Drawn to the Light Press Issue 7 October 2022

Roses Alan Murphy

Editor: Orla Fay

Published by Drawn to the Light Press ISSN 2737-7768

Next issue: February 2023

https://drawntothelightpress.com Twitter: @DrawnPress Instagram: @drawntothelightpress Facebook: @drawnpress22

Patrons: Anthony Wade Arthur Broomfield

Drawn to the Light Press is edited, designed, and produced by Orla Fay.

Cover design Roses by Alan Murphy Back cover design The Sensual World (1989) by Alan Murphy

The works included in this issue are copyright of the poets and artists ©2022 and may not be reproduced or changed in any way without the permission of the individual author.

Drawn to the Light Press is ©2022 of the editor. All rights reserved

Hard Swallows

Brian Kirk 5

A night in Ráithe Art Ó Súilleabháin 6 What is? Sinéad MacDeviit 7

Instead of a Lamp Jane Robinson 8 House Sparrows Sacha Hutchinson 9 Landing Gavan Duffy 10 viburnum haikus Mary Mulholland 11 An Admission Martin Sykes 12 Laid Bare Sue Wallacae-Shaddad 13 Nature’s Shriek Nora Brennan 14 Blood Brothers Áine Rose 15 Powerlines Bernadette Fosberry 16 Leo Caleb Brennan 17 Resting Caitríona Lane 18 Catching the Last Rays Caitríona Lane 19

The Golden Tree Diarmuid Fitzgrald 20 Son et Lumiere in the MRI Honor Duff 21 Sailing Through Picasso’s Rooms Anne Donnellan 22

The Bench at Dalkey Carol Beirne 23 The Parsley Linda Opyr 24 Vision Arthur Broomfield 25 Periwinkle Patrick Deeley 26 Redshank Sacha Hutchinson 27 Winter storms Sacha Hutchinson 28 Bird of Paradise RC deWinter 29 Dingle Wilds 42, Between Polly Richardson 30 It’s like this… Alsed Deacon 31 Maestro Paul Hennessy 32 Reunion Patrick Slevin 33

The Length of my Days Anita Alig 34 Floored Emma Jones 35 Knickers Pratibha Castle 36 Dancing to Van Morrison Angela Kirwan 37

My Mother Stoned

Eugene Platt 38 Reclamation Alison McCrossan 39 Possession (1981) Peter Heyns 40

What Makes You Special Polina Cosgrave 41 Interwoven Jess Dunne 42

Le Soul (The Loneliness) John Martin 43

Let there be light Marie MacSweeney 44

Riposte Mary Madec 45

The Clutch John D. Kelly 46

Throwing A Long Line Anthony Wade 47

A Prescription of Trees Mandy Beattie 48

Dear Mr. Spielberg Kathryn Slattery 49

De Scripto Meridians Frank Murphy 50

Lighting the Fires for Lamass and Lunasa Jean O’Brien 51

In Jordan Richard W. Halperin 52

Anxiety of Influence Emily Cullen 53

On Stage Linda McKenna 54

Things I Got Used To Amy Worgan 55

Yesterday Catherine Brennan 56 Touch Tim Dwyer 56

A Thousand Flames Anne Irwin 57

I miss you more than life Catherine Brennan 58 Notes on Contributors 59

Issue 7 contains the work of 52 individual poets and artists. Of the front and back cover design Alan Murphy says, “They are two collages, Roses and The Sensual World (1989). There's a floral theme in both artworks - they look as though they were created around the same time, though in fact I made the former two years after the latter.

The Roses image was one of three pieces I created for last year's Verso art project, which was an exhibition of postcard sized art - by amateurs and professionals - in aid of Lismore cathedral. The final version of the collage came about by accident - I hadn't originally intended putting flowers in it, but when I did it transformed the piece. There were many contributors to the Verso exhibition (in Lismore Castle Arts) - David Ryan, Jane Jermyn, Felix Faulkner and Donal Buckley, to name a few locals. Silvio Severino and a littleknown actress called Joanna Lumley were also involved.

The Sensual World image was for a Cork exhibition organised in 2019 by Silvio Severino, on the theme of 1989. My contribution was based on Kate Bush's The Sensual World (the album and song) which came out that year. I remember listening to it on vinyl back in the day. The tree-like verticals in the composition were inspired by the forest setting of the video for the song, and those are Kate's lips! The song was inspired by Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Joyce's Ulysses.”

Thanks to Jess Dunne for creating Interwoven to accompany Polina Cosgrave’s What Makes You Special, and to all the contributors.

Orla Fay, October 2022

Hard Swallows

Every summer they came back, hard swallows with pinched city faces, bullet heads, black boots and braces, ink tattoos and traces of abuse we took for attitude. Sitting on the wall across from Leisureland, drinking cider, spitting, shirts off in the midday sun. We crossed the road to pass them, trying to look down but our eyes were drawn to these exotic summer visitors, thirsty for a sip of urban squalor, bored with the blunt routine of school and farm in this backwater. By evening their numbers grew, the squad car took a turn around the town, the air felt heavy like a storm might break. The pubs won’t serve but the dark dunes welcome them along with certain local girls who can’t resist their tattooed arms, flat vowels that bend their names into a novel sound, unfamiliar, overwhelmed with wistful possibility, until the word gets out and there’s murder on the street. While happy families sleep it starts with threats, builds to shouts and screams, breaking glass, car engines roaring down the darkened street. Sun rises and the town is not the same, shopkeepers boarding broken windows, sweeping glass out of the road, boiling kettles to remove the blood that dries like clotted paint on concrete. Every summer was the same, every summer they came back.

Brian Kirk

A night in Ráithe

The house empty now listening to the sheep

Choosing its ghosts from mountain darkness

Where once it held us in life for a moment

Arrived in the little brown Ford Escort to be alone with you in the evening

Your father commandeered my presence Peter Street from his fiddle delaying the ache

You came to me later to make up the settee damp black curls falling over lace

That silver wave on your forehead your eyes revealed that you had time too

I scented the shampoo in your hair touched your bare shoulders gently

We tasted one another drank the intimate newness

Explored another landscape forgot we were not alone

The house was not empty then but only the ghosts know now.

Art Ó Súilleabháin

What is?

Another month is over. I know the bells won’t ring. No carols will be sung. Yet a mist spreads over the meadow and fades to let the sun brush un-crushed leaves.

Another month is coming: an adventure without a card, a winter without a crib, a holiday without a rest and an Xmas without the Christ.

