Dear reader, welcome to issue 14. All poems and artwork within are in some way connected to the theme of love. Once again thank you to all who submitted work and to the contributors.
Thanks to Lynda Tavakoli for the cover art. Of her photograph Smitten she says,
The photograph was from last year when my husband and I made our first visit to South Africa. It was taken at Boulders Penguin Colony, Table Mountain National Park, near Cape Town. It is home to a unique and endangered land-based colony of African penguins. They have created several boardwalks there that allow visitors to get very close to the penguins without disturbing them too much. I could have taken many similar photos because the animals themselves seem to be very affectionate with each other. I liked this one because it looks like they're holding hands.
Congratulations to Caitríona Lane on winning the Little Fires of Brigid Poetry Competition, and to runner-up Lucy Duggan.
I do hope you enjoy the issue. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Orla Fay 13/02/2025
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) - e.e. cummings
Nothing On (A Glosa)
When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone When I walk along High Holborn I think of you with nothing on.
(Celia Celia by Adrian Mitchell)
Well, Chesterton dubbed the Irish the ones that God made mad for their merry wars and sad songs. our caoineadhs or laments; even the sweeter ones, Danny Boy or Fields of Athenry sound dreary. Songs to cry into your beer to, to put on my Spotify playlist for when I am misty-eyed or teary, when I am sad and weary.
Those bloody great ballads, in the words of Paul Heaton, like Marty Robbins’s gunfighter songs of El Paso and the Rio Grande.
Ill-fated lovers on the Mexican border with their Mi amor, mi corazon voiced in the loving Spanish tongue. Songs for funerals and wakes, I sing them when I’m feeling down, when I think all hope has gone.
Never felt more like singin’ the blues:
that’s me (and Guy Mitchell). Forty different shades of bluesDelta Blues, St Louis Blues, Country Blues, Urban Blues, blues at every twist and turnthat take up lodgings in my soul when I trudge these London streets, companionless and forlorn, when I walk along High Holborn.
But enough of those doleful lays about somebody did somebody wrong. Time to listen to Monty Python, to look on the bright side of life, to think of beauty, to think of you. You in satin or in chiffon, you on the dance floor, you on the beach. I think of you, my Botticelli Venus, my one and only, my sine qua non. I think of you with nothing on.
Michael Durack
NYC Gave Me Stockholm Syndrome
New York City beat me from the moment I arrived and stared up, impressed, at the Empire State Building. Manhattan was like an urban Carmilla; vampiric, lustful, hungry, seductive, deadly. I hated it.
I loathed the pace of life, a speeding bullet leaving me pale and limp from blood loss. I despised the tall skyscrapers bearing down on me, a herd of concrete colossi clad in glass and steel and star-spangled banners. It seemed that every day my memories of home faded, scrubbed away with alcohol, abandoned on the F Train to be sacrificed to subway rats.
NYC took everything, holding me in a modern servitude, draining the life from my eyes as I drained the beer from my glass night after night. In a stupor I looked up again at the lights of the Empire State Building and fell in love. The city of dreams, promising me the world while it chained me to one small island and slowly dragged me, semi-willing, to an early shallow grave between two polluted rivers.
Then the plague burst its banks and flooded the streets.
I fled back to the Emerald Isle, and away from the sweet sting of her fangs in my jugular. The flight shredded what was left of my withered heart once the city was done with me. The only cure for me was time and distance from her cruel embrace.
Recovery took months, but slowly I began to remember the blooming heat of happiness in my chest, similar to the geysers of Yellowstone that I never got to see. Maybe one day I will go and see the bison and the wolves, once I am fully healed from my Stockholm Syndrome-esque infatuation with the icy death-grip of that vampire, New York City.
R.J. Breathnach
Deliveroo Delivery Boy
Her Deliveroo delivery boy boyfriend would arrive in the rain on his bike late at night. She helped him off with the box, the straps tight under his armpits. Warm socks waited on the radiator and the towel she used to dry his hair, the shivering diminishing. Cold weather to be delivering in.
She said his skin was beautiful, described how she would sit and watch while he ate in silence the capricciosa she had kept warm, told me she was scared customers would invite him in to share ribs, then stare at him like her, transfixed.
He never knew the day it was, had no time for times to come, for speculation or possibility. And when she asked why he left Eritrea, he didn’t answer, continued eating, though perhaps a little faster.
So she thought it best just to guess, accept that the past had condemned him to a future in the present.
Glenn Hubbard
Two More Steps
In this dream I see busy streets filled with noise. In the centre of a pack of strangers a woman walks with deliberate poise towards the corner of a building. Dangers pose as buskers; their music a film score for the slow-motion swaying of her hair.
