for real?”

“Yeah, I mean – you can’t really own anything, right?” The other boy – blond, bearded - stepped beside them. The girl nodded. “I mean, you were hungry, right? You were just following your natural incts. And then – pow!” He slapped his hands together. I jumped back in alarm. “She came along h all her pent-up hate and stopped you, and I bet she wasn’t even going to eat the orange herself.” shook his head. “So not cool.”

It was hard to pick out meaning through the dialect, but I thought I understood. They were mpathizing with me.

beautiful beyond anything I could have imagined; watching me with fearless, misty-yet-inquisitive eyes, as I stood expectantly before them and forced myself to hold their gaze. The topless boy’s eyes travelled down my body and focused on something at my midriff. He stared for a while. Then, without a change in expression, he whispered to the girl. She followed his gaze to my midriff, then looked up at my face again. All the while the blond boy watched motionlessly, blue eyes glazed and lips apart in a dopey smile.

“Hey - you got anything you could share with us in there?” That was the girl.

For a moment I was completely lost – then I realized that she was referring to my bag. I grabbed it and clutched it tightly to me. “No!” The girl cocked her head to one side, regarding me. Then she came closer and stretched out her hand. My muscles went rigid. I stepped back.

Her hand came closer – and closed lightly over mine. “Hey, that’s cool,” she said, and laughed.

“Don’t freak out about it!” She flashed me a smile. Behind her, the boys started to chuckle.

“Must be some pretty good stuff you got in there,” said the blond boy. His dopey smile remained.

“So – you want to do something, go somewhere?”

Somehow, I became a member of their group for the rest of the afternoon. We ambled aimlessly past the beachside houses for a while, and I listened with interest to their wonderfully peculiar manner of speaking. It was all so new to me.

“What do they call you?”

“Katrina.”

“You come far?”

“Yes.” “Where you come from, then?”

I didn’t answer.

“Were your parents cool with you coming here?”

I didn’t answer.

An image had been pasted to the side of a house, the image from the paper nestled in my bag: short pale man, tall dark man, a woman, a pinioned monkey, a red slash across it. The girl pointed to the picture of the woman. “Helen Monroe,” she said. She jabbed a finger at the topless boy. “She’s watching you! She knows you messed up her house: she’s mad at you!” She whooped.

I wanted to ask if she could read. I wanted to show her the paper, maybe my journal too.

Perhaps I could trust her? But then she ran off, beckoning us to follow, and the moment was gone.

There came a point where the houses ran out, so we turned up the little street between the final two buildings and ended up at a big, busy road: a ‘highway’. We all ran across it, the young people going on ahead, me following. The heat from the unobstructed sun grilled my shoulders and evaporated a lot of my common sense. The rush of the vehicles travelling past us, sometimes inches from my body, and the warm, ghostly glow of the streetlamps which had started to light made me feel as if I was drifting through a dream-world. I noticed things, like the way our shadows seemed to stretch out forever in the reddening sunlight, and the way the skin on my new friends’ backs seemed smoother and softer than my own, even though they had grown up in a similar climate and walked barefoot, like me, with no trouble at all.

ving his hands in front of it as the smoke rose up, up, up into the crimson sky. And I noticed the ell, the beautiful scent of herbs and petals, which drifted back to me from the pores of the three astical creatures which ran ahead of me, laughing and chattering: fearless, uninhibited, free.

We reached the other side of the highway. Here, another smell gripped me. Something etizing and warm.

I turned and followed the scent at a quick, loping pace. The young people, apparently curious, owed behind. I didn’t look back at them, I was absorbed by my pursuit, but I could sense their itement as they trailed me. They didn’t seem to have any notion whatsoever of what I was doing or ere I was going; they followed because they wanted to find out. Their blind innocence, their naivety, s touching.

The scent led me to a large white building, through a garden of chairs and tables. The smell w stronger into a tongue-prickling flavour-scent as I rounded the corner of the building, my pace ckening, to where a pile of waste was pouring from a burst plastic sack. There I stopped.

Two animals stood on top of the sack, bristling at me. Dogs. Hungry and mindlessly territorial. wever, today they were outnumbered.

I looked the pile over, once, twice. Selected my prize.

My group had assembled behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to check – there they were, ing blankly like children – and gave them what I hoped was a meaningful look, before turning back he dogs. One of the group (the girl, most likely) said something. I blocked her out, hearing the nd, not the words.

With quick, stiff steps and my head up, I advanced towards the pile.

The dogs saw me. Also advanced.

But I was too quick for them. I plunged elbow-deep into the pile, clamped onto the foodstuff I nted and within seconds was out again, baring my teeth in defiance, clutching my prize. The dogs od their ground and snarled back, but it was all for nothing. I had won.

Victory. An unusual feeling. I savoured it.

The food I had salvaged smelled peculiar: smelled of chemicals, treatments, spices. All the ells of my new home. I held it up to my face and breathed them all in.

I was ravenous. Still, I wanted to share the fruits of my efforts with my new friends. Trying my t to imitate their smiles, I turned around and held my food out to where they had been – but I found I was alone. Completely.

How very strange.

So I ate the piece of raw steak myself, taking note of the unusual under-tastes of citrus and serving chemicals which mingled with the familiar flavours of blood and flesh. I memorized this erence, filing it away in my cabinet of experiences to refer to at a later date.

The Civilised World was sure to be full of fascinating new experiences. I looked forward to what s to come.

SION OF THE COSMOS

nce at the night sky he heavens beyond ch sight of the starlight kness of the cosmos above

es of Compostela’s cathedral t to reach the Gods erlooks Obradorio Square cian pipes fill the air

ic stirs inside me y tears as big as pearls ming from the depths of my soul its release

king has been its own reward wed me ollow my curiosity gold in conversation of passers-by

ve my stick at the steps of a journey within a journey own passing strikes me is to be treasured while I can.

VISION OF THE COSMOS

I glance at the night sky At the heavens beyond Catch sight of the starlight Darkness of the cosmos above Spires of Compostela’s cathedral Built to reach the Gods Overlooks Obradorio Square Galician pipes fill the air Music stirs inside me I cry tears as big as pearls Coming from the depths of my soul Feel its release Walking has been its own reward Allowed me To follow my curiosity Find gold in conversation of passers-by I leave my stick at the steps End of a journey within a journey My own passing strikes me Life is to be treasured while I can.

member hopping sure-footed

m one black rock to the next, RDMORE

asionally stopping tare intently into pools of salty water, ing to catch a glimpse of a hermit crab rrying through the undergrowth of seaweed. age: NANCY en better, to see a WILDE sea-star lounging below the surface of the pool.

member walking thin path around the cliff head, past a decrepit holy well, standing aside for ignorant tourists caught up in themselves you’d wonder ey were even taking in the sights.

member seeing the massive rusted crane shed up at the foot of the sea cliffs, thinking of the stories it had become a breeding ground for seals. s this the birthplace of the seal pup o popped his head up by the pier each mmer?

member standing beside the round tower, t by monks so they could hide away mselves and their riches from pillaging Vikings. king up among the graves watching as the tower seemed to sway.

member my childhood in the west of terford. e my mother before me, nding every summer in a tiny village, lling along the beach looking out over the sea.

I remember hopping sure-footed from one black rock to the next, ARDMORE occasionally stopping to stare intently into pools of salty water, hoping to catch a glimpse of a hermit crab scurrying through the undergrowth of seaweed.

Image: NANCY Even better, to see a WILDE sea-star lounging just below the surface of the pool.

I remember walking the thin path around the cliff head, just past a decrepit holy well, and standing aside for ignorant tourists so caught up in themselves you’d wonder if they were even taking in the sights.

I remember seeing the massive rusted crane washed up at the foot of the sea cliffs, and thinking of the stories that it had become a breeding ground for seals.

Was this the birthplace of the seal pup who popped his head up by the pier each summer?

I remember standing beside the round tower, built by monks so they could hide away themselves and their riches from pillaging Vikings.

Looking up among the graves and watching as the tower seemed to sway.

I remember my childhood in the west of Waterford.

Like my mother before me, spending every summer in a tiny village, strolling along the beach and looking out over the sea.

LVIA BIRCH

age: SEÁN DUNNE

Restless, Pacing, Itching for the moment when day and dusk entwine under the wolf-grey sky.

I am full with the coming moment

Three score years I’ve wandered in their midst, Dancing in misstep to their discordant rhythm, ‘Strange’, Whispered behind my back.

A word to mark, to stigmatise and set apart.

Little do they know how strange they are to me Their lives framed by a Gregorian calendar of days And weeks And months.

A rosary of time Birth and death at either end.

I leave the house, Cross the field to the beckoning woods, Move through the trees, murmuring greetings, one sister to another.

The soil beneath my feet trembles with anticipation, Roots coil, ready themselves to welcome me back.

Here, under the equinox moon, I am returned.

lands and moved to the Republic of Ireland in 0 settling in Kinsale, County Cork. inDuring I first came to Kinsale on holiday 1988. I his was travelling with a friend and felt very drawn to the town ensive career in publishing and writing mediately, it reminded me of Cornish towns he fromcochildhood holidays. When we decided to move to Ireland in GEDEN nded the Sound EyeinInternational Poetry Festival 0etweMATTHEW initially looked County Clare and then a house came up in Kinsale and it just seemed perfect and we is a there co-founder Anam PressSome andREDMOND Harbour Lights still 30-odd later. years ago, the journalist Stan Gebler-Davis who lived in Kinsale, wrote a erviewed byof years JENNIFER ss. He was on appointed at English the ular feature the townwriter-in-residence – Kinsale Diary – in an paper, The Independent. I hadn’t heard of Kinsale before njing Centre, China andlittle has place been which writer had all this stuff going on. Stan used to write about the wasLiterature always curious about this esidence at County and Arts since age: KRYSTINA STIMAKOVITS ers living in Cork the town, the Library arts festival etc. So I did know about Kinsale and was intrigued so that’s how I 0. Publications ed up there. include Swimming to Albania, Kinsale ms, The Place Inside, Fruit and, most recently, The d Architect Pressa 2022).

Matthewwhen teaches And did(Doire you have lot of support you started writing in Kinsale? You said there were a lot of he facilitates writing ers Kinsale living in Writing the town,School did youand have a network? rses for Cork County Library and Arts Service. He been When a lecturer on the Creative Writing I arrived in MA 1990inquite a few of the at writers had actually left. Derek Mahon had left a couple of C. previously and Desmond O’Grady was only there on and off. At first there was no network but over the rs rs I got to know Desmond quite well. Desmond was a Limerick poet who divided his time between Kinsale Greece. He was the first of the writers I got to know who became a great friend and was of real help in ing me started as a writer. He introduced me to the editors of magazines such as William Cookson of Agenda gazine which was well-known in England. William Cookson set up the magazine at the instigation of Ezra nd. Desmond really pushed me forward as a writer and gave me the confidence to start sending work out in early years when I was still in my 20s. Desmond was a great support in the beginning and, as the years went got to know other writers such as Aidan Higgins, the novelist, who lived in the town. Derek Mahon then rned to Kinsale and I became very close friends with him.

Were you working at another job at this time as well?

I worked at Waterstones at the University of Cork where I realised bookselling really suited me. I roughly enjoyed working with books, meeting people and talking about and ordering books. Keeping an eye he book industry for a writer is really useful to see what’s selling and who the publishers are and so on. Then oved on to become the manager of the Kinsale Bookshop where a lot of writers would call in, including mond, Derek, Aidan and Alannah Hopkin amongst many others. I began to arrange a monthly open mic where had all sorts of people reading. Sometimes it would be a poem, sometimes a story and occasionally even gs or Seanchaí pieces.

Did it end in the pub?

Of course! And there was a pub next door so that was helpful. Sometimes it started in the pub.

It sounds idyllic. I don’t know of anything in Cork that’s like that at the moment. Maybe at The Well.

Yeah maybe. There are places that do open mics. But the bookshop was very open, and anybody could w up – from international writers, to a wandering fisherman and once even a nun. I always feel that a kshop should be more like an arts centre and a space for people to meet and get together. That was my idea nd those monthly evenings – it was just a space for people to meet and sing a song or whatever.

It really does sound like a little treasure. It’s a pity it’s not there now.

Midlands and moved to the Republic of Ireland in 1990 settling in Kinsale, County Cork. inDuring MG I first came to Kinsale on holiday 1988. I his was travelling with a friend and felt very drawn to the town extensive career in publishing and writing immediately, it reminded me of Cornish towns he fromcochildhood holidays. When we decided to move to Ireland in Poet GEDEN founded the Sound EyeinInternational Poetry Festival 1990 weMATTHEW initially looked County Clare and then a house came up in Kinsale and it just seemed perfect and we and still is a there co-founder Anam PressSome andREDMOND Harbour Lights are 30-odd later. years ago, the journalist Stan Gebler-Davis who lived in Kinsale, wrote a Interviewed byof years JENNIFER Press. He was on appointed at English the regular feature the townwriter-in-residence – Kinsale Diary – in an paper, The Independent. I hadn’t heard of Kinsale before Nanjing Centre, China andlittle has place been which writer had all this stuff going on. Stan used to write about the and wasLiterature always curious about this in residence at County and Arts since Image: KRYSTINA STIMAKOVITS writers living in Cork the town, the Library arts festival etc. So I did know about Kinsale and was intrigued so that’s how I 2020. Publications ended up there. include Swimming to Albania, Kinsale Poems, The Place Inside, Fruit and, most recently, The Cloud Architect Pressa 2022).