Yet my eyes are feasted by trees with leaves that look like crystal ginger against the tinted backdrop before the crash. Yet colours of the arc colour the plain and silent bells begin to chime. If this is not a sign of the adventure, what is?

Sinéad MacDevitt

Instead of a Lamp

The field in memory shines its light on a million moving shapes: midges near the hedge hunted in aerobatic dance by swift and swallow. A slow unfurling of fern heads in the ditch; soft summer rattle of quaking grass.

Fields at the university test station reduce everything to measurable variables, with perennial ryegrass

and electric fences. Security lights shine on a million moving blades of grass, input for the output of milk.

The factory farm field is losing soil in a runoff-rully, a gully to stream and lake, the green algae. And where

are cowslips and green-veined orchids? Where are the million moving shapes: dark bees with their pollen in baskets?

The field of the future is again small, is beautiful, rimmed by holly to shelter four cows, one horse and three sheep;

the hedgerows are once again pendant in sweet plums, threaded by honeysuckle, a million moths moving by moonlight.

Jane Robinson

House Sparrows Sacha Hutchinson

Landing

The stone I plucked from the ground left a perfect mould of itself where the earth had gripped it. Just too big to hide inside my fist, it sits on my palm and radiates a cold that comes from its core. Its shape is a sloppy axe head, the edges blunted and dulled, but still holding a vague threat. The sea’s lapping is too gentle to have sucked it plane, I see it instead in a rapid stream, battered smooth against others of its kind.

Stroking it with my thumb the skin of the rock is a matt black, that even wet will never reflect anything.

It will warm soon in my hand and stop playing dead. Its cold clammy sweat will disappear as it stores and returns the heat it draws from me. It is helpless while I hold it.

I turn it in my fingers and imagine its flight through air, the soft thud as it hits damp soil in a feeble stop, the half hearted splash as it strikes cold water. It would crackle as it burst through branches of trees,

scaring the birds away. That image pulls you back to mind. A sudden thought that makes me wish I could throw it into the days ahead, to listen for its landing, as it stirs up the shards of what is to come.

Gavan Duffy viburnum haikus

cupid's arrow-shaft found by the heart of a bronze age frozen mummy love unexpected for an old woman who thought love was for the young her pliable arms gladden the winter bareness flower pink cream white a smell of honey startles her bright red berries all around the snow

Mary Mulholland

An Admission

I still feel the sting of the Rialto sunlight, with the boarded-up buildings below, and my footsteps skittering over cracks on the pavement, avoiding bad fortunes, the air seeping with expectation, dust and smoke, burning aromas, all those dangling balconies blanketed by a city’s stranglehold, obscured –

But this is not an excuse, only an admission, vague as I have penned it, a riddle behind a locked door –My head bobs from the sedation, the nurse gives me a form, familiar faces guide me like a psychopomp, telling me there’s always a way back from Acheron. They’re lying –

I feel the ripples of the midday rush, the clang of passing cars and buses, or perhaps just another hangover –Wearily I sign my name, and they walk me towards the door as I follow blindly once again, like a sheep clinging to the murky mist of a cliff edge.

Martin Sykes

Laid Bare after Joyce Mansour

I live in the shade of your face more keen-eyed than I thought. You spin lunar collars around my body, illuminate fires I did not expect. I’m in the crosshairs of your pupils, the working of your jaw. I can hear an echo of your shadow, I have ears full of desperate light as I couch myself in your arms. Goodnight. Goodnight.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad

Nature’s Shriek

after Edvard Munch

Impervious to the order of the day –that art and beauty were one, you brought to light the dark corners of your soul, illness, insanity and death the black angels that accompanied you, subjects of your paintings without which, you tell us, your life would have been a ship without a rudder.

Remembered now for one image a poster in students’ bedrooms, an emoji on our phones, the Armageddon you saw in the sky at sunset, that November, our month of the dead, the veil between us and the other world threadbare, when fear gripped you and the infinite scream of nature shuddered in your bones. Pain reduced to a garbed skull, mouth open, a waif-like figure, its contours mirroring the sinuous shoreline of the fjord, the blood red sky.

Nora Brennan

Blood Brothers

We dragged you from a yellow house to my family home, passing potholes that held secrets in cloudy orange clay.

I poured you red wine in my mother’s cup and unfurled a yoga mat, the bends of spines and twists of waists were knives that sliced pumpkin-eyed slits onto our fingertips, to spell iron-bound pacts of unspoken words stitched to our lips.

How far can one person stretch before they snap? From down-dog to pigeon, your head bow and fell like rolling marble on sloped table. A few days earlier your father was found

face-down, floating in heaven. I always said October felt like something I couldn’t put my finger on, bright grey days that pushed the light away.

Áine Rose

Powerlines

In autumn they are decked, symbols of departing summer black and white in constant motion flickering across the sky.

In winter they cut across shoals of shimmering starlings. Watching as they constantly morph to new beings.

In spring the crows gather noisy in the growing light as they argue, fall from grace return as wind tosses.

In summer’s somnolence nothing stirs the still scented air. One lonely buzzard sits in contemplation then swoops.

Bernadette Fosberry

Leo

When she was born, it was hottest summer The Island of Ireland had ever seen. She will be a child born of the sun, And will not know the weather that homes here.

Just like that tempest rain which falls as rapids above her As she waits at the bus stop, or that sideways glancing torrent that will bite into her on muddy pitches in East Tipp. She will not be ready for it, her future.

She will only understand the soft hug of Pennies Pjs, Warm black fingerless gloves during her junior cert cycle, Or that of the lapping motion of the hot water bottle Hidden under the sun-blessed pillars of her legs.

She will comfort herself as she studies near fire often And with the warmth of dad’s hugs or eating soft ice-cream in the kitchen at 4pm October darkness. She will feel bliss During the April Break, when escapes to nan’s caravan

In Ballybunion, become ritual now. She will feel at home Here almost fresh in the hot brevity of Irish summer. And, while hypnotised by streaking rainfall sliding down the car window she will think back and wish for softer days.

That is her future however, now she rests in easy warmth, Cooed by the electric hum of the modern fan and calmed by the soft static of the baby monitor. Inured by the side of a figure.

A figure who she will eventually call mother, But now will only understand the bond she has, and comprehends, yet doesn’t, the love which she holds for her.

Caleb Brennan

Resting

Do not dismiss me as a crone, My veins gnarled, my skin punctured. Windswept.

Drenched by Atlantic waters. Do not dismiss me as a crone.