From the movement of her body, little more, I can tell it is you. Everywhere faces are turned towards me, except yours. Mirror glazed tower blocks reflect the crowd fluid about you, excited without cause, and I call to you, but the throng is too loud.
You’re wearing a sweater, methylene blue, tucked into tailored trousers. Your right hand rests in a pocket, and here, braced to you, is where I belong. In doorways suntanned deceits huddle, smiling through leather lips. Your motion away from me is unyielding,
closing on an exit which is eclipsed by the foot of the plaza’s tallest building. Two more steps and you’ll be gone. I hunger for that pocket of comfort, your light touch, 12
our faith in forever when we were younger, and the times we hurt through loving too much.
One. Two.
Kevin MacAlan
The Summer I turned Seventeen
Out walking together when suddenly I was stung, a wasp or hornet between my shirt and spine.
I stopped. And you: What’s wrong?. I said, then nimbly undid the buttons of my shirt and bared my back to you, then felt your hand on my bare shoulder, never had we touched before, your dexterous fingers pinched the sting, plucked it from my flesh.
And it would be years before I ‘d know again the palpable release I felt that day.
Liam Aungier
Perpi of the Warrior Band
In memory of a Good Dog
I imagine little Perpi as the hero Diarmaid’s pet. She does not accompany his battle chariot.
She keeps no guard dog’s vigil as he sleeps off last night’s beer. She ignores his every whistle, makes no move to chase the deer. But in that final tragic hunt when Diarmaid slips to the forest floor, she steps forward, snarling, between the fallen hero and the boar.
Caoimhín Mac Unfraidh
I am led to think of love-seekers
When I see a lonely magpie.
Barrows of sex poured into black holes; Plenty of “mates” minus the souls.
Too many heads are buried in the undergrowth,
Digging for tinder – bits of twigs and straw; They should be mining for gold to melt down, To fill the cracks and put the barrows to real use.
Be sure to melt gold with a flamethrower; Great love never sparks from small flames.
Lee Sheridan
Long Distance
Please come back outside And smile at me again Before I drive away from Our haven on the hill.
David Kenny
The Martyrdom of Sain Valentine – handmade collage
Alan Murphy
My Little Heart
I’m not allowed to walk. Bed rolled to the echo room rough gown fitted, lying on my side, cold blue gel sloshed under my breast. I can hear it booming from the screen as my insides materialise in black and white.
Like a bird nesting in my chest, it shudders on each contraction, sucks in and whooshes out.
It’s miniature electrical storm colour coded in blue and red.
Like seeing your first born for the first time, amazed this little thing lives inside, I want to reach in and hold it, shelter and care for it, my little heart.
Anne Mac Darby Beck
All the Pictures for Harper, January 2024
If we went to a show I always chose a postcard to remember our visit by –the painting was neither here nor there, might be one I’d seen that day or like the one I’m looking at now Window for Tate Gallery St Ives an image from elsewhere.
Patrick Heron’s blue-on-inky-blue is either dawn or dusk his soft pink glass an almost perfect match for that pompom hat you’re wearing.
We ride the lift to the fifth floor, a light lunch; your Mum, curating, takes the photo, me holding you on the terrace, overlooking the river –St Paul’s in the distance.
You see A Bigger Splash from your pram, fall asleep; wake up in time, wide-eyed, for Kusama’s installation: Infinity Mirror Room Filled with the Brilliance of Life.
Jeff Skinner
Love As Mussel
Defiant as the North Atlantic, it clings to saltwater kissed ropes; reeks of damp jeans and oilskins sweating under a lemony sun. Makes a mermaid on a bicep dive headfirst into the water; blooms roses on a wrinkled soil bed of neck. And, when they're hauled in, crates full as lungs ballooning with joy, every mollusc will accept the life that's swollen inside their shell. Time is just a word; a painting hanging on the wall of a restaurant serving this gift. Each opens more than the eye, the diner’s lips salivating like seabirds anticipating their first flight; this saline poetry is tasted with the heart, produces pearls when there should be none.
Christian Ward
Oyster, Served on Stripes Ellen Harrold
Pepper
I love you like pepperthat’s it my secret is out.
I love you being here unobtrusive, standing next to salt my accompaniment to sprinkle on life not the whole meal but as you bite down my favourite part. When things get stale, because they will you need it, to add a touch of spice.
I love just saying it you put your lips together and blow Pep… per. do it twice, because once is never enough Pep…per.
We’ll grow old have peppery hair each strand I will kiss. I promise to love you more each day.