Matthewwhen teaches JR And did(Doire you have lot of support you started writing in Kinsale? You said there were a lot of at the Kinsale facilitates writing writers living in Writing the town,School did youand have a network? courses for Cork County Library and Arts Service. He has a lecturer on the Creative Writing MGbeen When I arrived in MA 1990inquite a few of the at writers had actually left. Derek Mahon had left a couple of UCC. previously and Desmond O’Grady was only there on and off. At first there was no network but over the years years I got to know Desmond quite well. Desmond was a Limerick poet who divided his time between Kinsale and Greece. He was the first of the writers I got to know who became a great friend and was of real help in getting me started as a writer. He introduced me to the editors of magazines such as William Cookson of Agenda Magazine which was well-known in England. William Cookson set up the magazine at the instigation of Ezra Pound. Desmond really pushed me forward as a writer and gave me the confidence to start sending work out in the early years when I was still in my 20s. Desmond was a great support in the beginning and, as the years went by, I got to know other writers such as Aidan Higgins, the novelist, who lived in the town. Derek Mahon then returned to Kinsale and I became very close friends with him.

JR

Were you working at another job at this time as well?

MG I worked at Waterstones at the University of Cork where I realised bookselling really suited me. I thoroughly enjoyed working with books, meeting people and talking about and ordering books. Keeping an eye on the book industry for a writer is really useful to see what’s selling and who the publishers are and so on. Then I moved on to become the manager of the Kinsale Bookshop where a lot of writers would call in, including Desmond, Derek, Aidan and Alannah Hopkin amongst many others. I began to arrange a monthly open mic where we had all sorts of people reading. Sometimes it would be a poem, sometimes a story and occasionally even songs or Seanchaí pieces.

JR

Did it end in the pub?

MG

Of course! And there was a pub next door so that was helpful. Sometimes it started in the pub.

JR

It sounds idyllic. I don’t know of anything in Cork that’s like that at the moment. Maybe at The Well.

MG Yeah maybe. There are places that do open mics. But the bookshop was very open, and anybody could show up – from international writers, to a wandering fisherman and once even a nun. I always feel that a bookshop should be more like an arts centre and a space for people to meet and get together. That was my idea behind those monthly evenings – it was just a space for people to meet and sing a song or whatever.

JR

It really does sound like a little treasure. It’s a pity it’s not there now.

n mic has become mostly based around spoken-word poetry which is different to what we were doing back he day.

You recently received an Arts Council award to assist in you in writing the biography of Derek Mahon. uld you like to tell us a little about your friendship?

Derek moved back to Kinsale around 2003 when I got to know him properly. Then a biography came out ut him that he felt had not been very fair. Over coffee one day he wondered whether I might be interested in ing a new version and I immediately said yes. We would meet on a regular basis for me to interview him and notes and I have been working on it ever since Derek passed away a couple of years ago. I was lucky enough e awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary enabling me to finish writing and get published.

Do you find it cathartic writing about a lost friend and is it helpful in any way?

In some ways I feel Derek is still around because I am still working on the book and still thinking about ; re-reading my notes, remembering our conversations and, most importantly, reading his poetry. For me he is ainly one of the finest writers of the last 50 years. His poems still resonate in a way that not many others do. back to the work a lot, not just for research purposes but also for enjoyment. I find his work influencing my n writing with ideas or phrases and memories returning in my own poetry.

Perhaps we could talk about your new book? You have recently published The Cloud Architect. Could you me a little about your writing process?

It is a kind of slow accumulation. There is no deliberate process and it builds up over time. I don’t rush it. the poems come. It is important for me not to put pressure on the poem itself. Some of the poems in the k were conceived or begun maybe 20 or 30 years ago so I have just waited for the right moment to finish. I sider it to be the third book in a series. The first book, Swimming to Albania, was based around water. The ond book, The Place Inside, had earth as a theme and The Cloud Architect is based around air. I am working my through the elements though I do not stick rigidly to a theme, I allow a loose connection to the poems and iously not all of them relate to air but the title poem, The Cloud Architect, certainly does. It is more to do with umulation and experimentation. I like to try different forms in poetry. I don’t want the poems to be too lar either so forms and themes change throughout. But I think there is a progression through the collection ertain themes and ideas.

Do you attack writing every day or are you someone who writes when they need to write?

Probably the latter but I do think about writing every day. I might not actually write but as thinking is so h a part of the process I am certainly writing every day even when I am just staring out of the window. I k there is a progression towards the writing of a poem or the completion of a poem. The way I tend to write hat I have an idea or a theme that I allow to sink in over a quite a length of time. Gradually the poem begins ome together in my mind, then I start to write and often it will come relatively quickly because I have let the m gestate and grow.

This may be a good moment to pause and for you to read if you feel like it.

Sure. This is a poem called Golden Days.

At a certain point you need to steep yourself in reality, even as it disintegrates before the eyes; a dark interior trembles, occasional branch scrapes the walls or crashes through the hopeless roof.

I watch you sip a double espresso, lean back to allow the caffeine filter through your veins. We are at east with our dying, accept it as inevitable as a sun rise or sundowner at sunset.

We are not anywhere but here; a slight smudge on the vellum peered at by the bespectacled frown of the curator, the private world unravels even as we speak of moving on, living off-grid.

You wonder if we can expect more than a chimney sweep does; all language reduced to a sooty pile, specks of dust form a fine layer, settle down like families inching their way across the earth.

On my way home I blow the head off a dandelion which now need never face the snow; gone as golden lads and girls all must, swilled and stirred like coffee, the undrunk drops left in coffee cups.

Thank you. It was written as part of a commission for The Great Book of Ireland, actually a spin-off of the Great Book of Ireland which Theo Dorgan and others produced at end of the 1980s. It was a small book called w Eyes On The Great Book produced by the Munster Literature Centre. The poet drinking coffee was actually ek Mahon.

How do you make decisions about what form to use? Do you have a preferred form that you go to re often?

When I first started, I used a very free form and free verse and I was much less interested in the straints of different kinds of form. But the more I write the more interested I become in writing within a icular form such as, for example, the villanelle. It is important to be able to work within form and I feel it is at training for the mind, the ear and for the eye. I don’t have a favourite and I feel that different poems require rent forms. Free verse can be very effective in a free-flowing narrative poem but it doesn’t necessarily work everything.

I have the impression that you are quite measured and contemplative which would certainly suit working hin a framework. Some people would suit free verse all the way but I don’t think that’s you.

Returning to Derek Mahon who was a huge influence because his use of rhyme is so inventive and strong of course Derek’s work is very formal. I would consider his influence is definitely evident in my own work certainly in my most recent poems. He was the poet who first made me realise the importance of form in try and I began to understand that it was not retrograde but in fact something very contemporary.

I feel that the character of the poet plays a part and certainly noticed it in this collection where I derived at visual pleasure as well as pleasure in the sound.

Sound in poetry is almost more important for me than the visual element. It is where poetry comes m in that all poems were originally oral transmissions, and that element remains absolutely vital. A good poem t sound right. You must get the rhythms right: the echoes, repetitions, alliterations and rhymes all play a part onstructing the poem in the reader’s imagination.

It’s not just words. Maybe another poem?

Thanks Jennifer. I will read the title poem of The Cloud Architect which, funnily enough, is another mmission. It’s not that I get many commissions. I’ve probably only ever had two and I’m reading both of them. this was a commission to write a poem connected to the Elysian building in the centre of Cork.

Instead of working I draw pictures, mountain vistas or views from high windows overseeing the bottleneck below. I sketch a monk adorned in saffron robes, he contemplates the sunlight on St Luke’s and the steel-grey rain comes thundering in like a train. Moment to moment the days pass, the pine door isn’t aware of spring, the dormers weather the storm and cumulus radiatus crosses from sky to sky, each one on the point of breakdown.

When night falls I slowly disappear, clouds dissolve in the dark and a small orange sun flickers then fades away; twilight consumes the tower that was there, all that is solid melts into air.

r it. And of course, you know what I am going to ask you next! “All that is solid melts into air” is a line from The mmunist Manifesto by Karl Marx. Matthew, what are your socialist credentials?

That particular line seemed relevant in considering the Elysian Tower as a folly to capitalism. I couldn’t bringing in the line at the end. “All that is solid melts into air” seemed particularly relevant to a tower ppearing into the night. At that time the Elysian was empty after having been built in the Celtic Tiger era and n suddenly nobody could afford or wanted to live in it. Socialist credentials – I am not sure I have any except I do believe in socialism. I think equality is something we should strive for, whether we can achieve it or not, it should always be the goal for contemporary society. It seems to me that we are getting further and further y from it and so it is important in literature and the arts generally to make that point, whether subtly as in case in these poems, or directly through political action.

Well I would agree with you that a caring attitude is one that will serve the most and serve the many.

This seems to be becoming a tribute to Derek Mahon but again Derek’s poems are full of subtle socialist rence. His poem, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, deliberately focusses on forgotten victims from places like blinka or Pompeii. Derek was always concerned to give a voice to the voiceless. One of the most interesting insightful obituaries of Derek came from a left-wing newspaper that pointed out his socialist credentials and humanism in his work. I feel it is very important in all art.

I was going to raise that with you because I saw Simon Schama talking the other night. He was nearly ved to tears whilst examining the role of culture and art in society. He sees it as the duty of the artist to ak out and to have the courage to air their views.

I think duty is a strong word but I do agree that any right-thinking person would want to speak up in tever way they can. We all have different ways of doing it and different voices. Some people do it through tical and direct action and some people do it through painting. That’s OK as long as enough people are doing nd changing people’s minds bit by bit.

What sort of music do you listen to?

My tastes in music are very wide-ranging. I listen to Lyric FM because I find that’s where the best music am not knowledgeable at all about classical music but I like to have it on as background. If I am choosing ic to listen to it tends to be folk music.

Anybody in particular? Is it English folk music or Irish folk music?

World Music would be more what I’m thinking of, folk music from different parts of the world. I love that se of travel and sense of surprise you get when you hear music from Cape Verde or Portugal or Brazil or ba. Music is a bit like literature in that it’s a way of travelling in the imagination. Travel is important to me and I oy the sense of being a stranger in a strange land. Music and literature are another way of exploring that.

Superb. Maybe you would read us one more poem?

I will read the last poem in the book which is Murmuration. The subject matter in the second half of the m is a murmuration of starlings.

What is your next plan apart from the biography of Derek Mahon? Is there anything else?

MG I am on asmoke new collection In a time ofworking darkness stacks because it is important to keep my own work going. It is very interesting working ontrail Derek’s life and work but it is necessary for me to maintain my own voice are soon lost, a vapour drifts and sense of identity as a poet.

So I am working on a new collection though it is still early days yet. in the dawn light. I catch youryes, breath It connectedair; to fire to continue inwill thebebedroom watch it swirlthe elemental theme in the work. round my fingers, slip through the crack JR I will be looking aforward to seeing that Matthew and thank you so much for agreeing to this in the door, become thought interview. cloud in the sky. We are shaped, you say, by the past, the things MG Thanks Jennifer. we dream about while the world moves on. I murmur your name; message to the gods long departed, wonder where we go from here.

*

As the day is dying small crowds gather by the trees, the fields of Timoleague.

Night is falling fast but the wings have it, starlings burst from branches, twist and climb, all movement is here in the curves and swerves, the air brushes upturned faces as they rise and fall, disappear like a farewell kiss.

ollow glass and cobweb invitations into passageways and dusty corners."

GENT CLOUD ch of my photographic work explores the layers of

faces such as mesh and glass commonly found on ban sites of change and transition.

This series, Agent Cloud, focuses on windows t are significantly obscured through weathering d neglect or that have been deliberately covered h whitewash during the refurbishments of a shop offices. Strange patterns of translucent and opaque ves make for intriguing visual layers, now ncealing, now revealing what lies beyond or behind.

But why the need for whitewash? Why should desire to see clearly, to see beyond the surface be warted so wilfully? What is there to hide?

To me, the images resulting from such sites peal to the voyeur in all of us, while also offering h and ambiguous metaphors for the complexities of ntemporary living.

HREE POEMS

CURRACHS (for Maggie)

Sleepy seals, oil-skinned backs of currachs stir Overturning at the side of a river Around them, the light-search for kaleidescopes to pour across more splendour Glass offices react, their tongues crackle, stick Relish it

Nice to know this was waiting below the fog and brown days Umber mornings that dripped muddy waters to a close. Left us all unopened and gaping

Nice to think this was always coming That today the currachs would turn That the day your babies were born Young limbs would stretch Climb into their womb-like curve of oak

Full up with youth

Slide into dawn light Courage

Hope

as like an oil painting at the centre of it

mmed with green the sea and sky

the schoolgirls

all girls

in bright white uniforms

their long dark limbs fixed in starched cotton that impeccable blue

and how they babbled towards us

tream of them

and there was some block of orange too

ck with metal

too thick for the brittle cyclists

the girls

the girls I remember most

right white

their thin dark limbs

w everyone watched them

tuk-tuks

legs crossed

flowers and the sea

those Sri Lankan schoolgirls cloudless sky

some from under trees

licking rice and meat from tiny bones

ngry-mouthed

a bus maybe fruit

their white soles cooling

Alert to their every need, yes. But not now, not for the next thirty minutes – She is out, out and bending down, listening to poetry on the New Yorker. To a curtain rise of a voice, an order – to notice everything altogether now.