I am simply resting here a while On the branch of a Rowan Hitching a ride as I sky fall Returning to source to slumber Sleeping my way through to spring. At Imbolc you will glimpse my buds

When the May Queen appears this crone disappears For I am Sycamore, Verdant, vital.

Caitríona Lane

Caitríona Lane

The Golden Tree

This tree is a monument in my front garden. The red wine leaves turn golden when the sap stops.

My heart has been creaking with pain these last few months, lacerated by arguments and long pent-up rows.

I just sit and watch the leaves fall off one by one in a dance of letting go and gather on the ground. I hope my troubles will go the same away.

Golden waves come out and vibrate through the window, ripple through the house. This tree is singing to me.

Diarmuid Fitzgerald

Son et Lumiere in the MRI

There's a Sci-fi look about it all as you slide into the open mouth of the capsule, trying not to think of those movies where certain people are frozen, only to wake bewildered after 50 years, to an altered state.

Overhead a violet light appears, reminiscent of late winter sunsets, this changes to a pretty sugar pink, then to deep Mediterranean blue above a turquoise summer sea fading to a light-grey Irish sky.

Earphones to mute the worst noise don't block the pounding drum-beats. Somebody is knocking insistently at a door which will never open; trumpets blast and cymbals clang in this Symphony of Discordance.

The magnetic sound waves soar, break on the rippled shores of the brain as you lie, bathed in changing light, buffeted by strange sensations. No applause at performance end as you emerge, shaken but stirred.

Honor Duff

Sailing Through Picasso’s Rooms

I am swamped with guitars and bowls striated pitchers perch behind thick lines still of colour spill on boards gags my knowing battle skulls drench me with memory skeleton heads heaped in Khmer glass shrines when twisted thought turns vile quick as milk sours cannibals gobble their own vomit flesh

I dock by the hope bunch of leeks sway with drift of pallor to saturated pink Picasso sheds war monochrome for turquoise peace as today innocents in wheat fields of the East ready trench cocktails for the Red beast my stomach squirms

Anne Donnellan

The Bench at Dalkey

On the bench where we ate our fish and chips the seagulls would fight over our soggy leftover cod

we would watch young lovers holding hands on the sand where we once undressed and ran out to the sea

and under the waves I lost my virginity I had sand on my breasts and love in my loins

it was then we knew we were for eternity as we kissed a salty kiss you held me tightly

where you asked me to be yours forever, but why have you now left me

as your warm breath blows gently upon my neck I cannot see you but I know you're here

as the sun reaches out from the cumulous I taste your tender kiss upon my face

you are here, on the bench at Dalkey.

Carol Beirne

The Parsley

The breeze teases the hands of the leaves but leaves nothing of itself for me.

Even the small birds hide from a sky whose sun is too big to hold.

And yet, of a sudden, the smallest of black wings Appears – from nowhere, a secret shadow come to life.

There, neath the shade of awning, they swing past the lavender, geraniums, the sage and salvia.

But, finding the parsley, they choose. And close. Land as butterflies do: the flap of stillness.

I forget the heat, the clouds that will come. The rain, the trees, the grass drinking,

All gone in the cool shadows of parsley. The lift and land of that dark wonder.

Linda Opyr

Vision

It’s a mid-October day, a man and woman dig a potato patch. Three young girls watch and play.

Will they, in times of fog, spurn the sun, that beaming postman with bad news in his bag and dredge beneath the cortege, expect to meet the life to come?

Arthur Broomfield

Periwinkle

Your shell mouth gapes, as if too much gobbledy gook had contorted it, though your nature is to be soundless except for the whirring note less of wind or sea than of this mantelshelf dust tickling your throat. Your whorls set intertidal specks of lavender and brown gold

glinting in my eye. So much has come loose where you, a soft creature, once plugged yourself in to graze on algae before the swell

of waves swept you off, tossed you up. Now your small, ovate house occurs to me as a bauble.

At a push, you stand for the wistfulness

I can’t quite put my finger on, caught – as ever – between the lasting charge of the primordial and the sense that I too am disposable.

Patrick Deeley

Redshank Sacha Hutchinson

Winter storms

To start another day walking the shore bent into breeze wondered would I ever safely ride my bike again gales scrambled each into the next.

Where do birds go in storms?

I found waders on the playing field once a dump for heavy metal now this flooded patch deceptively clean in shiny mint green

All flocked or individually placed Godwit, Redshank, Oystercatcher ruffled, buffeted, braced on twingey, twiggy legs balanced on their beaks deep struck, they poked, pulled worms from toxic mud.

And the garden birds? heard but unseen their soft tweets at low level, either huddled in the lee of a tree or in hedges hidden away

day after day after day.

Sacha Hutchinson

Bird of Paradise

I gaze at your new face, resolute, your eyes, the lamplights of a hero, leading you to truth. The lines laid down by time only add character to what shines through.

Your plumage, as changeable as the weather, molts and refledges to suit the task at hand. You prefer to speak the language of peace and reconciliation, yet sometimes must say and do what contravenes your beliefs. This dichotomy does not trouble me.

I know your heart, your vision, your constraints, that you long for a life in the sun, free of the masks, the molting, the devil’s bargains. So fly homeward, beautiful bird, as soon as ever you can. The nest is ready for your return. I wait, impatient but steadfast, to shower you with all the love and comfort you’ve earned.

Dingle Wilds 42, Between

“With earth and dung drifting through my cavities.” All Things 2022 by David Radcliffe, Worldly Worders session - Inspirations from Jack Kerouac.

I slip loosely on to the drift with winds turning faces think of all the moments that blew translucent dreams to sods under these perfect imprints, grasses singing their ripeness

bursting seeds for seedlings, maybe scream as first cuts looms, silent

bar cricket’s ears reflect out its time, this time to hop on summers delight. Lone pony calls low nickers with moons passing fullness

illuminating horizon’s seamless waves, we sync our thoughts, her and I, sweet and succulent, precious in these slices of timeless bonds, a knowing pass, caught in each eye, between blinks, veins rush filled with it all.

Polly Richardson

We shouldn’t have happened you were petite and pretty I was obese and ugly you were getting over a husband I was nursing a divorce and two break-ups. Age mattered and yet – it’s like this … Some chemistry bound us together matched our steps through a myrtle bog picked a blackberry path to the high gate amphiprotic reactions compounded the us into a giving and a receiving pure water brought us to a sun-drenched island made tea in our tentative souls ate into our loneliness touched a colour in the darkness and left me trying to explain a hunger that happened.