Anita Gracey
Cranium
Heavy as a snowdrop on its frail stalk, his warm head fits the curve of your hand. It should be wrapped like a new flower, folded safely within its bracts. His veins a blue tracery through translucent skin. Heartbeat throbs at the fontanelle. Its rhythm tugs the organs out of you, makes your arms cry for the heft of him. Three kilos and every gram compels and demands your love.
Rose Malone
Your Optimism is Not an Umbrella
When we take a stroll I usually bring my waterproof —in every blue I see a grey.
You like to take a punt as if by simply saying It will be fine, it will be so, and when you’re wrong I never gloat, though once I quipped
Your optimism is not an umbrella —yet I shelter under it, in days of dark.
Frank Farrelly
Splattered Love Scene
Love hurled freely, ejected from a churning chest, with a ‘better out than in’ mentality. Relieved at liberation, flailing joyfully, though horrifically defenselessis amour ambient?
The bubbling, jiggling amorphous puddle attracts attention with its arrhythmic antics, but the blank voyeuristic intensity of your gaze turns to stunned shockis THAT for me???
Embarrassment and prickling discomfort peel up to the roots of your floppy fringe. Toe curling lips dilate at this offal odour. Shutters descend over misread friendship. We scramble to be gobbled by the same hole.
I check pointlessly to confirm my gift unwanted. The returns policy has been violated. This mess cannot be cleared, it must congeal and crust the impervious bitumen. We turn, in opposite directions from the stain of unrequited love.
Sharron Green
Circadian Clock
Edging along the bed as you slept, you wound up snoring on the middle of the mattress, as if gravity had pulled you to the centre of mass.
You were a ship between two oceans, but I became a flat earther falling off the brink of my own planet, hitting the floor with a big bang.
A destitute of sleep, I climbed over you and marooned myself in against the wall. And when we woke, hours later, you were taken aback
to find me neither gone nor where you’d anchored me, now a cannon on the plank. You smiled sleepily, rolled across, unravelling me to full mast.
Carl Griffin
Blackbird on a Plastic Gutter
Mustard beak peeks from silver duct of the mobile home next door another summer in Keerhaunmore you fill my breakfast routine with sweet giddy syllables still as a steel spoon I study your busyness
Arcing from aluminium pipe to marram dune you dart and dive with whistling news occasionally altering your tune to high pitched perfect trill your flocking call summoning collective wings to perch on a bent plastic gutter morning stage of your organised operatics
Though I do not know your dialect this fusion of sound and listening causes a stir in my heart you proclaiming delight that you have survived the night little fragments of hope transposed to grand arias of triumph snatched in the volatile of Connemara’s wilds.
Anne Donnellan
Song
We make a wide circle on the green in front of the houses on the cul-de-sac. I want to say Frisbee but it might be a ball we kick to one another. A dog
from nowhere appears, works out our weak link and sticks close – Paul I think is his name, we’re friends of friends. Inside, a girl, I don’t know
loves me (who doesn’t know I love her) is getting ready. We’re going dancing later. I’ll claim I let her beat me at pool in the pub first. Even walking back
near midnight, the sun won’t go down. Maybe our eyes have just adjusted. We push each other; laugh about everyone saying we are when we aren’t,
as if it’s the last thing on our minds. Neither of us will work it out until it’s too late, too complicated. It’s summer. I have lived there all these years.
Patrick Slevin
passiontide that Easter we spent in Spain, singing tall cold church, warm sunstruck wall of the café roof garden
we looked down on the procession swaying through the streets an open marble coffin where a marble Christ lay sleeping in a bloodbath of rose petals
when you bent your head to mine telling secrets like a child when your mothwing laughter alighted on my cheek in the telling
when we nestled together in cars & bars like the stray kittens we tried to befriend in streets we never dreamed would be so cold
I was all passion then lost in your silvery & translucent landscapes it was long ago but the body remembers
Mandy Macdonald
Latin in the Rain
Reveal your tortoise love. I want to taste your full salt. Summer scent of writhing fuchsia, necking in turtle necks.
Share your secrets, bathe my wounds. I want to know in three days what I did not know in thirty years.
You are my destiny returned. Copy book blotted desire, reading Latin in the rain. Alea iacta est.
I carpe diem once more with you – my Jimmy Reardon.
Catherine Ronan
For Every Child
She made griddle bread on the big pan, turning it with her hands from side to side, then on its edge round and round, an octagon of golden brown. A crust for every child.
Hands soft and gentle, to caress in times of our distress, or show us how to lace our shoes, to tie a knot, to knit and sew. A time for every child.
When all the jobs were done she’d play the piano. Her fingers gliding up the scale and down. A note for every child.