To notice - fungus on the trunk of a tree blooming one black line, one brown, and the rest, that expected mushroom colour and an egg carton, blown upside down inside it. The frills turning, in and out like lace Pale green mounds disrupting borders She has raised the collar of her houndstooth coat, this woman, is taking note of its satin lining, the firm hug at her middle, the fur She is paying attention, to her footprints in mud, to rain coming in, to the soft small muscles in her stomach, tightening.

om THE LADY ON THE PLANK and NTIL INDEPENDENCE DAY

ords: Poet JONATHAN WONHAM ages: Artist Printmaker NICK WONHAM

blished by Drizzle-Dazzle, 2022)

(Tuesday 1st March 2022 - Day 6)

Just over the border, people stand around looking dazed in their warm coats and hats.

They trundle around with them small suitcases in colours not appropriate to war, containing what they now own, running with their children in fear of the bullets and bombs, carrying their pets because they had no travel basket, having had no thoughts of travel until today.

(Thursday 3rd March 2022 - Day 8)

About this daylit dream, what can I say?

Not until we stood on the platform did I imagine never seeing you again.

How can I now depart? I throw myself against you, like the wind does at a wall.

What strange force have you woken in me?

My absolute courage, why are you standing alone in that grimy place? Panic of a full carriage, tears pouring down my face even as we say goodbye without words, my fool nose running, you make a joke about something so intimate of mine.

I love you, you beast! I can’t even repeat what you said, but it blew me apart.

And now am I laughing or crying?

Here I go, letting go of what I care most about in this dirty life. My journey just beginning, and I don’t know where to start.

(Monday 14th March 2022 - Day 19)

The man, standing in the rubble, says, ‘I have no words.’

The novelist writing from his safe place says, ‘I have no words.’

The voyeur, watching his television, says, ‘I have no words.’

And the dead, lying in the streets, say, ‘We have no words.’

(Thursday 28th July 2022 - Day 155)

Let’s not generalise about this bouquet of 25 stems sent on behalf of a friend.

It’s not a thank you from the people living in Minsk to the people of Kyiv and Zhytomyr.

Lukashenko alone dropped it there just across the border, its blossoms bold red, scattered and cold.

(Sunday 14th August 2022 - Day 172)

Eventually, all wars end.

Meanwhile, the trains continue to run.

A new ticket inspector appears replacing the one who caught some shrapnel during the war.

Meanwhile, the trains continue to run, ferrying evacuees, weapons.

Men dig clinker in the night, backfilling craters, while owls hoot and bats flicker overhead grabbing insects from the air.

In the distance, an artillery barrage rumbles on and on, as Russians try to knock down a town and one by one the heavy sleepers are laid down, the buckled rails are replaced by new-forged steel.

Eventually, all wars end.

Meanwhile, the trains continue to run.

(Friday 19th August 2022 - Day 177)

You invade my country, you shell my towns, you kill civilians in thousands, you plant bombs in the forests and under the roads...

Frankly mister, you provoke me, and that is understating.

You patrol my streets, eliminate my mayors, you torture good people and bus away children to god-knows-where while uprooting millions…

Frankly mister, you provoke me, and that is understating.

You annex my power plants, all the nuclear power on which my country runs so carefully managed and from there you blast the neighbouring towns…

Frankly mister, you provoke me, and that is understating.

And then you say that I provoke you?

Well, who knows, maybe it’s true.

Perhaps I provoke you with my heart.

PLACE IS A RESTLESS THING

ages: SEÁN DUNNE

until we see the first swallow of the year and then cut them off to hang on a branch for the swallow to take for its nest. Our neighbour tells us that she throws hers in the river. I’m not sure what benefit to the swallow this is, even symbolically. Whose tradition is the local one I don’t know; her parents moved from near the coast, with their sheep, in the early 1950’s. Her mother described the dismay when some families were sent to the bigger villages, like ours, the ones within sight of the lakes, while hers continued across the straight road to their new home. Dismembered houses, craters, and heaps of stones. A slumping, shallow valley of a place. No other village in sight. No lake. No sea. No gifts left hanging on the trees. The stories of arrival are of disappointment or opportunity, a blind gamble based on promises of better lives on the frontier. The stories of arrival have their place here.

The first cuckoo; the first nightingale; the first bee eater; the first golden oriole; the first swallow; the first night heron; the first scops owl; the first red-backed shrike, woodchat shrike, grey backed shrike; the first and only eagle owl; the first hen harrier; the first woodcock; the first nightjar; the first wandering sea eagle. Something about the countryside lends itself to lists, to records. I have friends who record the weather with colour pencils on a printout of a tree that has a leaf for every day of the year. Blue for snow, yellow for sun, red for wind. I think about making a list of all the plants in the garden but there’s no comprehensive book for how to tell these things in this place: the native and the invasive, the wild and the domestic. I keep a list of birds and mark it off when I see a new one. I know someone who keeps monthly lists as well as yearly lists, as well as one for life. I don’t record based on time but by place.

Here and elsewhere. First stork gets a tick. First black stork: another tick and a blurry photograph inexpertly taken through binoculars.

The stories of departure are housed in suburban Toronto, bungalows in Melbourne, tower blocks in Warsaw. The stories of departure are often stories in another language, another script on the back of old photographs. In On the Road of Time*, author Petre Nakovski describes a man he met who built a house on the other side of the border just to be as close as legally possible to his home. And every year on August 15th, as celebrations began, he would cross the trenches on the mountain saddle to light a candle. A flickering memorial to an escape; a flight; an exodus; an expulsion; a nightmare.

When viewed from across the lake, the valleys on either side of the border here are almost a mirror image of each other. Both capped with snow in winter, lighting up with frothy blossoms in spring, hazy in the height of summer, rushing to rust in autumn. I have looked at the twin valleys and wondered if the other is there at all, or just a parallel universe where another version of me is looking back across the water. The most obvious marker of difference is that “our side” has the straight road, running from the valley out across the isthmus and over to the limestone promontory of caves for hermitages, bears, field hospitals and political headquarters. …

Where I am in this, it reaches me like a sound, like a mosquito in the room at night that once you hear it, that’s it and you are caught between chasing and sleeping.

*Petre Nakovski. On the Road of Time. Translated by Risto Stefov. Risto Stefov Publications. Toronto. 2012

rises over the dark crest of the mountains, where the moon rises over the snowy brilliance of the mountains, which blush pink in the face of the sunset, which bruise purple when it’s time to leave. Taking the straight road home lines you up directly with the valley: there is no sight more inviting to your bones than to go in this direction. But this is not the direction that they took, it is not a walk that had an end in pastel tinted granite walls and peppers hanging on the balcony, rugs being washed and roosters calling from the yard. Voices, wood piles, the sound of the peel sliding bread from the oven and dogs barking at the church bell. If I turn now, I can still see the school perched where the road turns to accommodate the river and slides down the valley. If I turn now, I can see the airplanes rush in; when the only thing in the sky should be the eagles searching for snakes among the stones. But there is no luck. The airplanes sweep down over the villages in the valley and along the straight road. Easy pickings.

I hear it going west, where the shade descends early, pallid limestone rising from the water. A darkness that makes you want to return back, run back to where you left the tomatoes almost ready to pick, the melons in need of watering. It is not hard to imagine the houses locked up and empty, many of them remained in that state, but what happened in the gardens, that year? Did the bears take all the corn they were never allowed and overturn the beehives with abandon? Were the moles kept full and the beech martens sated? Did the boar feel a new fearlessness and plough the plots even in daylight? ….

the way back to the car, as the sun settles down and the chimney-smoke settles in pockets of the side, I see a curious, concave shape on the grass by the ditch. The ditch itself has had bottles and s thrown in it; scraps of clothes, an orange buoy, sardine tins, oilcans, and plastic bags with dentifiable remains of household detritus. It’s on the first angles of the slope down to the ditch where dull terracotta-coloured fragment is resting, its surface segmented. I crouch down, and seeing that n’t embedded in the earth, and therefore not in one piece, I pick it up. It’s weighty and fits mfortably in my palm. The inside surface is smooth and there’s striation around what is left of an ning on one end. The Odrin grenade was used by the Bulgarian army from 1915 until the end of the . The fuse delay was 7–8 seconds after which, if you were within its 225m range, you were in ger of being hit by a chemically propelled chunk of cast iron. At home, it becomes part of the dscape of the windowsill between a geranium and a creeping succulent that languidly takes the les of the corner it occupies, beside two rifle cartridges and a pistol cartridge yet to be catalogued stored away.

e first cartridge I found while preparing the garden for planting, but tossed it to the path as yet ther piece of useless debris like the ubiquitous rusty nails, broken glass and bottle caps. Only some eks later, when I spot another trodden into the surface of a nearby dirt road do I take notice and hunt the first one on the garden path. From then on, they have multiplied and multiplied. Under the umbers or bedded down with the potatoes, while digging, weeding or harvesting, some are flattened usted but others are perfectly cylindrical: the earth inside helping to hold their shape for decades. I one with thickish white strands of cordite sticking from the crumpled end. I find bullets too but, ke the cartridges, the bullets are mute. Nothing to read, no headstamps to point to their origin. I ect them anyway and store them in a jar like any other glut from the garden that you don’t know at to do with. And it’s not just the garden. Once my eyes know what they are and can pick out the pe, colour and size, where once I saw stones and twigs I now see cartridges. I find them on routes walk almost every day with the dogs. I find one poised on the bare rock of the summit closest to the se: neither pressed in the earth nor grown over by grass, as if the moment of its falling and the ment of my seeing have been spliced together. I don’t hunt them out, but if I am somewhere where I k it might be likely, I keep an eye

expanding area of attempted or consummated violence. On the rare occasion that I tell anyone about this growing collection I am always sure to point out that it’s not that I have an interests in cartridges or bullets or pieces of grenades per se. If I found anything else with such frequency I would be picking that up too, but here the archaeology is contemporary and too disquieting to ignore. …

From French 1904 to Greek 1994. British. German. Italian. Yugoslavian. Canadian.

Australian. American. Bulgarian. South African: someone in Pretoria Branch Mint in 1941 closed the cardboard box on this loaded cartridge which ended up more than 12,000km away on a dead-end road to a shut-up border post where the flag pole is empty and starlings gather noisily on the roof. It’ll outlive us all, this South African cartridge. The bullet too; whether it’s somewhere in the bushes beyond or wherever the bodies from here were dragged to. In the absence of facts, imagination becomes a tool for empathy. …

One morning in early September, I am with a friend on a shoulder of mountainside referred to as the balcony. The sun had already risen when we left to drive up there, but in that tricky way of mountains, it has at the same time not yet risen when we arrive in the balcony still in the shade. Though we are there for another purpose, we also look at birds. A buzzard making a peculiar call as it flies between trees, crag martins flickering around a rocky outcrop, swooping up from below like the foam of a crashing wave. A levant sparrowhawk slides by on a breeze, a short-toed eagle hangs for a moment. In the distance against the dark green of forests at the other side of the lake, we make out a flock of pelicans.

As they rise higher they disappear against the bright sky, reappearing again when they pass a more contrasting background. There is something moving about the sight, this matter of fact departure. While they do not migrate all together, this was still a large group and from a distance they appeared to flicker like moths white and grey against the oak and beech. The sun has by now come up for us on the balcony and we watch them. Pelicans fly with none of the strain of geese, none of the vulnerable stretch of swans or storks; with their necks tucked in they look comfortable and settled. They go east, finally disappearing from sight behind another forested hill. Maybe one of those individuals I have seen before, passing over the road or paddling with the cormorants in the big lake. Maybe I have seen one for the last time. A particular pelican who will not return. There is a witnessing in nature that passes us by. It seems obvious of course, that every time we hear a cuckoo it cannot be a different cuckoo. The nightingale that has made its place in the back garden is certainly the same one night after night. Once we name the cats we notice the cats. Each individual thing, living one unrepeatable life. Were we able to recognize each nightingale, each pelican, each moth, how different would it be? The first the first the first. …

It’s the only part of this that I can imagine, the planes coming in over the crest of the mountain. The rest is a flutter of historical details against the darkness of the winners’ narrative and I reach for them through a mist. I reach for the sound left by the rush of air of airplanes bearing down to push you in the sand, to leave some part of you for ever in your home. To leave your blood and let you walk on as ghosts. I reach from a feeling and towards some knowing. Even the middle of nowhere is somebody’s somewhere.

other story, another language, another people that called it home. I read one book, then another, n journal articles, memoirs, and obscure Internet forums. I pour over maps and old photographs; metimes with a specific question,sometimes not, but all of it serves to hold up a mirror at an angle reveal another side to what we think we know or what we are told we see. And still, awareness mes slowly, revealing itself bit by bit. Even when I knew that people had left this place, I presumed it s over time, a slow drip that eventually drained the people from the place. And indeed the children leave first, through an organized evacuation programme that brought them to wait out the war in mps and schools in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, but the main exodus of the adult inhabitants of villages in Greek Prespa took place in the days leading up to August 15th 1949. What was normally eriod of fasting and preparation for this feast day became a time of packing and panicking. In the fficial village dump I find school records from the 1920’s. I wonder how many of them got out in e.

ine, I come across a photo of a house I recognize as “Miss Maria’s” house. My husband has oduced this manner of referring to any older men or women as Mr. this and Miss that, so between us end up calling these elderly neighbours Miss Maria and “Miss Maria’s husband”. They own the ery that sells one type of bread. The photo is some years old, it’s hard to tell exactly what year. The se has probably looked similarly for a long time. Stone fronted with a tall arched door, painted bricks und the lintels, chickens in the yard. The “great big house of Mundushev” said one of the comments ow and another, “my grandparents’ house”. Miss Maria, her husband and their bread came later, of rse.

the night Kosta Mundushev and his wife left this house, as he describes in Prespa in Flames and oke**, it has been raining. They leave the house at 1 am and head to the nearest exit from the terror was rousing itself on the airfields beyond the mountains. Before they get to the Yugoslav border y are turned back. Forcing the people to run the gauntlet across the straight road in the direction of ania, bed sheets and blankets fluttering from carts. …

The column looked like muddy rainwater traveling down a river after a strong rainstorm during dry weather… Everyone was rushing trying to get ahead and cross the bridge… before the aircraft came back.