It’s like this … (for Ria)

Alsed Deacon

Maestro

He closed his eyes as he played, remembered summer evenings when the girls waited outside the Academy for the recitals to end. How they hung around for hours laughing and smoking together, sometimes drinking palinka by the fountain and dancing to the music coming from the taverns. His fingers dancing now on the faded keys of an old accordion as the music flowed through him from that long ago time. Years lost in the swell and cadence of a Bach adagio that stops me in my tracks, jazz standards he secretly learned as a student, the folk tunes of his parents. And then as though something unbuckled inside him, his need to talk when I approached. To hear himself saying the words. I don’t play much anymore. Years ago, I played for hours everyday. I was at the Academy then teaching in the morning, concerts in the afternoon. I was young. Life was good. And then, the wall came down and it was over. My job, my home all gone. None of us knew what to do. Mostly we drifted from town to town looking for work, drinking too much. My wife went back to her mother in Tatabanya. I never saw my daughter again. He nodded as I emptied my pockets to add to the meagre offerings in his instrument case. Wondering how thirty years on he is playing Hungarian waltzes outside a Wexford supermarket, grateful for this chance conversation, to play for a moment to a stranger who listens just enough to ward off the resentment that torments him daily. Thoughts of a daughter he barely knew. The ghosts

dancing on the cobbles beneath the glowering statue of Liszt. Applause rising to fill a throbbing Concert Hall.

Paul Hennessy

Reunion

What I remember is the camera we borrowed. How we wound the film on instead of reeling it in exposing the negatives to too much light. We could have waited. Found someone who understood the workings but in the rush ended up with nothing. In this empty moment with the eyes you’ve just told me I still have I squint through that viewfinder at those undeveloped pictures. The distance is right. The image is perfect.

Patrick Slevin

The Length of My Days

You, you are the length of my days, the cusp of the night and when I am blue with sadness and the crackling cold you pave a way to a place I can be. My brother, my sister, my cousin, my child, the woman on the 45 to Foxrock, the barman at the Ship Inn, the cashier at Dunnes Stores, Briarhill. Your child is sick, your arthritis is flaring, you cannot pay the electricity bill and the ESB will cut off your power any day now. You told me the judge said you were beyond redemption sending you down for life. You told me you cannot believe you were picked from among thousands. You’ve passed the five-year all-clear the day he found out she’d been with someone else. On that same day, you gave birth to not one, not two, but three healthy babies, and ye got the key to the house. And then on the M50, the pileup, seven seriously injured, three dead at the scene, a couple off without as much as a scratch, back to work the next day and everyone rallying, lending an ear, a crutch, a few moments to spare. The days are full of people asking how are you and pausing for the answer, cups of tea, and texts saying

did you make it home alright and finishing in multiple xs. We are, if nothing else, a cliffhanger, and you you are the measure of my days, the cusp of the light.

Anita Alig Floored

As omens go it felt like a bad sign: her daughter in hospital again and there lying on the other side of the glass – a dead robin.

Smooth and stiff with that red ribbon draped around its chest, it had the peace of a saint who forgives some moment of wickedness.

Yesterday she must have trapped it there, when in a rush, she’d closed the studio door and was too distracted to recall all the beautiful things alive in the world and how fate can turn on one small action.

Emma Jones

Knickers

By the river Liffey she stepped out of satin knickers sighing like peachy petals around her ankles, elastic, growing lax, having let her down.

Second sibling out of ten, and wise to the workings of a secret, she chuckled, and stifling the memory of a nun’s echoing scold, stuffed them, her touch ambiguous as roses, into a cardigan pocket together with a ladybird brushed unseen off her Mary Janes.

Dismissive of the unmaking inherent in a ladybird hex, she strode forth with a flounce of chestnut hair, flushed cheeks, on the arm of the young man who would be my father, across grudging grass into a future fragrant, green as a whispering willow’s promises divined from the morning’s dregs.

That girl’s laugh, her shadowy tales, persist, coast with a hawk on silent currents, sustenance for a skylark’s silvery beck, eulogies of a universe where love is endless song and no sour notes.

Pratibha Castle

Dancing to Van Morrison

Have I told you lately? plays on the radio, our song. You reach your hand across the table and take mine. We dance around the kitchen. Into the mystic is playing on the radio your song. I reach my hand across the table and I dance around the kitchen.

Angela Kirwan

My Mother Stoned

Startled by my late-in-life DNA discovery, I ask myself: Did my doting mother make a mistake, deserve to be stoned by an enraged man I grew up thinking was my father?

Whether belle or jezebel, my mother cuddled me continually after she cuckolded the trusting man who would raise me from infancy, a good man who worked his ass off to provide for family.

So, who am I to say? It was for posterity what the Prophet said to the too-eager would-be stoners of that woman caught in the act, the unpardonable act of adultery. I only know I cannot throw the first stone— and like my fellow Pharisees, I may just slip away…

Eugene Platt

Reclamation

A sea of bluebells, branches reach for a yellow skyall sun, and you rugged oddness, shame slicks your skin.

A sunray strikes one budding leaf and you remember painting

chimney stacks on hills, rocks blazed, the sky alight.

You run pause breathe. You bend to touch a bell. The flower’s neck is delicate in your fingers could snap.

When you were a child chimney smoke curled over the river, smooched mist. A magical view, caustic on the tongue.

You run deeper. Trees crowd in on themselves.

You flip over roots, twist your ankles on every turn.

Art only draws you deeper in, threatens to spill where you live.

Here, the fragile neck, drooping headyou yearn to relinquish.

Alison McCrossan

Possession (1981)

Through dark eyes Blue eyes the dark Hello dark eyes I have this fan in the bathroom on loud Help me

I want you help me

Y Walt I want I want you I want Walt to help me why you want help me why won’t you will help me I want you to help me why Blue but dark

Peter Heyns

What Makes You Special

What makes you special is how gently you hold the beating heart of life in the middle of your palm. Thus, you say: I am here to teach and be taught, to adore and be adored. So are you, don't worry.

What makes you special is how you open my mind as a Christmas present. With glitter blown off, ribbon carefully cut, I freeze unwrapped. See me and understand: I'm about to blow up from this kind of intimacy.

I, so ordinary and plain, abide by no rules, carry no weapons. Like a child, I encounter the world in all its generosity. And you — a gust of autumn wind over the lake, a bite on my neck,

chocolate bar saved for after dinner.

don't know what to do with you.