With all of us gathered round, she’d finger her rosary beads, as we knelt with her to pray. A Decade for every child.
The last time I saw her, her hands finally and eternally still, through her fingers, her shiny beads entwined. I combed my fingers through her hair, and on her brow, a furrow for every child.
Carmel Hogan
Our Last Holiday
Obviously there were long days of sun And a sea that sung herself into darkness.
And obviously there was drink & swimming & sex At unusual times, and nothing much else to do.
Obviously there was me and there was you And the unutterable thing we both knew –
That this would be our last holiday, The final whoop-de-doo.
Separately we were simple. Together, a riddle Of too few clues. And yet here you still are
Spread out on pages, flaming up in thought, Holding me under the water of my dreams
Where we swam on our last holiday.
Eugene O’Hare
Yearning Sonnet
How in the songs, it is always hid deep inside but I wore mine on the surface, like acne. I thought, this will end soon: how different I will be after. I fell in nettles, all stung up, the warm hives buzzing like reckless kisses: the body electric humming in the wires. How the birds were mute then. The older girls would grab at me and take kisses because I was easy meat. I waited: rubbed up. It only takes a little time to be loved. I learned my body. No wounds that needed healing could be seen. I would walk shirtless in the sun and step lightly: heart holding what the hands could not.
Kris Spencer
Marzipan
We viewed the required El Greco in the Santo Tomé gloom, Toledo nobles in starch-ruffed mode, Count Orgaz arrayed in his tomb.
Leaving the long-suffering figures pierced with shafts of sun in the shade, we chanced on a tourist market selling souvenir tat, and you made a present to me of a dagger, not the real thing of course, its true; I lost it a long time ago in my life just the same way that I lost you.
Our hotel was an Alcazar fortress, where I sampled Toledo treats, marzipan flavoured with honey, the region's special sweetmeats.
As a solemn procession went past, bare-shouldered we leaned out to look, but a man glared up with a frown, so I closed the window and took the primrose path back to bedshared marzipan kisses instead.
Honor Duff
Remember how my love light blooms
when I am cars, trains, walks away, and my voice is a river sound on the radio a small split in the thin air.
when my mouth won't speak and my hands won't speak and even the plasticine pit of my face will not speak.
when everything between us is text, is unmanageable words, a bed of cold characters.
Remember how my love light blooms, Like the pilot light in the boiler Like the smoke glow end of an incense stick,
Like the last line of a poem, Flaring up instead of out.
Maya Little
the kiss
cabobbled twangling frappelee fling frangipani in the air friends for ages and now this but passion’s fug will dissipate vision will land on two wedding bands worn gold old loved being true there's never an excuse
Jill Vance
Girl in a Bluebell Wood
I think of calling you back as a doctor would, each upward step an effort, the hope of another.
You reach the centre, five hundred metres, stand among bluebells, beam a beautiful smile.
Faded to girlhood, all the layers of growing eaten away, like today is the day all those years ago, when you found a spring wood, knelt down as if in prayer, and cupped the colour blue in the palms of your hands, in the wild of your eyes.
Billy Fenton
First Night
Tonight, I sleep in your shirt, the last worn before striped pyjamas became your norm. I washed it but your scent imbues the fabric. First night, my Love my Love, to wrap only your essence around me.
Sense memories of wrinkled skin touching wrinkled skin in tender, elder embrace, igniting fading memories – nights of smooth skin, hot passions. Out-loud laughter those times it went comically wrong.
Sleep shows no mercy. I slip from bed, wrap your dressing-gown around me. Gathering your clothes, I slip a record on the turntable. Johnny Cash and the Highwaymen blast; perhaps I might just be a single drop of rain...
Like a forensic detective, I arrange your clothes, serried files of memories. A battalion of love couldn’t save you. The centrepiece suggests itself, your souvenir tee-shirt, the Man in Black.
I will find you my Love, in showers, in spring.
Deirdre Devally
The
Overview Effect
I am content in the darkness weightless perfectly apart sovereign.
I bless the hum of the engines rumble the intimate blink of light.
I relish the work of repair replacement problems contained alone.
I press my lips to the plastic pouches squeeze sustenance for each cell.
I savour the stars and navy distance from planet to overview.
I lived there once with a close acquaintance far apart side by side.
I turned my back on the hopeful lonesome without regret or despair.
But still remember dancing freely and how it once felt to touch your hair.
Annie Egan
My Mother’s Wash Cloth
Rising sun drops light on the garden, two-tones the grass. I sense indiscriminate love touch my mouth, ears, hands. On these morning meanderings I see holidays in dawns, diamonds in dew.