Sometime before dawn, in Florina and Kastoria the pilots are stepping into their planes.

Rubbing sleep from their eyes, rubbing their flight goggles on the cuffs of their shirts.

Tightening their helmets and The planes swooped down low and machine-gunned the people, the wagons, the livestock and the horses carrying the heavy loads... It was a sunny day. The airplanes circled around the sky like vultures.

Trapped and exposed all at once, you turn back to home once more and as the sun rises over the crest of the mountains, the planes come with it.

osta Mundushev. Prespa in Flames and Smoke. Translated by Risto Stefov. Risto Stefov Publications. Toronto. 2017

the road during the first attack. Many were killed and even more were wounded. Many abandoned their belongings, left the road and ran into the mountains to hide. Some took the wounded and tried to get help.

The oxen and other animals pulling the wagons such as horses, donkeys and mules were left on the road. Most were killed throughout the day. The only people on the road before the bridge who remained alive after the attacks were those who fled the attacks and hid in the mire of Lake Mala Prespa and in the waters of Lake Golema Prespa. Those who were closest to the bridge and tried to cross were cut down by the aircraft. …

Did the pelicans leave early that year? Or did they paddle out into the big lake, and bob up and down on the ripples from the bombs, the bullets, the downed plane?

And did the cormorants dive deep below, as is their want, and stir up the fish for the pelicans to catch? And did they wonder why the people didn’t dive, and eat, and dry on the beach in the sun, and leave when it was time and, in time, return? …

Oh, my dear traveller! Why did you come now?

Why did you not come sooner?

To see Tsrniche full of people To see people singing, people smiling Oh, my dear traveller! Why didn’t you come sooner?**

RVIVING THE SOIL

age: JACQUELINE LEDOUX

But the stillness was the sleep of swords” Zora Neale Hurston She didn't saunter, she wasn't cocky, but she was overly relaxed. She had been chatting with the Dunnes Stores Girl: Sisters from the same overcast soil.

My wait had been overstretched by the confidence they shared.

The volume of her shopping did not compel consideration for others waiting.

Maybe if our faces looked more closely related?

Her pace matts my dreads. Her ease mocks my schedule.

Well-trained expressions mask tensions; weather pummelled patience will endure against the liberties she takes.

My daughter waits by the far wall, fingers tracing shadows, her cheeks are still bruised from tears.

Now, like us, the shopper's own daughter waits as she strolls back into the isles.

I am swamped by indifference to injustice; bate, from lifting pan African weights.

The shopper ambles back to the check-out waving the Colgate, she forgot.

Hard to be on your own after a loss, Dunnes Stores consoles.

Who can swallow storms?

My rage retreats to our shared fragility: Both trying to grow under fierce circumstances.

Prospects are usually darkened by the colour of one's face, paranoia is a reasonable response.

But, shur, we both come from the soil, after all.

GREDIENTS (FOR A MOTHER)

I set her down in a thousand square-foot glass prison.

First, I give her stacking spoons, blue nesting cups, a mixing bowl, sugar, water, flour, butter—

she redecorates the kitchen while I make nut bars and bake scones in heart-shaped silicone moulds.

Then she’s two and we’re both on the floor, greasing tins, cracking eggs, her hands are miniatures of mine.

Together, with one spoon, we stir until she stomps, Me do!

I watch her batter-freckled face, furious

with concentration; stirring, pouring, powdering, while my trembling fingers smear clots of dough

and broken shells across my face, my neck, my breasts, my bird-bone ribs.

AEVE KEANE

HE BOOKSHELF

Tiny frog, once you swam and jumped around my insides; heel in rib, elbow in gut.

Now your heels stamp carpet, your little hands open doors much too big for you, your elbow lending weight.

You slide away the barrier, between you and words you cannot read yet.

A glass front, no match.

Warm palms grab covers, grubby fingers turn pages, awkwardly – Tearing without intent, like you tore before once, unwittingly – You create a tower of discarded titles piled with accidental meaning.

Wild The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Don’t Touch My Hair The God of Small Things Fortunately, The Milk Wonder

EST2022 CORK FESTIVAL July I wasLITERARY lucky enough to be mentor to the Irish iters Centre Young Writer Delegates at West Cork Literary sh Writer's Centre Young Writer Delegates

tival: Darcey Dugan, Mark Jackson, Em Egan Reeve and tlin Young. It was a privilege to work with four such iting, talented and innovative voices. As well as throwing mselves whole-heartedly into the festival and producing at work, they were a joy to hang out with, as was Jess Kinney of the Irish Writers Centre. It all made for a rious week in Bantry where we were so well looked after Eimear O’Herlihy and Jennifer deBie of West Cork erary Festival.

During our week in Bantry, the delegates and I ended events together and got to meet many of the writers pearing at the festival. The delegates sent me work to ich I suggested edits, and we had a workshop where they wed me with new writing they produced. They shone as ders at the open mic in Ma Murphys, and at the Young iter Delegates Showcase event where they read and wered audience questions as if they’d been doing it all ir lives! We’re going to be hearing a lot more from these r talented young voices in the future.

Danielle McLaughlin is an award-winning novelist.

A LOSS OF RESPECT Heuston is always jammed at Christmas. This is where I found myself after a two-and-a-half-hour journey of trying not to stare at the people seated opposite me. The landscape beyond the train window had been one of continual mist and frost, which had inspired one or two nicely atmospheric photos.

As the afternoon melted into evening and the sun went down, I ended up staring at my own haggard reflection as we screeched into the station. I hauled my bags off the rack and dragged them through the station’s thick layer of dust and grime.

Dad was waiting outside in his pride and joy – his 2018 white BMW with black leather interior and mahogany finish. He let me come to him.

Once I had thrown my bags into the boot and gotten in, he remarked on how much I had brought back with me. I told him I needed Mam to wash a few extra clothes this time around. In his practised clinical way, he looked into my eyes, saw I wasn’t lying, and so started the engine. We sped off along the quays.

For the forty or so minutes we were together, barely a word was exchanged. I couldn’t stop my right leg from jiggling, and I wasn’t sure if it was the worry of what I would soon tell him or some secret that he was hiding from me.

We finally reached the tall wrought iron gates that now acted as a reminder of my childhood. We drove up the driveway and parked outside the porch.

Mam was her usual bubbly self and welcomed me home with a big hug and a kiss.

‘Jesus, Éanna, you’ve got enough stuff with you anyway.’

I smiled and shrugged – this was usually enough to convince her of anything.

I carried my bags upstairs to my room and collapsed onto my bed. I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I had done the right thing. I knew what everyone would tell me and that’s why I had kept it to myself. Not even Annie knew and maybe I just wouldn’t tell her.

The house felt different, quieter, probably because Sorcha wasn’t back yet, or else I had become accustomed to the constant din of student accommodation.

My phone buzzed twice on the nightstand. I turned it off without looking at the screen and waited for Mam to call me for tea.

Sorcha came home the next day, wearing her favourite oversized white puffer jacket with a new pair of blue high-waisted jeans. I let Mam fuss over her uninterrupted for a while. Dad was out at his practice, seeing his final few patients before Christmas day.

I was watching TV in the living room when Sorcha popped her head in the door.

‘Not even going to give your big sister a hug?’

‘I’m nineteen.’

She pretend-frowned at me. I sighed and got up. She wrapped her arms around me.

‘I think you’ve gotten taller,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ I said as I sat back down. ‘It’s possible.’

‘How’s college going, anyway?’ she asked as she threw her coat on the sofa and sat beside me.

I changed channels.

‘Fine, fine,’ I said. ‘No big news.’

‘Not until next year. Still on the basics. It would bore you to death if I told you, honestly.’ ‘Dad always says the same thing,’ she said and crossed her legs.

‘He’d know alright.’

‘What about the photography?’ she said after a moment of silence. ‘Take any good pictures lately?’

I unlocked my phone and showed her the ones I had taken on the train.

‘Very avant-garde,’ she said.

I shrugged and switched channels again. She would never understand art, she didn’t have the eye for it. She handed the phone back.

We watched some 4K David Attenborough documentary in silence for a few minutes. A group of walruses fell to their death over a muddy cliff where once there had been a slide of ice to the pale blue ocean.

‘The Christmas tree looks nice this year.’

I looked over at the artificial tree in the corner, laden down with new Brown Thomas-bought decorations.

‘I had nothing to do with it,’ I said.

She nodded.

When it came to Christmas day, we had Uncle Derek and Aunt Therese over, as well as my grandfather. We sat around the table as though we were a proper family, with Dad at the head of the table.

Mam was busy as usual, hurrying about the kitchen. I wanted to tell her to take it easy, but I knew she took pride in her Christmas dinner.

There was the customary talk of weather, politics, and Dad’s practice. Nothing ever went right with Dad’s practice, that’s what my childhood had taught me.

After about half an hour of this, my grandfather turned to me, which induced more fear in my heart than I felt was appropriate.

‘How are you liking Galway, Éanna?’ he asked from his high-backed, therapeutic chair that I had lugged from the garage the day before.

‘It’s going fine, thanks.’

‘Oh yes? Getting good grades, I hope?’

‘Well, I’m passing,’ I said through gritted teeth.

‘Just passing?’ he replied.

I nodded. What did he want me to say? That I was the next Edward Jenner and planned to cure cancer or something?

‘They’ve got a great faculty there,’ Dad said.

‘My friend Susan’s boyfriend went there,’ Sorcha said, ‘and he loved it.’

‘Sure, didn’t little Franky O’Sullivan from down the road go there?’ Aunt Therese added.

‘Who?’ Uncle Derek asked.

‘Denise’s young lad.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ he said. ‘And he got a first, I believe.’

‘That’s right,’ Aunt Therese said, and turned to me with a smile. ‘No pressure, Éanna.’

I gave her a quick smile and then folded a slab of ham into my mouth.

versation I had no interest in, like Sorcha’s new bathroom tiles in her apartment, or Mam’s failure to a nail appointment.

‘What about that sweet girl Annie,’ Mam said to me. ‘How’s she keeping?’

Everyone turned to me.

‘Good, good,’ I said. ‘But maybe it was only a short-lived thing, you know.’

‘Did she break up with you?’

‘No, no,’ I said, knowing that she would when she found out what I had done. Dating a future tor had always been an important talking point for her. She didn’t like to talk about art, or dreams.

‘I’ll see her when I get back,’ I said. ‘After Christmas.’

Mam nodded. Dad kept his eyes on me.

I excused myself and went to the bathroom.

I closed the dining room doors quietly behind me and locked myself in the downstairs toilet. I cked my phone, there were three missed phone calls from Annie and one from my housemate Ben. What did they want me to tell them? That I was going to come back after Christmas and that rything was going to be alright?

Right now, Annie was most likely bragging to her family about her boyfriend Éanna, the soon-todoctor. Yes, I could hear her say, every couple has their issues, but Éanna and I are meant to be ether. I could just imagine her little blonde head nodding and chewing over Christmas dinner. ewing and nodding.

I looked at myself in the mirror and I didn’t like what I saw. Maybe there was a way I could just er tell them. Keep up the pretence for four more years and then print off one of those fake, online rees. Download it from some website and do a Catch Me if You Can job on it.

No, no, that wasn’t the way. I had to be honest with myself and them. I like photography, no I e photography. I could imagine a whole future for myself taking pictures and who knew where it might d? Freelancing for news outlets, covering important current affairs, directing short films? eryone should know about this world I had made in my head because I had no intentions of wasting more of my life in a sterile lab, trying to decide which pipette was the best suited for the given task.

I took a deep breath and unlocked the door. Now was as good a time as any to tell them.

*** alked back into the dining room. Mam looked up at me.

‘Everything alright, Éanna?’ she said.

I smiled and took my seat beside Uncle Derek. Mam’s traditional sherry trifle was waiting for me tall wine glass.