Polina Cosgrave

Interwoven Jess Dunne

Le Soul (The Loneliness)

I remember my arm around her waist

With her hand upon my shoulder

Happy that she wore the linen dress

With red flowers

Watching the children eating omelette

Of mushrooms that we had picked In our woods

And that I had cooked in an iron pan

The long table on the grass in the sun

Children blond with brown faces

The langue d’oc gushing between them

And Uncle Jean dying of melanoma

Drinking Monbazillac

Looking out across the lake

John Martin

Let there be light

Sky gravid with gulls. High stepping wind swallowing seas, spreading stolen waters oceans away beside a naked rock where this structure rises, block upon block, wayward boulders sliding towards ocean floor while above is made a plinth for reflectors, light, lenses, powerful rays guiding ships safely through storms and we surely know that seas are seas, mean well yet need amelioration, a lighthouse on the horizon where hope is made and endures.

Marie MacSweeney

Riposte

After The Song of Songs

These words of how love is strong as death are a lie and on the mountains of spices the cold winds have blown the sweet perfumes away, so that he who searches for me, in the streets of his dreams, will not find me.

I have gone into the flowing streams of Lebanon and washed my soul of all grief. I have washed my soul where the flowers of love first took root, where the doves cuddled in the cranny of the cliff.

Now where the shadows stretch in the evening from the peak of Amana, from the peaks of Senir and Hermon

I shout my goodbyes to him, the singer of songs.

May he read between the scarlet of my lips I am gone. I sleep but my heart is awake. When he calls I will hear him but I will not give answer.

Mary Madec

The Clutch

Low accessible all in one basket vulnerable in a scrape above sea-level at high tide; exposed on shingle amongst sea kale in a nest of dried wrack and kelp lined with fine down from her own breast.

A speck of blood. Her heart is beating fast. A North Atlantic Eider: a mother brooding not for moving, slowly starving after more than three weeks on top of her little low heavens; the faintest of tappings within her precious half-dozen beginning to stir her world, tap into mine as she nestles listens watches waits.

Does she pray to not be seen as she sits alone? Her ostentatious mate is long gone to moult offshore in a raft of useless drakes all at sea. Her clutch won't change gear to hatch until each of her six is ready for that special day when they'll all shed their smooth cool shellsuits together, see eye to eye, be bill to bill for the first time in a new outside dispensation after the pipping of egg teeth is done in synchronization after they've all muscled out exhausted; after each has grown into its new yolk-slicked downy skin.

She has made the warmest of nests in the lightest of feathers. To me it is like a pillow for a dreamer.

I nearly flattered her flattened her by treading on her (and them) with my big leather boots, so expertly was she camouflaged when we happened upon her on that wild rocky shore at Doon Point.

John D. Kelly

Throwing A Long Line

Watching at the window on a wet day in late October I think to see the invisible wind in the inflated sheets of grey rain fronting the gusts like full sheeny sails, a fairy flotilla sailing the waters streaming over the black tar that now smothers the old pathway, a dismal day indeed with the nearly naked ash vainly hiding its bony bareness behind the still modestly dressed oak, yet among the greyed beech, and a blanched birch, there is the luminous warmth of the bones of a misplaced acer gifted heedlessly by a long passing bird, and the brightness of berries clustered amid barbed blackthorns, colours that throw a long line of hope to the seasons of sun waiting beyond the bleakness of winter nearing.

Anthony Wade

A Prescription of Trees

In this Apostle of Trees my rib-breath’s a bluebird taking flight. I sniff truffles of pine sap; sit among mole-roots to shelter from wind-kettle whistles under wings of ash birch, sycamore. This forest bath strips crepe-skin with oil of wild violet, thyme, bluebells Braille of bark maps abacus of bones as I wrap a rowan with wrists, elbows, knees Being here is an earth-orgasm — a pulse-thrum; pulling splinters from cracks where atlas moths flit in a lava-leaf of burnt umber, burnished gold, amber — Their tissue paper crinkles underfoot as I gather giant fir cones I’m a mushroom thirsting-up thimbles of dew-dimples in this peace-place a clock face with no hands. Time is a tincture of twig-antlers at the, Cloutie Well — I leave with a dish of alms from this tree-hearth and gift my thanks in crotchets semibreves, minims, quavers

Mandy Beattie

Earth-orgasm: the wonders of nature & earth & Universal energies received on a spiritual journey – Rachel Te Wano

Dear Mr. Spielberg, (A Golden Shovel of Movie Magic)

No one back then questioned why parents would bring their five-year-old. Does it make them bad? No. I loved it. Petrified, my feet up in the seat. I may have had an imagination already, but you lit the fuse to it, fuelled it, left me wanting to be an adventurer, without the crippling fear of snakes.

Clowns and maggots, they’re the things that make my breath halt. Back then, before my introduction to Mr. King and his clown, never has anything scared me more, except the tree that tried to feed itself Robbie while Carol-Anne was taken by them… DeLorean time machines, and Mogwai came after, caught my formative sweet spot, just before midnight

struck and turned me into an adolescent. The Goonies, Gremlins, Poltergeist, Indiana Jones, I never tire of watching, reliving that early magic, saying things that show my age, like Goonies never say die.

Kathryn Slattery

De Scripto Meridians (Four Seasons)

Vivaldi, Seemed an odd choice It was always cold. Whiteouts. Journeymen peddlers. Monkish types Sculling up the fjords Estuaries,

The oars dipped Knuckle down Pull up And if you could see The headlands The redoubts along The shorelines, Easter… Was a movable feast. And if you could Winter here Throw them a Bone.

The hinterlands, A shady eyed cadence Of river and Rhyme. Frank Murphy

Light the Bonfires for Lamass and Lunasa

The light is starting to withdraw earlier and earlier every evening, those summer nights that barely turned dark azure around midnight are shortening. This is now the season of Lunasa, we bow to the great god Lugh, busy our hands with making and creating, weaving and baking, busy our minds with half remembered longings, wild words tamed by time and use. Our hearts settling in the margins, once we strode surefooted centre stage, blinded in sunlight and golden wheat now we trip and falter in the stubble fields gathering autumn shadows, our days picked out in the half light. On some far hill a bonefire blazes.

Jean O’Brien

In Jordan

In Jordan one evening we were guests in a garden whose walls were trellises of roses. Daytime we would walk the streets of Amman, oranges everywhere. Once we went into the desert to see the rock Moses struck, water gushing from it. Women were washing dishes in the pools beneath. During our years, I took many photos of you. The only one I have kept is of you standing on the shore of the Dead Sea. What is dead? What is the sea?

