Munnelly I gave you my heart in a burlap bag Kara Lynn Amiot

I gave you my heart in a burlap bag

There I was, in the palm of your hands, fragile but safe, no need to fret the trust. That was until you began to tug and tug, finding one angry thread, the weak link, the loose hold on the rest of me. You tug, and the unravel begins, the spiral of panic-reactions you waited for, hands holding tight that suddenly let go. It was the dance canon unfolding, on repeat, the weave unraveling at the seams. The one lonely thread of me - all of my fibres that twisted out from one, that knotted and looped into every complexity of my being. That was all that it took to leave me ripped open and spilling apart, exposed inside from out, completely undone. Kara Lynn Amiot

The morning

Immediately, with expediency, my eyes burst open.

It’s 03:12am. Alert, prised, exposed, I climb downstairs.

It’s still dark, but sparks of light jerk the murky dregs of night. Soon it’s time.

I step outside, through cracks tracked across the wide, lightening horizon.

The birds’ sfumato captures me. Enraptured at their unknown, atoning, sweet vibrato,

I’m held, to listen. As nature glistens, softening air blossoms my care.

The dog and the cat follow, filling my hollow, together we swallow, wallow in nature.

Nurturing creation, purchasing time to breathe, here I thrive. Lorna Collins

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan

"Cloaking A Thirst"

The best way to obfuscate evidence of shame is to dissolve into darkness, This is how the street groomed us to become nightmares swallowing the footsteps of strangers. There's no way our blotches can be seen without light, I tell you this to show you how our palms bear the zigzag route to a slum----our body, where boys hide under the grey bulb to profess love to their fellow. In this place, a girl cannot kiss her fellow without being shown a pathway to ashes. Even if you've not seen how men made the semiotics of love monotonous, you'd have heard that there's only one route to love & it is by dragging the swollen legs of a heart contrary to whatever gender you are. There is no safer way of drawing peace from the throat of this society as an alien in your body, without being nailed on the cross. Here, concealing one's true thirst is a better way to stay safe & hypocrisy is the truest disguised way of life.

The Stiperstones

I see why the devil tarried to spill from his apron these rocks like tumbled dice for all we know such soaring beauty may still draw him back through the drift of years to spy across to great Snowdon and then to cast his ancient eye over to the chair of Idris Gawr. He may have paused, as evil does, to refresh his satan soul amongst the glint of quartz, his horned head resting upon yielding heather soothed by something of the beat of hell from those who toiled in death like darkness for the lead until oft times the day on which they fell. Bernard Pearson

Citizenship

As a child, I lay curled in a nest of cranes Embedded in cracks, in a land of concrete a blink of neon, a moment. I collected red buses, black cabs, amassed beliefs. Absolutes

Today, I belong to a land of disturbance, dashed hopes, madness, matriarchy, and distorted lyrics. I am becalmed by salt skies, mountains of granite, toothless mud, wit, wind wry amusement.

Light here is bold yet fluid, filled with drops of water Strong, deliberate, fleet of wit, swift of soft. It is fiery, wild, with a delicate, unreliable touch; it holds me. Kate Ennals

Holiday Monday

Tinnies West, Valentia Island, 13th August 2020

A water-drop on barbed-wire sort of day. Shedded cows bellow to ones in the field who munch oblivious to crow-calls. The cloud-sky teases the channel, offering a meeting it might just withhold if the mountains make a better offer. Last night’s amber alert was just the turf ’s last grated flicker. The tethered collie sniffs the air, bristles at every moo. The coffee awaits the plunger, the day its plan. Nessa O’Mahony

The Yellow Pen

Morning, pad, a Yellow pen, and then Some wingéd creature, Butterfly or moth, Flaps past the toothy Canopy of our little park’s last Left-standing cherry.

Prunus serrulata Serrulata? Small serrations; Trust me, I’ve just looked it up. Bird’s songs now, which I haven’t, but some guesses Would be praise of the day, Alarm, Dismay, a thousand small Distresses. Someone knows. I suppose, just not me. Capping the yellow pen, I put it, the pad and all such thoughts away. Clive Collins

Noble Incomprehensible Things

I have to go slowly here. At twenty, Poetry visited me: ‘You are hired. Now, Figure out what to do.’ I am still

Getting the hang of it. The first thing I thought of at the time was ‘firmament,’ A word in Genesis I still do not understand:

Something interposed between two worlds Which keeps the two worlds from utterly Crushing each other. Maybe death –

That of a bug; of the dog Buffy; of My mother; of myself one day – is The sudden withdrawal of firmament.

I do not know why we have the impulse To return our dead to the earth. I am struck, In the story of the martyrdom of Stephen,

By the fact that after the crowd left, His friends stayed on, to decently bury him. If today a Martian descended,

Wanting to better understand our race, I would say, That. The perpetual too-late of brief life. Richard W. Halperin

Embers

A rusting rim gathers siblings some now parents. Short-lived orange flies soar from the bonfire then quench in calm, frightened Covid air. Rotten pallets, wine, Johnny Green & Jim Guinness; native trunks, a transplanted Swede even a foreign one from the Pale trade war stories of how we expertly fooled our parents. From wherever she ended up Gran chuckles. Micéal Kearney