Out of an unexpected rain cloud, I let the May shower have its way with me so I can feel my mother’s wash cloth on my face. Her touch has give and sway. The cloud burst creates a new sheen on the fields. Thrush’s-egg sky
assures to deepen as the day comes into its own. Beyond the tide of my imagining, my mother sings her way through my bones.
Mary Lee
Love Opens
We love to talk, our silences unfailingly filling with words waiting, like imagined flutterings in a high rookery in the dark before dawn; we speak our love with lambent words, dewy droplets lightly lying across an open bloom dawning fresh,
lingering limpid drops enfolding the sky in their lucent orbs, as your eyes reflect my love; and the strength I draw from your loving protects me, as does a mother who firmly cradles her child within a secure, unbreakable embrace,
yet you release me to give and to share, to let the child hidden within walk safely with the who you have freed me to become, for as an evening primrose in shade
displays its beauty only when the warm sun opens its face, my true life blossomed when first with love you held me.
Anthony Wade
A Weekend Away
there’s you, that crotch-like valley in the distance and there’s me, above, the cirrus clouds matted, like sweat clung pubic hair and there’s us, in between, those two dogs with the kitchen door ajar, eating themselves sick.
Craig Cox
Little Fires of Brigid Poetry Competition
Winner - Caitríona Lane – A Fail from Muire na nGael
Runner-up - Lucy Duggan – I dream of my first life
Saint Brigid by Patrick Joseph Tuohy
A Fail from Muire na nGael
im Marion Lane
All the public hullabaloo surrounding that very first holiday drifts away quietly in my mind’s eye, like snow falling softly gradually drenching a disintegrating photograph. Colours, yes, I remember the colours as if clicked by camera, dressed head to toe in purple, my coat, beret, knee high boots with contrasting woven mauve scarf after surviving my root canal. As if these details are important, they somehow remain etched in my recall.
But you did not survive your February 1st diagnosis. Not even ‘til summer. I can still see you in your blood red winter wool coat standing in front of St. Brigid’s statue. We had gone walking in different directions to process the shock that afternoon and serendipitously found ourselves drawn to the church to light candles before Muire na nGael. Rows of votives glistening away as the gloaming moved in. Our two flames supported by the hopes and dreams of others. I wonder were their prayers answered.
God knows why but I don’t Brigid. On this your very first bank holiday could you not have leaned in a little closer to avert the death on the breath of a brave young woman. To her you were the saint of healing, to me the patron of poets, a wordsmith of wisdom. But no, Brigid, you did not lean in to listen. Neither the Christian or Pagan Brigid came to offer a cure and so three months later as my sister’s lungs rise and fall on her last dawn I come again to light candles and raise my face to heaven and sigh, why?
I berate Brigid and not just Brigid but all the great saints of Ireland and all time.
I have a quiet chat with Heaney who must be sitting now by the Holy Spirit, all sublime and I cry onto all how I was lead away on feathers of hope and now in God’s name, I ask what am I to do when the further shore has disappeared beyond the veil, beyond reach,
when my belief in cures and miracles has disappointed. And when the healing wells have run dry, what on earth am I to do next and how and why. In the month of May, the votives are fewer at Brigid’s statue. I move further up the aisle to the Queen of heaven and cry.
Caitriona Lane
On February 1st 2023 my younger fit sister received a diagnosis of aggressive cancer. What was meant to be a bank holiday celebration for the Irish sisterhood was thrown into turmoil. A different hullabaloo entirely. On St. Brigid’s eve I had laid a cloth outside to catch the dew that according to tradition would become a healing cure. As my sister endured horrific headaches I gave her this Brigid’s blessed rag.
I was reminded of Heaney’s The Cure at Troy; ‘believe in miracle. And cures and healing wells.’ But the cancer marched on in swift motion and swept Marion away in mere weeks. Like Philoctetes she was left for dead and a battle ensued between faith and fate.
A diagnosis date is forever seared into the brain and I wish to honour her through creating a vision in polaroid colour of her fighting the darkness of death via the candle light. We held onto the hope of angels’ feathers, but those feathers instead carried her away. People worldwide attest to the power of prayer but sometimes, like storm Éowyn, some things are beyond human control. Abandonment eventually leads to acceptance, leads to forgiveness. I forgive Brigid and in winning this competition, wonder is my sister perhaps winking through Brigid’s veil invoking me to heal my grief under the guidance of the patron of poets.