Richard Halperin

Anxiety of Influence

When Keats first looked into Chapman’s Homer I wonder why he didn’t think why bother write a sonnet? Under the sun, is there anything left to utter or sync with Fibonacci’s number? Thankfully, he kept going, his iteration spawned from emotion, epiphany shared with his mate, Charles Cowden. I’m here on Delos, my desk at Annaghmakerrig, thinking not of planets discovered, but of the supermassive black hole exposed at the core of our solar system and I realise there will always be newness to uncover. No matter how blasé we are, how fearful of pastiche, our interstellar human brains have something to reveal.

Emily Cullen

On Stage

The players play to the box, not the stalls, nor the pit, certainly not the Gods where the poorest sit, sweating, sucking at the market stall’s detritus. One year we had a box, but the angles were all wrong, the children fought and cried, and always there was the fear they might fall out. On stage, Aladdin finds a cave of fabulous treasure but also the Genie with his wish, wish, wish. The boxes distract, intrude on the action so Aladdin forgets what’s next, until the Genie nudges him, whispers, you must choose. If Aladdin had said, I wish for nothing, would the world have become ash? He should have pushed down the lid, shouted, I wish you dead, but dazzled by visions of his home made silken and opulent, the flourish of a huge, shiny key, complacent creak of a front door made from the finest oak he chooses riches, and despite the comic turns, the annual topical inserts, we all know what disasters must follow.

Linda McKenna

Things I Got Used To

Elderly men in the cardio unit

In all their rice-papered layers Skin tucked, folded, hands in prayer

That brilliant teal-green relief map

Weaving in and out of the world here Enveloped in powder blue

Fingernails – pale yellow moons

With eyebrows that jut like wire brushes There’s no objection to the paper gowns –

A man in a dress is sick either way

The world spins like a rum-induced Friday Catching liquid bile in cardboard bowls

Some are raw-boned with pot bellies

Others might deflate with a cough

Some breathe until they don’t with one eye open Or reach on tiptoe to hang their own cross.

Amy Worgan

Yesterday

Halcyon thoughts weep underneath Winter's glow Graduating embers and Heartrending rivers flow Framing attention garnished and Innervation overload. Nothing new here except this Neverending laughter that slices Every sombre moment Rebounding, rebinding Timelessness? Yesterday.

Catherine Brennan

Touch

Fiddle, a young black lab dripping from the sea, greets me like a long-lost friend.

He snuggles up to my open hand then races back to his awaiting family.

I pick up my pace the other way, where the strand stretches to beyond.

Tim Dwyer

A Thousand Flames

on the cherry blossom an autumn blaze captured in the dome of grey November mist freed by a breeze leaves float with wings of fire down to rest curled on grass tips tranquil elegance waiting transient testimonials on the altar of fading beauty epilogue before the closing of the year.

Anne Irwin

Notes on Contributors

Anita Alig is a writer living in the West of Ireland. She spends her days crafting poems, as well as writing fiction and news articles. In 2020, Anita set up the Poetry Cooperative, an online community of well-known and emerging poets.

Mandy Beattie’s poems have appeared in journals such as Poets Republic, Lothlorien, Wordpeace, Ink, Sweat & Tears etc, chapbooks & public spaces. Poets Choice in Marble Broadsheet. Shortlisted: Dreich’s Black Box Competition. She has a forthcoming short story in the inaugural edition of, Howl & more poems soon to be published in other journals.

Carol Beirne lives in Co. Roscommon. She started writing in 2020 and has been shortlisted for the Roscommon New Writing Award 2020 and runner up in 2021. She was runner up in The Lancashire Flash fiction writing competition 2021 and has had several short stories, flash fiction and poetry published in various anthologies.

Caleb Brennan (b.1994) is a native of Limerick City, Ireland. Caleb’s work has appeared in numerous publications around Ireland, The UK and The US such as The Stony Thursday, N@, Wordlegs, Revival, The Linnet’s Wings, Skylight 47, Backsteps and The Blue Hour magazine. In 2014, His Chapbook “Unsocial Media” was Highly Commended by the judges in the BYOB poetry magazine pamphlet competition (NY, USA). In 2017, Revival press featured a series of Caleb’s poetry in Sextet 2, a group collection of six Limerick based writers.

Catherine Brennan is a self taught visual artist and curator from Laois and a member of the Laois Arthouse Collective. Working with acrylic and mixed media expanding into photography sculpture and written word during the pandemic. My work has always been emotion based, using art to work through the anxieties of life and clear the mind.

Nora Brennan’s poems have been published in various magazines including, Skylight 47, The Kilkenny Poetry Broadsheet, Crannóg

and The Stony Thursday Book. She was a recipient of the Artlinks Bursary Award for Emerging Artist 2016, which led to the publication of her first collection of poems, The Greening of Stubble Ground in 2017. She was a mentee in the Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme 2020.

Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois. His recent collection is Ireland Calling. Arthur is poet Laureate for Mountmellick.

Pratibha Castle is an Irish poet living in West Sussex. Her awardwinning debut pamphlet A Triptych of Birds & A Few Loose Feathers (Hedgehog Poetry Press) was published in 2022. Her work appears amongst others in Agenda, HU, Blue Nib, IS&T, London Grip, Lime Square Poets, OHC, Friday Poem, High Window, Not the Time To Be Silent anthology… Highly commended and longlisted in various competitions including Bridport Prize, she was given special mention in The Welsh Poetry Competition 2021. Pratibha’s second pamphlet is due for publication at the end of 2022.

Polina Cosgrave is a bilingual poet based in Ireland. Her debut collection My Name Is was published by Dedalus Press (2020). Polina features in the Forward Prizes Book of Poetry 2022.

Emily Cullen is the Meskell UL-Fifty Poet in Residence. She has published three collections: Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019), In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013) and No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003). Emily teaches on the MA in Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

Alsed Deacon is a French-Canadian living in Connemara now for over 30 years and drowning in the weight of its beauty within and without.

Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist, and children’s writer from Loughrea. His awards include The Dermot Healy Poetry Prize, The Eilis Dillon and Bisto Awards, and the 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award. Seven collections of his poems have been published by Dedalus Press, most recently The End of the World.

RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times, 2/2017), easing the edges: a collection of everyday miracles, (Patrick Heath Public Library of Boerne, 11/2021) The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Anthology (River Bend Bookshop Press, 12/2021), in print: 2River, Event, Gargoyle Magazine, the minnesota review, Night Picnic Journal, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, The Ogham Stone, Twelve Mile Review, Variant Literature, York Literary Review among many others and appears in numerous online literary journals.