‘Fine,’ I said and picked up my spoon. cle Derek nudged me in the ribs and gave me a wink.

Sorcha, Dad, and my grandfather were talking about Sorcha’s new position at the firm. I dug into trifle and forced myself to swallow, waiting for the right moment.

‘Sorcha was saying that you’re still taking photos,’ Aunt Therese said.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Well, can I see some?’

‘I put them all on my laptop last night,’ I said.

‘Well, go get your laptop, silly.’

‘You’ve got to take your hobbies seriously,’ Uncle Derek chimed in. ‘It’s very important for a young man. Girls like that sort of thing.’

These old fucks, could they not take a hint?

‘I take it pretty seriously,’ I said and swallowed another bite.

‘You don’t seem to, honey,’ Aunt Therese said.

Mam looked over at her sister.

‘Believe me, I do,’ I said. ‘Éanna,’ Mam said. ‘Your tone.’

I put my spoon down.

‘You know, I take it so seriously that I’ve . . . that I’ve dropped out. How about that? Is that seriously enough for you?’

My aunt put down her cup. A silence pervaded the room.

‘You’ve done what?’ Dad said.

I looked at him.

‘Those points -’ he began. ‘All those points. What about all those points?’

‘The only reason I got those points was because of all the grind schools. It had nothing to do with me.’ ‘Éanna,’ Mam said. ‘You realise you’ve done a very serious thing, don’t you?’

‘Medicine is the lifeblood of this family,’ my grandfather said, ‘it literally runs through our veins.’

‘No,’ Dad said. ‘You can’t drop out, you simply can’t.’

‘I already did! What don’t you understand? I haven’t been in the course for over a month. I was just staying in the flat so you wouldn’t think anything was going on.’

My father stood up, he was red in the face.

‘You ungrateful little brat! You’ve always been like this. Do you know how hard I’ve had to work so we could live this kind of lifestyle?’

‘And what lifestyle is that?’ I said. ‘Constantly being missing and then when you are home, spending all your time obsessing over your car? Not much of a life if you ask me.’ ‘Éanna,’ Mam said, ‘go to your room.’

‘What? I’m almost twenty. When is everyone going to understand that I’m an adult?’

Aunt Therese was tutting to herself.

I looked around the room and saw no hint of empathy.

‘Fuck this,’ I said and left the room.

Once I was in the hall, I couldn’t think of anywhere to go so I grabbed my jacket from the coat rack and went outside in the cold. *** I walked down the driveway and tread on the hard, frozen grass of our front garden. I went and sat on the wooden bench in front of the metal mushroom-shaped water fountain that probably hadn’t been turned on since summer.

allic orb.

I heard the front door open, so I sank down into the bench, even though it was impossible to see water feature from the front door because of a line of small bushes along the driveway.

Sorcha walked halfway down the drive and then came over to me.

She sat beside me.

‘Well, that was something,’ she said.

I didn’t say anything.

‘Look, I get it. It’s hard to live up to everyone’s expectations and maybe sometimes it’s better to what your heart tells you.’

‘You think?’ I said.

‘Yeah, I mean I loved commerce but if you want to do photography then you shouldn’t need one’s permission.’

I hugged her then for the first time in years.

‘Thanks Sorcha,’ I said.

We sat there looking at the fountain for a while.

‘Mam and Dad are separating,’ she said.

I turned to her.

‘What?’

‘They didn’t want to tell you yet. They didn’t know how you’d handle it.’

I laughed nervously.

‘Maybe they were right,’ I said.

‘We knew this day was coming though, didn’t we? It wasn’t a surprise when they told me.’

‘When was that?’

‘About a month ago.’

I nodded and swallowed deeply. I wasn’t sure what to say or if there was anything to say.

‘Come on,’ she said and stood up. ‘It’s too cold out here.’

‘I’ll be in in a second,’ I said.

She walked off, her Docs crunching in the hardened grass.

I stayed there for another minute, watching myself massive against the curvilinear sky in the s reflection. As I sat there, a robin landed on the centre of the fountain, where the water normally mes out.

It looked at me with its small inky eye, and so did its mirror reflection, backlit by the crisp winter t.

I took out my phone and zoomed in on its eye, bordered by a burnt orange. If only I had my LR with me, but I guess this would do.

I snapped a shot of it looking directly at me.

It shook its head and flew off.

46A Is this how I'm finding out then? Louisa asked as she spun around and stood nose to nose with Arthur.

What the fuck do you mean by that? Arthur forced a snort of laughter through his nose.

Louisa was so close to him she could feel the whiskey burn his sinuses. People had told her to expect with marriage that you would begin to feel things less, that you grew a thicker skin. That his dinner party digs wouldn't carry such a sting.

If this is happening, with me finding out you're sleeping with other women then I would just like to be in on the joke, Louisa said as she watched Arthur realize his joke was having the intended effect.

The room went cold as the crowd sucked in their hot-air comments on the situation. The questions in the post-dinner party game had been called out by their guests with reckless abandon and had touched the newest nerve in Louisa and Arthur's marriage. Soon after the guests were filling out of the house, then it was just Louisa and Arthur. Joni had been shooed out skipping their usual postgradpostparty-postmortem.

I was joking you know, Arthur's Eton knock-off accent didn't ever lend itself to any explanation of his actions.

No, Louisa said, I know.

I hate that sentence, Arthur let the stack of plates in his hand slam into the sink, I never have any fucking clue what you're saying.

I know.

They put you on a pedestal, Arthur said, because they all know these impressive things about you.

So you wanted to knock me down a few pegs? She asked.

No Louisa, I wanted to show them you are in fact a human being.

Aren't you supposed to see me as perfect?

No, I'm supposed to see your flaws and love them too, Arthur had been spoon fed this line from his father to use in marital disputes. He had used it ten times before.

You aren't doing either. You are, she looked at him and saw his eyebrow raised, waiting impatiently. You're doing a satire of someone who might love me.

That isn't fair, he said.

Louisa put the last plate on the drying rack as Arthur leaned against the counter, having watched her clean up. She went to the hallway and turned towards the front door. She put on her jacket and left.

Louisa had never thought she was the kind of person who would run headfirst into marriage like a glassdoor when she found out she was pregnant. A week into being married the doctor told her she had what they called a silent miscarriage. At some point, the fetus gave up developing but didn't alert her with excessive pain or bleeding. On the way back from the doctor's office, she looked on her phone for application closing dates of post-grad programs in Dublin. She kept checking her pockets for the prescription the doctor had written for miscarriage management. She had stacked the words on top of each other in her head.

management She had thought of awful things she could say to Arthur when he came in the door. Crude jokes and ways to blame him. But she knew, if it was anyone's fault it was her. Louisa in a state of shock listed off all the potential causes to the doctor. Infidelity. Incompetence. The doctor told her the fetus had died before any of the things she had confessed to and then took back what he said - said it wasn't a case of death but a case of stopped developing. He stopped himself, but Louisa felt like the words 'moral decay' were close to coming out of his mouth.

Arthur didn't come to appointments. Arthur had never rushed to her side. Lost the baby, she texted him before going into the tube station. When she came back up to the ground, she had one missed call and one text, both from Joni. She wasn't having a good day of it, the text read, but in cleaning out her mother's house, Joni had found a picture of them from school. Attached was a picture of them in primary school. Hair braided and in their red uniforms, sitting on a wall with their socks pulled down on a day dated September. Joni made a joke about getting pregnant herself so they recreate the picture with their own little girls. Louisa who had felt no attachment to the pregnancy before losing it found herself sobbing in the bathroom of a pub.

Things happened quicker than they should have. Soon it was September and Louisa had begun her programme. She clung to the older women who returned to university after their late in life divorces. Some days she walked to classes, some days she got the bus. Her favorite time of day was the mid-morning lull on the buses that still carried cold still air from the seaside suburbs.

It was soothing to be back in a place that was familiar rather than pseudo-familiar in the way London and university had been. She felt herself sink into the landscape rather than stand pronounced against it. Arthur's cruelty didn't stab here the way it did at university or in London. Here his cruelty felt childish. Back in England, she had felt his desired effects. She carried each hurled insult around in coat pockets and heard him narrate the faults in all her actions.

She felt for the box of smokes in her pocket. Reaching in and pulling out a box that showed tooth decay that spread through an entire mouth. The flesh was bright red. Bitten to that stage, like tugged on or slapped cheeks. By this point Louisa was in the centre of town, other than the selfassured stragglers, the city was quiet. She was opposite the university gates and wondered about the choices she had made to bring her back to this place. Louisa stood under a street light studying it for a moment, up ahead an electric bus sign glowed. It promised one final bus for the night. Louisa sat at the stop, with some morbid curiosity about if the bus would even show up. The bus route, the 46A was familiar, one Lousia and Joni used to take out to the beach. On hot Fridays in August and September, when school was just starting up, they would go sea swimming. Louisa and Joni would put their swimsuits on under their school uniforms at lunch and squirm in them till the end of the day.

When they finally reached the sand, they would rip off their uniform and race towards the sea.

The saltwater would dissolve away the homework assignments written on the back of their hands and the sweat from the hot recycled air of the bus. When they eventually got out of the sea, they would let the uniform fabric stick to their still-damp skin. They would wring their hair out while waiting for the next bus back to the city outside chain-cafes. Louisa wondered what the area was like at night. She could imagine running into people from secondary school stumbling out of pubs and back to their parents' houses. Presenting her with drunken burps in her face as they explained they were saving up for their own place.

explain to them she got married on a Wednesday afternoon in a clerical office. She would avoid the s. She would go to the Forty Foot, the diving spot. She would kick off her heels and dive in and ch as the debris of her coat pockets floated to the surface. The bus ticket that got her there. The pping receipt from the posh market where she had gotten supplies for that night's dinner party. The scription she never filled. The pen from the fertility clinic. Her cigarettes waterlogged. Her wallet and ne would sink with her she assumed. She thought about the sonogram picture disintegrating, but polaroid from Joni's 21st plastic and solid holding up in the saltwater. She needed to clean out her let.

She waited at the stop for half an hour. One bus raced past, the yellow glow of text reading Out Service. She waited ten more minutes after the promised bus disappeared from the screen. She ked at her phone at 10.32 pm. It felt like 4 in the morning. Louisa considered staying rooted to the p until the 46A showed. Louisa closed her eyes, to give them a reprieve from anxiously staring down street waiting for the bus's appearance. She thought she was imagining the squeak of the wheels doors.

She opened her eyes and the bus driver stared expectantly at her. She got on the bus.

Watching the city turn to suburb she thought about the alternative to what she was leaving ind in the house. She imagined Arthur up all night with a screaming child, probably only a few nths old at this point. Arthur would call her and beg for her to come back because he knew where hing was. But if they had a child they wouldn't be in Dublin. They wouldn't have been hosting a ner party to celebrate the end of the semester. But Louisa could guess at this minute Arthur was in , reading an Economist article, waiting for the click of the door for her arrival back. Louisa wondered marriage was a case of always existing in a different reality to the one you were living. A life in the at-ifs. She realized that was more a case of miscarriage than marriage.

Louisa, shaken out of her speculation, got off at the next familiar stop. She'd walk to Joni's or own house, or a psychiatric unit, whichever she encountered first. She went down a road she ally avoided Mount Pleasant. If you rolled it around in your mouth long enough its name would ome pornographic, round, hard and smooth in your mouth. She paused in front of one of the terrace ses with a sticky lock.

She stood on the opposite side of the narrow street and watched the movement of light and life he house she had studied for so long. She saw a rectangle of warm kitchen lighting feed into the nt room, where the blue light of the tv mingled with the lamp that had a bulb that got so hot it once tered the skin of her finger. She didn't notice her breath catch as a figure blocked the light of the hen, his arm bent, a mug in hand. She watched him put it down on the table in front of the sofa.

The figure came to the window, he went to pull the curtains and saw her. She watched him se, trying to decipher if it was her or not. The street light she was standing under gave her away.

He opened a window and he shouted across the street to her, Louisa?

Louisa could begin to make out his features. If she got a little closer she knew she would see a half-moon on the bridge of his nose. A scar the same size as the whites of his fingernail under his eyebrow. lo.

Enjoying the view? Ciaran asked I'm getting the perverted appeal, Louisa called back.

No, I think it would ruin the perverted appeal.

Would you just come in?

She crossed the street, looking both ways despite it being one-way. At the end of the street, a double-decker rush of blue and yellow. She stood at the gate waiting for him to come to the front door and open it. She couldn't see Ciaran's head resting on the door, considering what was about to happen.

The door, eventually, opened. She walked in, she expected him to try and hug or kiss her or initiate some sort of physical contact. Instead, he stood with his back flat against the wall holding the door open and pointed his hand in the direction of the kitchen. Louisa took her usual seat at the table.

I didn't know you were back. Visiting Joni? He asked I moved back, she said.

Tea? He asked Sure.

He put the kettle on but made no further efforts to make the tea.

Where are you living then? He asked.

We're in Rathmines, she said, I'm surprised I haven't run into you yet.

Did you and Joni finally move in together then? He asked.

No, actually, I live with my husband.

Very funny Louisa.

I'm serious Ciaran.

Condensation from the kettle dropped from the bottom of the cupboard onto the counter.