Caitriona Lane
I dream of my first life
Darlugdach … filled her clogs with coals of fire and plunged her two feet into them. And so … fire extinguished fire and pain vanquished pain and she got back into her bed. … Then Brigit healed her burnt feet so that not even a trace of burning was to be seen on them any more than if the fire had not touched them. — Vita Prima/First Life of Saint Brigid, transl. Seán Connolly
When we are in our winter sleep planted under birch leaves in our bed my eyes are open. I want to whisper to you, but I keep quiet. Your cold feet against my shins. In my thoughts, fire. Afraid to sleep and dream of burning
through my desires and having to burn my dreams, too, to keep warm. Sleep will pour oil on the fire, and dreams will make me straight again. Our bed will melt away and I’ll be kissing the feet of a hairless guy with an app called Wispr —
an idea for an app, he still needs the cash, he whispers in my ear and I can feel the words burn, because the queer feminists of Berlin are just feet away and I’m a Pärchen now with a guy I really don’t want to sleep with. I beg them: help me stay out of his Ikea bed, but he’s telling them how to make money: set someone’s hair on fire then sell them the water to put it out. “Wow, that’s fire,” says an effortless person with blue hair and whispers
into her phone, a voice note to the group chat. “You made your bed, says my ex-, “and now you have to lie.” I burn to be at a wine-soaked ranch again, half asleep in the lap of the CEO’s wife, she’s telling me her best story, feet slipping out of her glass slippers, she sold photos of her feet to get through college, kissed one girl per semester, now she fires one chef per quarter and I ask her: “When you sleep do you dream that you could stop being straight?” She whispers “When I miss girls, I run barefoot on the trails to feel the burn.” I try it but a rattlesnake bites my ankle. In the hospital bed
I wake up and wake up to you, in our winter bed, and the earth is thawing. Cramps in my feet where the venom glowed like embers burning. I try not to move but you’re awake. I want to fire the guy who writes my dreams. (It is a guy.) I whisper, “I’m not running away,” and you say, “I know, go back to sleep.”
Lucy Duggan
According to one hagiography of Brigid, her close friend and pupil Darlugdach fell in love with a man and planned to go out at night and meet him. She got up from the bed she was sharing with Brigid, but a vision told her to put hot coals in her shoes. She burned her feet on the coals and went back to bed; Brigid had been awake all this time, and in the morning, she comforted Darlugdach and healed her feet.
I chose the form of a sestina, so that the repeating words would connect the repetitive dreams with the story of Darlugdach’s burned feet.
Lucy Duggan
Declaration College ends with the goods train shunting heavy into earshot, then view: dropping beet, inking your work, slowly ploughing the line.
We skin our pants down the embankment, feel the train’s pulse in the warm rail.
I catch your breathlessness. The touch of oily, smoke tainted fingers anoint each tack hammered flush against the railway sleeper. Our initials in a tin man’s heart.
James Anthony
My Acting Days
1981: Meryl Streep plays Sarah Woodruff, enigmatic and troubled in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ Victorian period drama. I fell for her melancholy and intrigue, imagined myself in a black cloak under Lyme Regis cliffs keeping a fateful assignation with an incendiary and lethal Jeremy Irons. But my hair was wrong. I needed the unfettered wildness of her Titan mane, that riotous spill of auburn waves unpinned in feverish scenes.
The hairdresser, Mary Riordan, more at home with poodle perms ridged tight for women on pensions days, looked quizzical at the newspaper cutting I presented, promised nothing as she lathered on the ammonia and peroxide.
She turned my hair to frizz and straw, a brittle rasp, hidden with tears and fury, under a headscarf that bore no resemblance at all to the hood of Sarah Woodruff’s black cloak, as she waited for her forbidden lover in the brooding dark, her wild red hair already undone.
Margaret Galvin
Kissing the Shore Alan Murphy
Notes on Contributors
James Anthony is a Galway-based poet. His work has been published in various magazines and anthologies. His poems were shortlisted in the Red Line Book Festival (2017, 2019, 2020), Over the Edge New Writer of the Year (2017), and highly commended in the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Awards (2017, 2023).
Liam Aungier has had poems published in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers and elsewhere. A first collection, Apples in Winter, was published by Doghouse. A second collection is forthcoming in 2025.
Anne Mac Darby Beck grew up in rural Ireland and writes poetry and short stories. Her work has been published in various magazines, journals and anthologies in Ireland. She has also had work published in British and American magazines such as Scintilla and Nourish anthology.
R.J. Breathnach is an award winning writer, Wexford-born and Meath-based. 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.
Craig Cox is a writer, sound artist and Adult Education teacher. He can be contacted at craigcoxart@gmail.com.
Deirdre Devally holds an MA in Creative Writing from UL. She was shortlisted in Fish Short Story Competition, 2024 and longlisted with two poems. Her work appears in Trumpet 12, The Stony Thursday Book and more. She has received two Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursaries/Awards and mentorship awards.