Anne Donnellan’s poems have appeared in Boyne Berries, The Bangor Literary Journal, Skylight 47, Orbis, Poethead, The Galway Review and the NUIG Ropes Literary Journal. She was a featured reader at the“Over The Edge: Open Reading” in Galway City Library 2019. Anne’s debut collection Witness is due to be published in the coming months by Revival Press Limerick.

Honor Duff, a native of Dublin, now living in Bailieborough, Co Cavan, has had her work published in several journals, including Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, Crannog, The Galway Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Drawn To the Light Press, and has been placed and commended in many poetry competitions.

Gavan Duffy writes poetry and short fiction. He is a member of the Scurrilous Salon writers Group and has previously published in Crannog, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, New Irish Writing, Boyne Berries, South Bank Poetry Journal, Stony Thursday Book, The Lake, Bangor Literary Journal among others. He was the winner of the Francis Ledwidge Award 2020 and is working towards a first collection.

Jessica Dunne is an emerging illustrator based in Westmeath, Ireland. Her work celebrates nature by exploring expressive plants, animals and people. Her style tends to combine bold graphic shapes with textured linework. She is available for editorial and narrative illustration.

Tim Dwyer’s poems appear regularly in Irish and UK journals, recently/forthcoming in Allegro, Black Nore Review, The High

Window, Spilling Cocoa On Martin Amis, and The Stony Thursday Book. His chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longings (Lapwing). Originally from Brooklyn, he now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland. tjdwyer@frontiernet.net.

Diarmuid Fitzgerald (he/him) lives and works in Dublin as a teacher, writer, healer, and coach. A collection of poems The Singing Hollow was published in 2021 by Alba Publishing. Two collections of haiku have been published also by Alba Publishing, Thames Way in 2015 and A Thousand Sparks in 2018. Poems appeared in The Stinging Fly, Cyphers, Crannóg, Boyne Berries, The Blue Nib, Impossible Archetype, and the Green Carnations anthology. Diarmuid won a grant from Poetry Ireland in 2022 and a Words Ireland mentoring bursary in 2021. Follow on Instagram @deewriters. Diarmuid also offers creative writing courses at www.writeasif.com.

Bernadette Fosberry was born in England but has lived happily in Ireland for the last thirty years. She has always enjoyed writing poetry and fiction and is an active member of the Headford Writers Group.

Richard W. Halperin's poetry is published by Salmon and by Lapwing. In Spring 2023 a Selected and New Poems will be published by Salmon, drawing upon all the collections. 'In Jordan' will be in it.

Paul Hennessy lives and writes in Wexford. He was the winner of the 2022 Shahidah Janjua Poetry Competition and was short-listed for the Anthony Cronin award. Recent work has appeared in the Waxed Lemon and the Wexford Bohemian.

Peter Heyns lives outside Boston, MA. After a long hiatus, he began writing poems again in 2020, written with Speech-To-Text technology into his phone, mostly while hurrying somewhere.

Sacha Hutchinson is a practicing artist with a home studio in Barna. She received a Bachelor of Arts in art and design in 2010. Her work looks at nature’s vulnerability and has a strong

environmental message. She paints in gouache and oil. She enjoys writing poetry and has published several poems. She records life with daily thumbnail sketches, written observations, diary entries in ink pen and has filled over sixty sketch books. These act as an inspiration for larger projects. She has been involved in several group and solo exhibitions. She illustrated the last during lockdown. The birds along the shore and in the coastal meadows of Galway Bay were the focus of her work. Their importance was freshly felt during this time. As their numbers continue to fall their conservation is ever more important.

Anne Irwin lives in Galway. Her poetry has been published in many literary journals and magazines including Poetry Ireland Review, ROPES, Skylight 47, Poetry Bus, Irish Left Review, High Window, Boyne Berries, Automatic Pilot, A New Ulster, Crossways, Galway Review Anthology and Vox Galvia.

Emma Lara Jones lives in Felixstowe, England. She has had many jobs including piano tutor, lawyer, and English teacher. She now focuses on her writing full-time and is about to begin a Creative Writing Masters.

John D. Kelly lives in Co. Fermanagh. His work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. He won the Listowel Poetry Short Collection Award and the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition, in 2020. His manuscript was highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2016. Most recently he was a finalist in the Montreal International Poetry Prize. His first collection: The Loss Of Yellowhammers was published by Summer Palace Press in 2020.

Brian Kirk has published a poetry collection After The Fall (Salmon Poetry, 2017) and a short fiction chapbook, It’s Not Me, It’s You (Southword Editions, 2019). His poem “Birthday” won Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year, 2018. His novel Riverrun was a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022.

Angela Kirwan, originally from Dublin, has been living in Carlow for the thirty years. She has recently graduated with a B.A (hons) degree in Arts and Humanities from Carlow College, St. Patrick’s. She was awarded first place in poetry in the college’s literary awards in 2022. She is a member of Carlow Writers Co-operative.

Originally from Dublin Caitríona Lane moved to the West where life makes more sense. The natural world surrounding her cottage informs her writing and creativity. Her poetry reflects the environment in which she now lives. She is a bilingual writer. Poetry Ireland selected her work as part of their Introductions/ Céadlínte series 2022.

Sinéad MacDevitt has been shortlisted in the Swords Heritage Festival short story competition and highly commended in the Jonathan Swift prose competition. Her poems have been commended in the Francis Ledwidge, LMFM and Rush Poetry competitions. In 2013, she was awarded second prize in the Desmond O’Grady poetry competition.

Marie MacSweeney has written short stories, poems, radio plays and talks. She has won various prizes and competitions, among them the Phizzfest and Kells Poetry Prizes and the Francis MacManus Short Story for Radio Award and the Books Ireland Award, 2017. Her stories and poems have been published in many anthologies and magazines. She has broadcast on Sunday Miscellany for many years and occasionally with Lyric FM and had radio plays performed on RTE.

Her publications to date are OUR ORDINARY WORLD AND OTHER STORIES (2004), MOTHER CECILY’S MUSIC ROOM (2006) and FLYING DURING THE HOURS OF DARKNESS (2009), both poetry collections published by Lapwing, Belfast. FLYING DURING THE HOURS OF DARKNESS also contains her translation of the renowned Irish grief poem CAOINEADH AIRT ÚI LAOGHAIRE. She also writes opinion pieces and articles with historical content.

Mary Madec's most recent book appeared from Salmon at the end of 2019, The Egret Lands with News From Other Parts. In 2021 she received a literary bursary from the Arts Council and is in the process of completing her next collection on Eurydice as a myth of the environment, title to be decided.