So tell me about the husband, Ciaran prompted.

It's barely a marriage, I wouldn’t concern yourself with it.

What makes something barely a marriage? Ciaran suppressed a smile. He had missed her melodrama.

We got married because I was pregnant, and then I wasn't pregnant.

Louisa — His parents felt guilty because they pressured us to get married, Louisa explained, They asked what I wanted, which was the first time I had been asked that question in a while and I said I wanted to go back to study and I wanted to go back home. So they pay my fees and the mortgage payments, and he flies back and forth to London.

The English are well used to their sons knocking up the Irish scullery maids, Ciaran said.

Is that really all you have to say?

Ciaran got up to make the tea.

Are you happy? Ciaran asked placing a mug in front of her.

Yes, Louisa said, most of the time. Mainly when he's gone.

Generally, Louisa?

I got what I wanted, Louisa said.

That's not enough for anyone, Ciaran said.

Louisa looked up at the ceiling and found a water stain to associate the truism with the next time she came over.

Would you leave him for me? This was Ciaran's way. Fix the past through moralizing. Fuck the future with a hypothetical.

akes the world less terrifying to think that maybe one person hasn't changed at all, Louisa continued ook at the ceiling as she explained this.

Would you do it if it would be good for you? Ciaran asked.

God no, but maybe I'd do it if I thought it would do you any good. I think it's good you're alone, said.

A wince shot over Ciaran's face. Louisa realized how like Arthur she had become. How far she s from who she was when Ciaran loved her.

The next day was a Sunday. The first 46A would leave Dun Laoghaire at 8.30am. She thought he bitter instant coffee from the canister next to the kettle and calling Joni from the still active phone in the house.

Can I sleep here tonight? Louisa asked.

REITRIC “Have you noticed the smell?” she said, the woman at the front of the elevator, the one who I had spotted through discoloured lace curtains on the lonely winter evenings that had started to become a fixture in the long and dreadful storm that was my life. I would stare through my bedroom window, across the courtyard of my complex, for hours on end, figuring out my neighbours, watching from various angles that hurt my neck and strained my eyes, unsettling them in the hallways when we spoke and I knew personal details about their recent evenings.

I had never met her in person before. She lived in a section of our building that had direct access to the lobby, so I was baffled as to why she was here, but I couldn’t say that. That would be strange, and I did not wish for that impression to be given.

The smell. She wanted to know about the smell.

I had noticed it, as she had asked.

“Yes,” I said, glancing in the mirror, pondering how she might perceive me were her head turned towards me and not fixed firmly on the elevator doors.

“And what are you going to do about it?” The doors opened, and she stepped off, never glancing back.

I was supposed to be getting off on the same floor, but I found myself considering what, in fact, I was going to do about the stench. I was late for work that day. * In therapy that evening I asked the doctor what I should do. He suggested that it might be better if I focused on the larger things in my life that needed working on, like my body dysmorphia and suicidal ideation. I acted as if he hadn’t suggested that because those things were major parts of my personality. If I were to grow as a person and lose either of those traits, I would simply not have any thoughts.

“Do you think the smell is real?” I asked him. He replied that it was highly unlikely two people who had never spoken before had fabricated a smell to complain about in a shared elevator.

“What if I’ve imagined it so that I can develop a connection with her?” I asked.

He looked at me, probably troubled by the extent of my self-evaluation. He sighed, and I felt the need to please him, so I did what I always did when there was a lull in conversation.

“Do you want to hear about the sexual abuse I suffered as a teenager?”

That seemed to satisfy him. They all enjoyed hearing about that. They could really sit and think about it, bathing in the liquid trauma that spilled from my mouth. * I walked home, and on my trip, I noticed how very few things I saw in the sky. There were no airplanes, no helicopters, barely even a cloud. It was a murky blue kind of day and the world felt empty. I hoped (in my heart) that the air-dwelling objects would return soon, their absence disconcerting, but I felt (in my heart) that nothing was getting better from here. A sad tumble of dry leaves had fluttered into my abdomen, the crunchiness of them increasing my awareness of just how little time I had left, how many years I had occupied within my depressed stupor. How wasteful I was.

A man on the street said hello to me. We knew one another but I did not reply.

le eating a pint of cookie dough ice-cream. I texted three of my exes and sat very still on a chair for r an hour, staring at the wall, dreaming about a wedding that wasn’t happening anytime soon and dren that shouldn’t happen anytime at all. I did some chores and moved to the window of my room.

I looked across the courtyard, and there she was, her face grey in the light, cloaked in those t brown net curtains, ghostly, staring right back at me. She waved, frightening me, and I shut my ds as quickly as I could and lay in bed, devising my next dangerous act, knowing that I couldn’t do thing of the sort without losing my job.

Midway through my mind’s planning of a complex plot (where I would fake my own death by ving my clothes next to the sea, wetting them slightly in the brine, before getting changed into a re set which I had in my rucksack. I would then use public transport, and a plane ((boarding with my passport)) to start my new life abroad, somewhere cold with hostile people, probably committing cide within a week or two without my essential serotonin boosting medication) a knock sounded on door. I wasn’t sure who it was, but opened it nonetheless, and was surprised to see her there.

“I can’t sleep,” she said.

“How do you know where I live?”

“Have you ever seen that episode of ‘Friends’?”

I thought for a second and realised that I had seen that episode of ‘Friends’, to my dismay. She n’t pause for long enough to allow me to reply, pushing past me to enter my home.

She stood in the middle of my large sitting room, looking (extremely) small and (extremely) ill, ch like a child from a film adaptation of a Dickens novel, although she must have been my age or er. A small beacon of desperation in an otherwise completely ordinary room, the magnolia walls uring that the cacophony of distress could not escape. She paced, either on some kind of stimulant going through a manic episode (with which I was familiar) and I understood, in that moment, how ny people must have fallen in love with her. A waif, a wisp, and yet I’m sure she left dozens of ken hearts scattered in her wake. When I was younger, I was jealous of girls like that, thought that existing they undermined my very being. In the time since I had become accustomed to being moralized, and had found my peace in the fact that all of men I tended to date or sleep with would mit to me that they actually had a serious girlfriend, who would be a girl like that. Someone who I ldn’t compare to, but who still wasn’t good enough to make him faithful.

She spoke.

“The smell. It’s just as bad in here. How do you live with it?”

“I’ve become accustomed to it, I suppose. When I first moved in, I contacted the landlord about He came and agreed that the smell was strange, but he checked all over the apartment, inside the ls, under the floors, at my insistence. He said that there was no sign of whatever the smell was. No upstairs complained, only me, so he suggested it was something to do with the basement. Or the ns. And he only owns this apartment, not the entire building, so he couldn’t go and mess around h the basement. Or the drains.”

As I said it, I knew that it was true, but it felt as though I hadn’t thought about this time in my life ce it had happened. It had been pushed out of my mind. Wasn’t that peculiar? I had accepted that I s supposed to exist in a world that smelled like this, an all-consuming smell of collapse. It was very d, but very alive, if a smell could be both of those things.

She crossed her arms, and asked me (clearly displeased), “How long ago was that?”

She was quite obviously upset by this – having to compose herself by pulling on the hem of her irt – exposing a slice of fragile seeming collarbone that jutted out from under mottled greying skin en she spoke, not loud enough to be considered yelling but loud nonetheless.

“Do people never come to your house? I had a friend over last week and she told me she ldn’t bear it.”

She seemed distressed. I wondered why she would be, but remembered that most people live some degree of community, with family and friends, not the era of solitude that I had grown mplacent with.

“No. I meet them somewhere else,” I said, which was not true.

“Huh. Makes sense. Well.” Lost for words she paced more. “I can’t leave this building unless I e a reason”.

“Oh. That’s how most people think, don’t worry. You don’t really do things unless you have a son, that’s just how life works.”

I was impressed by my sincerity, my eloquence, and I felt only pride in myself for articulating it well. I remembered that I had in fact gotten rid of my rug, for fear it would hold onto the odour. It had n an (almost) automatic act at the time, but now I questioned it. Had the smell, forgotten about ore she informed me of it, influenced my decisions over the past year, or so? I was suddenly aware my lack of agency, my lack of control. My mind was truly an untrustworthy, ugly thing.

“Give me a tour of your house” she said, but opened the door to my kitchen before I could pond.

“The kitchen looks normal.” She sounded surprised and began opening up drawers and pecting my crockery, running her finger along the inside of my stainless-steel sink. It was clean. I ely used it.

“But here, it gets worse. Can you tell?”

She was pressed up against the (empty) fridge, body between my (empty) rubbish bin, and the ce that should hold a dishwasher but didn’t. I could, but I had always assumed it was the bin. The ell of rubbish, although I kept the home clean. Why had I assumed that?

(My mother said I assumed too much, acidic words spat at me while I cowered in my childhood hen, a dozen years ago. I was a very silly child, always worrying, seeking affection when she had e to give. She did not want something so small and so needy, and my requirements were barely as a result. This was fine, entirely understandable in fact. I knew that were I to become a mother I uld be much the same, distant and unavailable.)

“My kitchen is the same,” She said. “It has to be the apartment, or the apartments between us. w many are there? Three? Four? It’s got to be. Does anyone live in them?”

There were three, and nobody did. I was lost for words. I now feared the smell may be of omposition, and if so, that was beginning to look (more and more) as if it may be a person. A eased human being, rotting for over a year, trying to alert me of its decay. My knowledge of bodies s limited to my exposure to the CSI franchise as an adolescent, so I wasn’t sure how long it took for process to complete itself.

In the case of my neighbour’s possible decomposition, I was doubtful. I was sure that the smell uld have stopped by now. There would be a limited amount of body. Still, the bottom of my stomach riddled with algae coated stones.

She didn’t seem worried.

“Come on,” she said, not recognising the horror that had to have shown on my face.

immensely.

We looked at the apartments that formed the connection between the right side of her apartment and the left side of mine. We were underground, in a sense, here, these being at a sub street level, the entrance to the outside world being two floors above us. Usually the weight of everything above, the heaviness of the air, didn’t bother me. Tonight the sky was molten metal, and I felt seconds away from being crumpled by it.

“Wait a second.” She shimmied her window open and disappeared inside. When she entered her apartment, she did not turn on any lights. I was left alone in the muggy night air, almost entirely in darkness save for the yellowy glow from my living room window. My bedroom was unlit.

I was not wearing any shoes, I realised. I could feel the moss-clogged drains beneath my feet, imagined the woodlice that must be scuttling around on the ground below.

She came out with a hammer. A large one, not an implement I would have seen being in a toolbox but one that might be stored in a (large) storeroom where (large) people who did (large and) very crucial roadworks could collect it from, although (I supposed) they had machinery for that now.

“What are you doing?” I asked, and she didn’t respond but she did swing the hammer into the window, breaking it.

The glass shattered inwards with little resistance.

And a pigeon flew out.

Another.

Dozens, fluttering through the violent black of the sky.

We looked at each other, her and I, but it wasn’t clear what her thoughts on this delightful development were. She went to the next apartments window, breaking that too.

More pigeons, this time close to fifty, fluttered out, cooing, enjoying the crisp air on their silver feathers.

“I can’t believe they were trapped in there,” I said, and I felt my face break into an all too rare smile, for I knew that well over sixty of them were now free, ready to perch on tin roofs and obstruct footpaths.

“We have more work to do yet,” she said, grimly, and swung the hammer into the last window.

There was silence. No birds exited.

We peered in.

Inside was a mass, a gurgling lump of something distinctly avian. It was a body, and a large one at that, but like a Portuguese Man-O-War it was a creature made from smaller components, each once secular but now part of something terrible. Bones, sure, and lots of them, but an ooze of dread between, and I knew that it was the children, the wrinkled pink babies exploring the vast remains of their dead ancestors.

The smell was pungent.

d holding it high

WO mark POEMS the moment the wind changes, meday in exact the future,

d when the first tired leafIfalls. cenote I have gathered everything need, llpapered and organised, ill be busy ected shoes and necklaces for every occasion, airing mycolour shoes of nail polish, ry single dtched stitching my socks the bedsheets er days of walking he pillows gs the earth, hearound curtains.

n resting. ce my plants are all alive diberately. in their right pots, th my whole self. d I have all the right spices for every dish, ad, baking, and bicarbonate soda, en this time comes re will hall givebe it no all room away for anything else.

is why ds sleep on the floor. en air,I have gathered everything I need, ill let it allmushrooms, go. ries, and d be constantly filled with fields.

ere will be no room for anything else then.

ill be far too busy king sure the dough sits g enough to rise d the tea leaves ve long enough to infuse.

mind with be too full h knowing what to plant and when, at bird is which, en they nest d how they cry. ich weeds cure my joints, brain, heart.

and holding it high TWO to mark POEMS the moment the wind changes, Someday in exact the future, and note when the first tired leafIfalls. once I have gathered everything need, wallpapered and organised, Icollected will be busy shoes and necklaces for every occasion, repairing mycolour shoes of nail polish, every single and stitching my socks matched the bedsheets after days of walking to the pillows rings the earth, to thearound curtains. then resting.

Once my plants are all alive Deliberately. and in their right pots, With my whole self. and I have all the right spices for every dish, bread, baking, and bicarbonate soda, When this time comes there I shallwill givebe it no all room away for anything else.