Anne Donnellan’s debut collection Witness was published in December 2022 by Revival Press Limerick. Anne’s work has
appeared in several poetry journals including Crannog, Skylight 47 and Drawn to the Light Press, She was the 2023 winner of the Allingham Poetry Competition. She hosts the Poetry Lobby readings in Galway.
Honor Duff, a native of Dublin, now lives in County Cavan. Her poems have been placed and commended in several competitions, including the Francis Ledwidge Awards, the Goldsmith Poetry Competition, the Red Line Festival, and have been published in various journals including, Boyne Berries, Drawn To The Light Press, Crannóg, The Stony Thursday Book ,The Galway Review and Skylight 47.
Lucy Duggan is a writer and translator based in rural Brandenburg, in eastern Germany. She is the author of Tendrils (Cambridge: Peer Press, 2014), a novel about long-lost enemies. Her work has appeared in The Catweazle Magazine, The Spectacle, and The Washington Square Review.
Michael Durack lives in Co. Tipperary, Ireland. His poems feature in publications such as The Blue Nib, Skylight 47, The Cafe Review, Live Encounters, The Banyan Review, The Waxed Lemon, Drawn to the Light, The Poetry Bus, The Stony Thursday Book, The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Ireland Review as well as airing on local and national radio. He is the author of a memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (2016) and three poetry collections, Where It Began (2017), Flip Sides (2020) and This Deluge of Words (2023) published by Revival Press.
Annie Egan lives near the sea in Galway, Ireland with her partner, three daughters and too many pets. Annie works as a human rights researcher. She is new to writing poetry and has previously been published in The Bangor Literary Journal, The Belfast Review, The Madrigal, The Poets’ Republic (Drunk Muse) and ‘We are all Palestinians’, an anthology published by Culture Matters.
Frank Farrelly is from Waterford. His poems have been widely published. His publications include The Boiler Room (Revival Press 2020) and Small Victories (Revival Press 2024). He is a previous
winner of the Fingal Poetry Prize, Francis Ledwidge Award, Rush Poetry Prize and Allingham Poetry Prize.
Billy Fenton writes fiction and poetry. His work has been widely published including - The Rialto, Irish Times, Cyphers, Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Acumen, Orbis, Crannóg, FourFaced Liar, Abridged, and many others.
Margaret Galvin is a Tipperary writer, long time resident in Wexford. Her most recent collection is 'Our House, Delirious', poetry and essays from Revival Press Limerick. Her work is frequently broadcast on 'Sunday Miscellany' and 'A Word in Edgeways', RTE radio 1. She has particular interest in facilitating writing workshops for persons with support needs, in the health and disability sector.
Anita Gracey has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Honest Ulsterman, Washing Windows – Irish Women Write Poetry (1-1V), Sonder, Corshum, and Poetry Jukebox. Recipient Good Relations Award 2023. Awardee Irish Writers Centre’s, Northern Soul Roadshow 2024. Represented County Antrim in Poetry Ireland Day 2024 on Eat the Storms podcast.
Sharron Green has published Introducing Rhymes_n_Roses; Viral Odes, Willing Words and her latest, Rhymes for the Mind is due out soon. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Surrey and has been Head Writer for their New Writer’s Festival. She hosts monthly poetry open mic nights and is a member of The Booming Lovelies, a trio of performing poets. To find out more go to https://linktr.ee/rhymes_n_roses.
Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. His book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain Press in 2020.
Ellen Harrold (She/Her) is an Irish artist and writer as well as editor-in-chief of Metachrosis Literary. She uses drawing, text, and
textiles to explore physics, anatomy, and ecology through creative abstraction. She has recently published art in The Storms Journal, An Áitiúil, and Orion.
Carmel Hogan is an emerging writer from Kilkenny. She writes poetry and stories inspired by her life experiences. Her work appears in White Twine and Old Suitcases, a miscellany of poetry and prose, she is published in Drawn To The Light Press, the Kilkenny Poetry Broadsheet 2024 and in Kilkenny - The Best of Ireland - Live, Work, Enjoy - A publication by Kilkenny Co. Enterprise Board to promote Kilkenny.
Glenn Hubbard began writing in 2013 and has had work published in a variety of journals including Stand, Strix, and Skylight 47. Although it may not always be obvious, he owes a great deal to the poetry of R.F. Langley.
David Kenny is a writer from Wicklow. He holds a BA in Film and Documentary from ATU Galway and a Certificate in Creative Fiction from Carlow College, St. Patrick's. His poetry features in Swerve Magazine and Underbelly Press.