John Martin’s 2004 collection, The Origin of Loneliness was followed by poems in The London Magazine, Magma, The Lancet, Dreich, Trasna and Ink Drinkers magazines. A former soldier, he studied philosophy before medicine and currently works as a doctor and scientist in Europe and the US.

Alison McCrossan is from Cork. Publications include Southword, Orbis, Abridged, and The Honest Ulsterman & Drawn to the Light Press.

Linda McKenna’s debut poetry collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. The title poem won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year in 2021. She has had poems published or forthcoming in, among others, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, Acumen, Atrium, One, The Stony Thursday Book, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Drawn to the Light, Abridged, Skylight 47. She lives in Downpatrick, County Down and is working on her second collection.

Mary Mulholland lives in London and is widely published. Her debut pamphlet, What the Sheep Taught Me, came out with Live Canon, this summer and a collaborative pamphlet (with Simon Maddrell and Vasiliki Albedo), All About Our Mothers, came out from Nine Pens earlier this year. She has a poetry MA from Newcastle, The Poetry School, and a background in psychology and history of art. She is co-editor of The Alchemy Spoon magazine and founded Red Door Poets.

@marymulhol // www.marymulholland,co.uk//.

Alan Murphy is the Irish artist and writer-illustrator of four collections of poetry for children and teenagers. He has contributed collage art, photography and poetry to numerous digital and print

journals and anthologies in Ireland, the UK and the US, and exhibited throughout Ireland and abroad. Dublin born, he lives in Lismore, county Waterford. Occasionally he reviews books for Inis magazine and has lately taken up song writing via the guitar, which he plays badly.

Frank Murphy was winner of The Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award for Poetry in 2009. Short-listed and placed in many others. Most recent commended in the Jonathan Swift in 2021. Published many places. Editor for The Meath Writers' Circle.

Jean O’Brien’s 6th collection Stars Burn Regardless came out from Salmon Publishing this Spring. An award winning poet her work is published, anthologized and broadcast regularly. She was the Poet in Residence in CCI Paris for November 2021.She holds an M.Phil in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College, Dublin and tutors in same.

Linda Opyr was the Nassau County Poet Laureate 2011-13. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Where the Eye Wants Coast (2020). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Hudson Review, The Atlanta Review, The Paterson

Literary Review, and The New York Times, as well as other publications in Ireland, Wales, England and the United States. In 2017 she was a featured poet at the Bailieborough Poetry Festival in County Cavan, Ireland.

Art Ó Súilleabháin was born in Corr na Móna, Co. Galway and spent some years in Boston USA. He lectured at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC before returning to Ireland and Corr na Móna in the north Connemara Gaeltacht. He has featured in Poetry Ireland Review, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, The Honest Ulsterman, Writing Home, Hold Open the Door, Vox Galvia, and The Haibun Journal (haiku) among others. He won Duais Phádraig Ó Conchubhair in the Bally Bard Festival in 2022 for a poem as Gaeilge and was chosen by Poetry Ireland Introductions as Gaeilge

for 2022. He published his first collection in English - Mayflies in the Heather in 2021. www.artosuilleabhain.com.

Eugene Platt’s forthcoming collection, Weaned on War, will be published by Revival Press in Limerick. The official launch of the book has been set for February 11, 2023.

Polly Richardson Munnelly currently lives and writes in Dingle co Kerry, she continues to run groups the Bulls Arse Writers & Worldly Worders remotely along with her walking poetry workshops. She has been published both nationally and internationally. Her collection Winter’s Breath is available on Amazon in both print and e-book.

Jane Robinson lives in Dublin. She was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the California Institute of Technology and worked as a scientist in Ireland, India, and the US for ten years before turning to writing, particularly poetry, to express and explore the urgent issue of environmental change. Her debut collection, Journey to the Sleeping Whale, received the Shine Strong Award. A second collection will be published by Salmon in March 2023. Recent essays are in Skylight 47-14, and in ‘Irish Women Poets Rediscovered’ (Cork University Press, 2022). She is currently teaching a workshop on the practice of Ecopoetry at the Irish Writers Centre.

Áine Rose is an artist and poet from Donegal, Ireland. She has a bachelor’s degree in Speech & Language Therapy from Trinity College, Dublin (2017) and a postgraduate fine-art degree from the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Clare (2021). She has been awarded the Emerging Artist Bursary Award from Arts & Health funded by Irish Health Service & Irish Arts Council (2022). Her work has appeared in Lothlorien Journal, Morning Fruit, Icarus, A New Ulster & Irish Arts Review.

K.T. Slattery is a native of Mississippi, now living in Ireland. Her writing has been published in Ropes Literary Journal, Nightingale and Sparrow, The Blue Nib, Impspired, The Wellington Street Review, Analogies and Allegories, and Streetcake. She received a

special mention in the 2020 Desmond O’Grady Poetry Competition, was nominated for The Pushcart Prize in 2021, and in 2022 was a featured writer in the collective, Pushed Toward the Blue Hour, published by Nine Pens Press.

Patrick Slevin has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Skylight 47, The High Window, The Cormorant, The Blue Nib, The Manchester Review, The Interperters' House and the Poets' Republic and others.

Martin Sykes is a writer from County Mayo, Ireland. He came runner up in the 2019 Dalkey Creates Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2020 Trim Poetry Competition and longlisted for the 2020 Fish Poetry Prize. He was selected as one of the Young Writer Delegates for the 2020 Cúirt Literary Festival. His poetry has appeared in Boyne Berries and Skylight 47.

Anthony Wade, a Forward Prize nominee, has published in poetry journals in Ireland (including Drawn To The Light), Britain, India and the US, in print and online. Irish, he now lives by the sea in East Cork not ten miles from where he spent childhood summers, and is an active member of the local writers’ group. twitter.com@anthonywadepoet.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad has an MA from Newcastle University/Poetry School London. Her short collection A City Waking Up was published by Dempsey and Windle, October 2020. Sue was highly commended in the Plough Poetry Prize 2021 and has had several pamphlets shortlisted and longlisted by Maytree Press. Her poems have featured in London Grip, Artemis, The Ekphrastic Review, The High Window, Fenland Poetry Journal, Ink, Sweat & Tears amongst others. Sue writes poetry reviews for Sphinx Review, London Grip and The Alchemy Spoon. She is Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society. https://suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com.

Amy Worgan is a poet and essayist from Manchester. Her work likes to focus on themes of neurodivergence and ekphrasis. She is currently studying an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University.