This sleep is why and on the floor. when Eat air,I have gathered everything I need, Iberries, will letand it allmushrooms, go. and be constantly filled with fields.

There will be no room for anything else then.

I will be far too busy making sure the dough sits long enough to rise and the tea leaves have long enough to infuse.

My mind with be too full with knowing what to plant and when, what bird is which, when they nest and how they cry.

Which weeds cure my joints, my brain, my heart.

Erasure from the script of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

sorry to bother you, but I couldn't get the

wnstairs door open. I guess they sent me the

tairs key. I couldn't get the downstairs door open.

d, I guess they sent me the upstairs key.

uldn't get the downstairs door open.

sorry to wake you.

hat's quite all right. It could happen to anyone,

e frequently does. Good night.

te to... I hate to bother you, but if I could ask more favour could I use the phone?

e. Why not? Thank you.

ll, this is a nice little place you've got here.

u just moved in, too, huh?

o. I've been here about a year.

e phone's over there. Well, it was. Oh, I remember.

uck it in the suitcase.

d of muffles the sound.

sorry. -Is he all right?

re. Sure. He's okay, aren't you, cat?

or old cat. Poor slob. Poor slob without a name.

e way I look at it, I don't have the right to give him one. don't belong to each other. just took up by the river one day. I don't even want to

n anything until I find a place where me and things go

ether. I'm not sure where that is, but I know what it's like.

like Tiffany's.

any's? You mean the jewellery store?

t's right. I'm crazy about Tiffany's. Listen.

The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of.

- Do you ever get that feeling? -Sure.

Well, when I get it, the only thing that does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany's. (?)

Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.

If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then... Then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

I'm sorry. You wanted something.

The telephone. It's just that I was supposed to meet somebody.

I mean, this is 10:00 Thursday morning, isn't it? I just got off a plane from Rome and I'm not too sure. Thursday. Is this Thursday?

-I think so. -Thursday! Oh, no, it can't be!

It's too gruesome.

Well, what's so gruesome about Thursday?

Nothing, except I can never remember when it's coming up.

NTRIC SPANDA Photographic Reverie

photographiques du Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire. Je sors, je rentre, je sors, je rentre… et j'ai beaucoup de mal à ressortir de l'exposition de la photographe Flore. Ses tirages captivent mon œil et mon coeur. Je sors, il ne fait pas très chaud, je prend un café dans un gobelet en carton qui me réchauffe les mains. Et puis je vois la serre, je la vois vraiment. On se regarde. Une énergie passe. Je change d'endroit pour passer par derrière. L'énergie est plus forte. Je pose mon café sur un petit mur et je photographie les seize faces vitrées de la serre. Je photographie très vite, aucune pensée vient entraver la relation à ce qui se montre.

Cette série de seize photographies est comme une fulgurance, comme un surgissement, un "spanda" tantrique. Avec l'impression profonde de m'être laissé guidé par l'énergie de la serre.

It's winter at the end of February this year. The last day of photographic exhibitions at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire. I go out, I go in, I go out, I go in … and I'm having a lot of trouble getting out of the exhibition by the photographer Flore. Her prints captivate my eye and my heart. I go out, it's not warm, I have a coffee in a paper cup that revives my hands.

And then I see the greenhouse, I really see it. We look at each other. An energy passes. I change places to go behind. The energy is stronger. I put my coffee on a low wall and I photograph the sixteen glass faces of the greenhouse. I photograph very quickly, with no thought betweem to hinder the relationship to what is shown.

This series of sixteen photographs is like a flash, like an upsurge, a tantric "spanda". With the deep impression of having let myself be guided by the energy of the greenhouse.

TER PRAGUE

Caterina was 20 years old and strong-willed. If there was something she didn’t like she said it up front, unapologetically. I think this is why I fell in love with her. Caterina was mature, more mature than me in a lot of ways. Although I was older, she’d done more living – travelling and working in different countries, hopping from place to place at a moment’s notice, becoming a citizen of the world.

She’d also led a difficult life. She’d experienced so much in such a short amount of time. Her eyes were the colour of knowledge.

She told me that when things were really bad for her before we met, she’d have sex with three or more men a day. She had sex when she was bored or feeling low. She used sex as an attempt to make herself feel better. It made me feel insecure and uncertain about our future. Could I really trust her? Could I really make a relationship work with her?

“You’re a sex addict?” I asked, and she said she had been and could be again.

On that first day, I stood outside the door of the apartment we’d booked for the next five nights.

It was all excitement and nerves, spiralling around my beating heart. When she opened the door she screamed and hugged me and kissed me as if to make sure I was real. I hadn’t seen her in three weeks. I was barely able to put down my bags as she kissed me all over. She cooed and whispered, “I missed you,” and I told her the same. The apartment was small, and the only bed was a fold-out couch.

But we hardly clocked it. Sex with Caterina was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It felt guilt free for the first time in my life. There was no fear of judgement. No sense of shame – shame couldn’t reach me all the way from Ireland.

Despite the insecurities, I knew I loved Caterina after that first night in Prague. I didn’t tell her right away. It seemed too soon and too bizarre to love someone so fully so soon. It didn’t make sense that I could feel so strongly after such little time. I told myself I was just getting caught up in the romance of something I’d never felt before. Emotions – all kinds of them – were full and vibrant for the first time, rather than far away and numb.

Caterina had been to Prague several times. She’d been travelling for over two years. Her family were wealthy but broken. She showed me pictures of them – of her brothers and mother and father – and it was clear she had love for her brothers but had a complicated relationship with her parents. She hadn’t seen her parents since she’d left, but she’d seen her brothers many times. I showed her pictures of my family too, but my relationships weren’t as complicated as hers appeared to be.

“Your brother is much better looking than you,” she joked, and kissed my neck.

Caterina wanted to study architecture and often pointed out features of building I would have never noticed. She adored the Charles Bridge. She blurted out unrehearsed facts – things she found interesting, dates, measurements, styles – details no tour guide would ever care to mention. She loved to use the word ‘typical’. English wasn’t her first language, and she used this word as an anchor, squeezing it into places it didn’t belong.

“This is a typical example of the Gothic style of architecture.”

It was a beautiful, crisp November morning as we walked the bridge. We laughed and pointed out statues and views as we meandered along. Caterina kept calling it the Carl Bridge, losing some letters in translation. She was all I could focus on. She was all I wanted to focus on. There was so much life in her that looked nothing like mine. The way I felt around her was the way I always hoped I could feel, it felt like I was alive.

We continued up the hill to Prague’s medieval castle and we looked out over the city. Red roofs, sparkling water, the bluest sky. The sun held court above us on its own; there wasn’t a single cloud. But the sun still had winter’s weakness; we could still see our words condensing as they left our mouths.

, talking about everything and nothing. Caterina didn’t like to drink as much as me, and she smoked ver she did get drunk. She mentioned she wanted to settle down somewhere eventually, but she sn’t sure where that might be.

“I’d like to visit Ireland, maybe. Not for you obviously, but maybe it will suit me better.” She stuck tongue out at me. I smiled and held her gaze. When we returned to the old town we ate gelato pite the cold. Caterina insisted.

“The gelato in Venice is much-a-better.”

She exaggerated her accent and shook her pinched fingertips at me. I couldn’t argue. She was y certain of this fact. We walked the entirety of Prague hand in hand that day, absorbed by one ther. I found myself doing the things I usually despised to see happy couples doing when I was single olding hands, kissing, and staring at each other. Over dinner we talked about the future and how ertain it was for us. She feared she’d never see me again if I returned to Ireland.

“It’ll work if we want it to work.”

And I did want it to work. I think she just needed to hear it from me. She needed reassurance. In same conversation Caterina brought up Switzerland again. Most men treated her terribly when she ked there during the summers.

“All they want is to fuck me and then they leave. That’s it.”

She was so matter-of fact about it.

“And any man I’ve been in a relationship with, no one has ever even bought me flowers. I’ve er been given flowers.”

She said she’d be returning to Switzerland again to work the following summer.

“Why would you go back to a place where you’re treated so badly?” I was trying to understand. e shrugged.

“The money is good.”

When we got back our apartment that evening, I told her I had to call my mother and would follow up in a bit. She was suspicious, and later she told me she thought I was calling another girl behind back. It was late. I ran through narrow streets to the only flower shop that was still open. I picked up t of everything, daisies and roses and tulips and lilies. The cashier wrapped my selection with paper le she chatted on her phone, securing the brown paper with Sello tape. I was sweaty and out of ath in the doorway when I arrived back. Caterina started crying when I revealed the flowers. She took m in one hand and held my chin in the other.

“Thank you.” Her eyes were bright with tears.

We had sex, and then I showed her a poem I’d written for her, and she told me she loved me for first time. It felt all perfectly clichéd and Hollywood, the way love was always portrayed. And, of rse, I told her I loved her back. Even though I hadn’t known her a month previous. We made plans to et again in Venice in December. I was going there anyway towards the end of my trip, so we planned pend ten days exploring the north of Italy together. She said we could go to the beach in the town ere she came from if it wasn’t snowing. Then we’d visit Venice and Verona and Milan before I flew me. I felt our lives slotting together.

Prague was a fever dream. None of it felt real. And maybe none of it was real. Maybe we were h caught in the moment precisely because it lacked reality. It was the romance you only see people erience on holidays, or in rom-coms. Even when we did simple things, like grocery shopping, it felt re vibrant with her than it ever did back home. Being away, being free, and being with her, drew life of the even most mundane things.

visited the Kafka Museum and we sat at the square overlooking the clock tower drinking beer at lunchtime. At the Christmas market she helped me pick out a scarf to bring home to my mother, something silk with blooming hues of gold and blue. We ate goulash. We petted dogs and we talked to strangers in an Irish bar. She kissed me whenever she got the urge and she’d always insist on coiling her fingers between mine. I was feeling affection I wasn’t used to. My heart was warm with her. She was a drug to which I was addicted, and I knew she felt the same way.

Yet under all of it there was mistrust and there was deceit. I didn’t really believe that she hadn’t been with another person while we were apart. I didn’t even truly mind if she had been with others, I just didn’t want to know about it. Then there was deceit on my part, because I had been with someone else. I didn’t want to know if she was sleeping with others, and so I assumed to return the favour. We were both single, travelling through Europe separately. We both avoided talking about commitment.

We’d said we loved each other, but people who love one another don’t do this. They don’t keep secrets and they don’t look elsewhere for love. We loved one another, or so we said, but I had slept with someone else, and I would again. I knew I should have felt some remorse for this. I knew I should have, but I couldn’t feel it.

Our final two days were spent in echo-chambered bliss, the rest of the world faded out of view.

And yet, I knew on some level that what we had wasn’t real. It felt superficial, fragile, insecure. Neither of us trusted the other fully. Caterina would make jokes about sleeping with other men whilst also saying she could never share me with anyone else. There were subtle cues, slight choices, that highlighted our faulty foundation. We never used each other’s phones, for example, or I wouldn’t let Caterina read my notebooks. Things you’d easily miss or choose to ignore. Warning signs that what we had might be different to what we thought we had.

After Prague Caterina planned to go to Germany to visit her best friend and work on a farm.

She never stayed anywhere for too long. She’d stay there for a week or two before heading home to Italy for a few weeks, and then she’d move on again.

“Why don’t you come to Hungary with me?”, I asked her.

“Because I’m going to Germany.”

“Do you have to go there?”

“Well, do you have to go to Budapest?”

After that, we dropped it. We’d be going our separate ways.

The city was frostbitten on our way to the station. Patches of shiny white still endured where the morning sun hadn’t yet reached. We didn’t speak much then, silenced by the uncertainty of our future together. I gave Caterina my tan Patagonia cap to keep safe until we met in Italy. I didn’t want her to give it back. It was my way of showing her that we’d definitely see one another again. We weren’t really certain of where or when we’d see one another. We just hoped we would.

I got on the train just before it began to pull out of the station. Caterina idled on the platform before turning back, my cap resting on her head, and made her way to a train that would take her in the opposite direction of me.

AITRESS

WAITRESS

g. walks another customer.

AITRESS

ep my back turned. ying I won't be noticed. ought it would be a quiet day. as been a quiet day.

ss," says the customer. ease turn around; I only want your attention for a minute."

eathe deeply and try and relax. ping I'll turn around and they will be gone.

ss," the customer says again. only take a minute of your time."

rn around and reluctantly walk towards the customer. prise, surprise, they’ve already made themselves at home. ey've been here before.

hat will it be?" I ask, I already know the answer.

e usual," the customer says, hink I'll go for ... r confidence, your sense of purpose with a side of your self-belief. before I forget, I'll substitute your positive thoughts negative, uncomfortable ones, sure you won't mind, you let me the last time."

d and walk away. at's the point in arguing? ey'll just keep asking until they get what they want.

They mercilessly ravish it in whole.

Swallowing every bite, they grow stronger as I grow weaker.

As I'm about to close up.

I feel them behind me, their breath on my neck.

A warm tingling sensation that makes me nauseous.

“Any chance of one for the road?" the customer enquiries.

“I don't think I've anything else to give you," I assure them.

“Very well then, until next time," the customer mumbles.

As they finally leave they turn around and say, “Oh of course, your tip, the usual rate I assume? Don’t forget Miss...”