Caitríona Lane is a bilingual Poetry Ireland Introductions Poet 2022. Her work in both Irish and English has won prizes and been broadcast on RTE RnaG and local radio in Connemara. Widely published in journals she was shortlisted for Eavan Boland Award 2023. I.W.C awarded her a residency in Cill Rialaig 2024.
Mary Lee’s poems have been widely published and anthologised nationally and internationally, including Skylight 47, Orbis, Crannόg, Poems for Patience competition, short listed twice). Her work has been broadcast on RTE Radio 1. Mary’s third poetry collection: The Stranger, the Dream, the Bird is forthcoming with Revival Press, Limerick early 2025.
Maya Little is a writer and theatre director. She won the Creative Future poetry award in 2024 and was a Roundhouse Poetry
Collective member. She is a regular workshop facilitator at Oxford Poetry Library and Fusion Arts. She likes making work about connection, climate, capitalism, and anything a bit weird.
Kevin MacAlan lives in Co Waterford. He has an MA in Creative Writing, and has contributed to journals, including The Waxed Lemon, An Áitiúil, Howl, Stripes, Bindweed, The Belfast Review, The Martello, and Wild Umbrella. He was longlisted for The National Poetry Competition 2023 and The Fish Poetry Prize 2024.
Mandy Macdonald is an Australian, Aberdeen-based writer and editor. Her poetry appears in Scotland and beyond in online and print journals and anthologies. Her second pamphlet is The Unreliability of Rainbows (Yaffle’s Nest, November 2024). Mandy believes poetry can change the world but is cultivating an allotment just in case.
Caoimhín Mac Unfraidh lives in Cobh, Co. Cork and writes poems, short stories and essays, usually on historical themes, in both Irish and English.
Rose Malone writes poetry and short stories and has been published in New Square, The Galway Review, Shorter Stories and The Leinster Leader
Alan Murphy lives on a crow-infested housing estate in Lismore, County Waterford. A visual artist who also writes poetry and songs, he is the author and illustrator of four collections of poems for children and teenagers.
Eugene O’Hare was named runner-up in the 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award (2024) for an unpublished first collection. His first poems have appeared in Drawn to the Light, Arc, Stand, Cyphers, Dedalus Press and more.
Catherine Ronan has performed at many events including Electric Picnic, The Winter Warmer, Poetry Ireland and Cultivating Voices. In 2024, she represented Cork in the Cork Coventry Poetry
Exchange. Her Poetry Collection, Elemental Skin was nominated for the Forward, Pigott and Heaney Poetry Prizes.
Lee Sheridan is an Irish novelist and poet. He came joint-second in the Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter Flash Fiction Competition (2024) and was shortlisted for the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition (2023). He established a publishing house, Luain Press, and released his debut novella St George's Day in 2022. Later that year he released a collection of poems, Monuments
Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and journals, most recently in Shooter Literary Magazine, Poetry News, Acumen. He was commended in this year’s Coast to Coast to Coast competition, highly commended in the Sonnet or Not competition, and long listed for the BrieflyWrite Prize.
Patrick Slevin has appeared in Poetry Review Ireland, New Isles Press, Manchester Review, Spellbinder, The Cormorant, Skylight 47, The Poets' Republic, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter's House, High Window and others; the anthologies An Aituil, Something About Home, Life and Soul and has featured on RTE's Poem of the Day.
Kris Spencer is a writer and teacher living in London. He has two poetry collections published by Kelsay Books: Life Drawing (2022) and Contact Sheets (2024). He is currently working to complete his first novel.
Jill Eloise Vance is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her work has appeared in Truth Serum Press, Pure Slush, Dirigible Balloon, Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis, Full House Literary, Forge Zine, The Alchemy Spoon, Allegro Poetry, Chemical Inevitable, Celestite Poetry, Overtly Lit, The Hyacinth Review and Green Ink Poetry.
Anthony Wade was inspired by the ‘Collected Poems of Francis Ledwidge’, joining Midleton Writers Group in 2016, with a first poem published in 2018; now a Forward Prize nominee with poetry published in print journals in Ireland, England, Scotland, the US, and Canada. twitter.com@anthonywadepoet
Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with two collections, Intermission and Zoo, available on Amazon and elsewhere: His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and was longlisted for the 2023 National Poetry Competition and recognised in the 2024 Ware, Bridport, Maria Edgeworth,
Pen to Print, London Independent Story and Shahidah Janjua poetry competitions.
Patrons: Anthony Wade
Arthur Broomfield
Attracta Fahy
James Finnegan
Simon Lewis
This project was supported by Meath County Council Arts Office and Creative Ireland through the Professional Artist Development Fund.