“That I am nothing and of course, that I look fat today .... I know," I say before they get a chance to.

I take a minute after they leave.

When the place is empty, I can think clearly and finally close up.

When the place is empty, I think maybe I don't have to quit just yet.

I’m haunted by how angry the management would be with me.

If I moved on from here.

Just as I begin to get a sense of reality, I hear a sound that makes my body ache and head throb.

Ding.

In walks another customer.

FICTION

HERINE AIREY studied English at the University of Cambridge and lives in West Cork. Her first novel be published by Viking in 2025.

EGAN REEVE is a writer originally from Bantry, West Cork, now living in Cork City. Their work, ranging m poetry to prose and non-fiction pieces, centres on themes of gender, sexuality, mental illness, and y image, among others. They are finishing up a BA in English at UCC.

ARON GUARD is an MA Creative Writing student in UL. She writes short stories, poetry, and is working a novel. She won the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award 2020 and has been listed in other mpetitions. Her work has appeared in New Irish Writing, The Ogham Stone, and Washing Windows III.

KE GUERIN is a writer of stories and a roarer of poetry from the mountainous uplands of North Cork. He n the Bryan McMahon short story award in 2022. He has had writing included/forthcoming in: New h Writing, Howl, The Martello Journal, The Hooghly Review, The Stonecoast Review.

NNAH HOARE Hannah’s stories have appeared in the Mechanics Institute Review, Open Pen, Infinity nderers Magazine, and been performed by Liars League. She won the Book Edit Writers' Prize (2021) was semi-finalist for Writers of the Future (2021, Fourth Quarter). Her novel, Parahumanity, is ilable through Amazon and Waterstones. Her website is: www.hannahhoare.co.uk

RK JACKSON is a final year creative writing student at UCD. Last year, he was selected to attend the st Cork Literary Festival as one of four Irish Writers Centre Young Writer Delegates. He also recently mpleted an Editorial and PR Internship at Paper Lanterns YA Literary Journal. Twitter: jackson_writer.

EVE KEANE (she/her) is a writer and teacher based in Cork. She graduated from the MA in Creative ting at UL in 2023 and writes poetry and prose. Her work has featured in Ropes, The Storms, The ham Stone, and various podcasts. She can be found on Instagram at @mabbit and w.MaeveKeane.com.

RLOWE RUSSELL is fascinated by what makes humans tick, and the wonderful and diverse ways in ch we juggle the tricky business of living both inside our skin and outside it. Combining family history fictional invention, Bantling is her first novel, available as Kindle or paperback from Amazon. w.marlowerussell.com.

TLIN YOUNG is a writer and editor from Dublin. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Queen's versity Belfast literary magazine The Apiary and the editor of the anthology Awkward Middle Children. work has appeared in Howl, The North and The Honest Ulsterman among other publications.

NON-FICTION

ÉAD CORCORAN studied visual art in IADT and has worked in theatre, performance art, and arts nagement. After several years in Greece, she now lives in West Cork with her husband and two dogs. has previously been published in Source Magazine as part of its New Writers Prize 2022.

ATHAN DOIG Born and raised in Scotland, but a long-term resident in Ireland. Left teaching in Glasgow k in the eighties to grow vegetables in West Cork. Manages to travel in the winter, particularly to the ian sub- continent.

RAGH FLEMING is a writer from Cork. His debut in nonfiction, a collection of essays on mental health ed Lonely Boy, is published by BookHub Publishing. His work appears in many literary magazines uding The Ogham Stone, Beir Bua, Trasna, The Madrigal, Époque, Sunday Morning, Wexford Bohemian.

NON-FICTION Cont/d DANIELLE McLAUGHLIN is the author of the short story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets, published

by The Stinging Fly Press in 2015. Her debut novel, The Art of Falling, was published by John Murray in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2022.

JENNIFER REDMOND is an artist and writer based in County Cork.

PAUL TEMME is a writer and poet whose subjects include ludicrous economic systems, climate, lifesaving surgery, and the stunning north Cornwall coastline where he lives. Published work includes Warming: 26 Voices for Change, Hot Poets: Sparks and his spoken word set Notes of Dissent was seen at the 2021 Causley Festival.

GILLIAN WATT is published academically, and also in journalism, fiction, and poetry. She is completing an historical novel set in India at the end of WW2 and California in the 1960s. She is on the editorial team of SWERVE magazine and a member of Jericho writers.

FIONA YORK Born in Waterford, Fiona has lived many years in West Cork, working in theatre, TV and film. She has latterly published a memoir.

POETRY EMMA BARRY I began writing after seeing Mandy Moore’s angst-filled, criminally underrated film How to Deal. Something inside me unlocked (separate from my sexual awakening). It baffled me that characters struggled to comprehend emotions through speech yet expressed them through the written word. How writing gave them and so many people a voice.

R.J. BREATHNACH is a Wexford-born journalist and writer based in Meath, Ireland. His work has been published in ROPES Literary Journal, The Wexford Bohemian, and The Honest Ulsterman, among others.

His debut poetry chapbook, I Grew Tired of Being a Zombie, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2021.

HOLLY DARRAGH-HICKEY sees writing as a personal salvation and the ultimate form of resilience. She is published in several Irish/international anthologies and most recently in Poetry in the Park. She was also a runner-up for the short story contest, Speaking Words. Holly is a member of various poetry collectives.

IVAN DE MONBRISON is a French poet and artist living in Paris born in 1969 and affected by various types of mental disorders. He has published some poems in the past.

DARCEY DUGAN is a poet from Northern Ireland whose poems have been published in journals such as The Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, The Waxed Lemon, Púca, and The Stony Thursday Book.

LOU HILL is a poet, musician, carpenter ... (not necessarily in order of preference or talent). His poems were published in Ink, Sweat & Tears and CAP 74024 magazine. His most recent spoken-word record Dogends featured on The Late Junction (BBCR3), Tom Robinson's Introducing Mixtape (BBCR6), and BBC Radio London.

JENNIFER HORGAN lives in Cork City. She writes a weekly education column for the Irish Examiner. Her creative work appears in various online and print journals including Howl, The Honest Ulsterman and Abridged. Her debut collection is due for release in 2025 with Doire Press.

FIN KEEGAN Recent poems by Fin Keegan appear in Cold Mountain Review (forthcoming) and Amsterdam Quarterly; Home thoughts at Red Rock, Nevada was shortlisted for Bournemouth Writing Prize 2023. Articles: Irish Arts Review, Irish Times and Dublin Review of Books. A story, Remembering Albert, broadcast on the BBC World Service in 1998.

MI GEORGE SIMPSON Her work explores the trauma of living with and overcoming racism. Trees, and p inclines contribute to her health and wealth. Kemi has lived in Cork for 18 years and is studying for asters in Creative Writing at University College Cork.

ET HARPER writes and performs with other poets in London. She is poet in residence at an orchard in t. Her poems are published online, including in The Morning Star and Ink, Sweat & Tears and in print lications including Magma 85 and Not The Time To Be Silent.

ZE JACOBS is a writer/(sound) poet/journalist/translator. She co-authored Terra to Titan, a science on/non-fiction graphic novel (In de Knipscheer, 2019), co-organises DeBarra's Spoken Word and conded the West Cork Doughnut Economy Network. She is an Associative Artist of 49, North Street, bbereen. Born in Amsterdam, she lives in West Cork.

NNA NÍ RÍORDÁIN is a translator and writer from West Cork. Her work has been featured in arryman Literary Journal, Drawn to the Light Press, Cork Words 3, New Isles Press, Burrow, Lothlorien try Journal, pendemic.ie and Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal.

NA LYNCH graduated with an MA in Creative Writing in 2018. She is a mother, grandmother, poet, rt story writer and memoirist. Her work has been published in many journals. She is working with ntor Tom McCarthy on her first poetry collection, and was awarded an Arts Council Grant.

RY Mc CARTHY holds an MA in Creative writing from the University of Limerick, where she graduated h First Class Honours. She was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2022. Her poetry has eared in Crossways Literary Magazine, Riverbed Review, Spirituality, The Southern Star, The Echo and he anthologies: Washing Windows 111, Chasing Shadows and A World Transformed.

UREN O'DONOVAN is a writer from Cork. She is the winner of the 2023 Cúirt New Writing Prize in try judged by Seán Hewitt. In 2022 she was awarded Arts Council funding to work on her debut poetry ection and was the recipient of a Munster Literature Mentorship with Afric McGlinchey.

RICIA WALLACE lives in Co. Meath, Ireland. Her work features in Poems from Phizzfest, Cordella gazine and Bath Flash Fiction Anthology. A committed dendrophile, Patricia’s writing probes the tient relationship between humans and the natural world. Her novel-in-progress explores the threads t bind and weave the tapestry of our lives.

ATHAN WONHAM is a Scot born 1965. He grew up in Morpeth, Northumberland and worked for many rs as a geologist. His poetry was first published by Faber in Poetry Introduction 7 (1990). Since then he published six collections, the latest of which is Without You! (Drizzle-Dazzle, 2023).

HANNA ZOMERS is a rural playwright and weekly columnist for a Canadian newspaper Her poetry has eared in the Blue Nib, Mediterranean Magazine, A New Ulster, Poetica, Trouvaille and Ink. She loves o travel to Spain and Ireland.

WILLEM BOEL (born 1983) lives and works in Ghent (BE). Next to two dimensional work, he mainly focusses on installations. These iron structures carry the marks and bruises of intensive labour and repetitive actions. Boel works in series such as De Nieuwe Molens and Pare Feu. CAROLINE BOYFIELD is a full-time artist and project manager/curator living in Brittany. She has exhibited in France and the UK. Bilingual in French and English, Caroline is editor-at-large for SWERVE in France and is SWERVE's first artist-in-residence 2023. Contact: www.carolineboyfield.com.

LAURE COLOMER studied at the Beaux Arts school in Paris, where she studied sculpture in the studio of Richard Deacon and video with Dominique Belloir. She has travelled to Australia, New Zealand and Canada as an artist-in-residence. She lives and works in Morlaix, Brittany.

SÉAN DUNNE is a writer and photographer living in Cork city. His work has been published in Motley Magazine and he is a founding member of the Waterford LIT Festival.

SINÉAD FAGAN Sinéad is a graduate of DCCOI and CCAD In 2011, winning Student of the Year. Her work has been featured in the Irish Arts Review 2021 and the New York Times in 2022. Underwater Cavern 2020 Halo Vessel won the Sculpture Prize at the RUA, in Belfast in 2021.

LYDIA HICKEY Digital media artist working with photography, moving-image and sound. She graduated with an honours degree in BFA Media with Critical Cultures at the National College of Art and Design.

After graduating she became a member of LUCIDA Collective, a network of lens-based new media artists.

IRVI is a French visual artist, based in Brittany who works with paper collage, lead typography, poetry, life and travel notebooks. Themes include the sea, exile, individual and collective memory, and exploration of the maritime landscape and its magical aspect, links between the human and spiritual, dream and reality.

JACQUELINE LEDOUX Photographer and writer based in Morlaix, France. Selected exhibitions: Au lit d’envers (1998), Natures du mouvement (2001), À la veille de ne jamais partir (2012), Bleus de Bress (2022).

Her work explores the spirit of place and the desire for the horizons they inspire.

CHARLOTTE MALIK Charlotte Malik (born 1962) studied sculpture at St Martins, Chelsea School of Art, The Royal Academy. She lives and works in London as a sculptor and therapist and will create an installation at the SWERVE Gallery in 2024.

GERARD ROUXEL photographer, curator and co-founder of the Courants d’Arts collective in Morlaix, France. Born in 1952, he exhibits in France and has taken part in artist residencies in France and Portugal. He creates artist books, including Voyages vers l’Amour, a photographic journal covering 55 days of the first COVID lockdown. gerard-rouxel.fr KRYSTINA STIMAKOVITS Originally from Vienna, now living in London. She delights in exploiting photography’s ability to represent and transform the real in the same instant. Photographs are ‘factual enigmas’. By exploring tensions between the familiar and uncanny, she digs beneath appearances.

NANCY WILDE was born in Portugal and moved to Dublin to study photography at Griffith College.

Nancy works and lives in Galway and hosts Time Capsule, a weekly radio show on Flirt FM. Nancy’s work can be found in LFB - Love From Berlin online magazine and in Garden: On Diasporic Wilderness.

NICK WONHAM's linocut prints are usually inspired by wildlife; his prints have been exhibited nationally, published as greetings cards and he has illustrated several books. The Ukraine books are his second collaboration with his brother, Jonathan, and the illustrations are based on photos which have come out of the conflict.

Image following pages: IRVI

Design Thanks andto: Graphics: Cork County Mich Council Maroney Arts Funding michstudio@mac.com Benefactors: www.michmaroney.com Jonathan Printed in Doig Skibbereen by: Otila Fintan Maroney O'Connell Monique InspireMaroney Printers Caroline Boyfield SWERVE Editor-at-Large France Gillian Watt Assumpta Curran Donal Hayes Janet Heeran Sue O'Connor

Contact SWERVE: info@swervemagazine.org 00 353 (0) 87 116 7130 www.swervemagazine.org Insta: @swerve_magazine FB: Swerve Magazine and Swerve Magazine France

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