The Apiary Issue 2

The Apiary

ISSUE 2, SUMMER 2021

Editorial Team Editor in Chief Caitlin Young

Editor & Typesetting Ríbh Brownlee

Editor Anna Royle

Editor Alexandra Ward

Editor Jasper Banerjee

Editor Niall Young

The Apiary is a literary magazine organised, edited and produced by the Writers’ Society of Queen’s University Belfast.

All proceeds from sales of The Apiary go towards funding future issues.

Editor’s Letter

BY CAITLIN YOUNG

“We peer into the future and see you happy and hope it is a sign that we will by happy too, something to cling to, happiness - the least and best of human attainments” – Frank O’Hara, “Poem read at Joan Mitchell’s” We are so close to the end of this tunnel. Understandably the light hurts our eyes but we are getting used to it again. The days and air are getting lighter. This magazine started and found its feet amidst this all. In a year relegated to seeing each other through screens, this magazine brought us back to reality to hold each other’s writings and art in our hands. It was our reminder and reward for this prolonged performance of patience.

As we read through each entry to the One Pager, and wrote collectively, 8,260 words of notes about the work sent to us. Three winners arose after a month of deliberation. Matthew McGlinchey’s tactile imagery tracing our interrupted everyday. Melanie K Hayes’ intense consideration of the ethical concerns behind art and our everyday communication. Enya Howell’s disconnected tone of building management to the horrors taking place in someone’s home. In each of them, a capturing of the comforting absurdity of the banal. Compiling the shortlisted works left us with a kaleidoscopic picture of the ways in which time, connections and our relationship to reality bends and snaps back in our faces.

This being our final issue of The Apiary this academic year means we are set for change. The most heartbreaking of which is the loss of our eagle-eyed typesetter and editor, Ríbh Brownlee, as she graduates this summer. I can only hope this issue shines a light on the tireless work Ríbh has done over the past two years. The journey of this magazine owes an absurd amount to everyone who helped us along the way, but this issue I want to thank Ríbh for being the person who kept us on our way.

– Signing off, Caitlin Young

Contents

The One Pager Issue Dungarees – Matthew McGlinchey On the Kitchen Table – Therese Kieran Three Trees – James McNaney Your Next Summer Look – Amy Devlin Russia – Madeline Kinkead Self Portrait in Lockdown – Connie Gavin Áine and the Chicken – Jamie Ryan Anderson i have never been so in love – Elle Cunningham Ownership and I have some things to work on at couple’s therapy next week – Melanie K Hayes Rain – Therese Kieran To-Do List – Beth Rose Healy Practice Shelf Love – Megan McGarrity The Felt Remembers – Dara McWade Hooded Stranger – Hebe Lawson I’m Terrified of Something – Luke Macpherson Notice – Enya Howell The Exploitative Nature of Fountain Pens – Ethan Rea

Cover art by Amy Devlin

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Dungarees B Y M AT T H EW MC G L I NC H EY

Sometimes the only answer to a question is what the thing is not. A cat is not a dog. An artichoke is not a thistle. Green is not usually blue. Sunlight predictably catches some mistaken expression, the no not in this light of an untimely photograph I take of myself for you. I almost hear the sea roll behind the motorway. I hold the day, here, right here in my palm.

Then I’m going home cycling the Antrim Road on a day I most certainly should not have worn these green dungarees. Olive turned to seaweed. All thigh-sticky and sock-wet, back sweat and car-conscious. It’s scary to cycle in Belfast. A bus reminds me I am a mortal boy in his fancy favourite dungarees and while I give the finger back I think most people don’t give a fuck goes the toaster. It’s Tuesday and all the world is all the world I’ll ever know or have ever tried to know. Some politician makes an arse of himself. Precarity as a spread? If I could give a taste to you it would be the sharp briny salty fibery liver- loving try of an artichoke heart from a jar. Why not? You don’t have to be vegetarian. It’s all part of the drafting process.

If night was all in one place then go there with me. Dante gesturing towards the stars. The idea of God better understood as what’s not God. Like dungarees. How an item makes you more yourself than your own big toe.

How a strand of hair is as thin as a moth’s wing. I love the fact that you and I are traveling through each other’s lives. Like this. And also, this.

It almost holds. I scribble half of myself onto a page for any possibility of entertainment during this time apart. O, spondee of the heart, I’ve cut you some lemons. I’ve built you a chair to sit on. I am in the middle of pouring bitter tea. There are oranges and apples and pears in the fruit bowl where something like light is glinting off of them.

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ART BY THERESE KIERAN

Three Trees

BY JAMES MCNANEY

I/ - 2005 The oak is shaking in rhythmic time, brushing back, and then forward. The sun is rising behind it, and the shadows are cast over Rosaline’s face. A glimmer between swaying branches, and her eyes open, the crib lit up. Her arms move in a suggestion of coordination. The pale reflection of her tiny hands, her red face, and the leaves cast off the moving oak, all pass over the surface of Juliet’s unfocused eye. Her daughter is a small reddened dot, newly formed on the face of the world.

The nurse behind Juliet is folding sheets, talking absently. Juliet’s body is here and her eyes are on her daughter, but she is somewhere else and does not think as she listens and replies to the nurse.

‘Course you can get himself to look after all that…’

Juliet mumbles quietly, ‘I can try…’

An oak leaf is caught in a breeze and is blown out into the carriageway.

II/ - 2010 The sycamore clicks on itself in the garden. The new leaves are candle flames of green at the end of long branches. The sky is thinking about clearing. Rosaline sits by the bay window and picks dried paint from her fingertips. Her face and her legs are patched with reds and oranges. She can hear her mother and grandmother in the hall, but her attention is split between the tree and her new skin.

Juliet is putting away paint rollers, trying not to spread the paint on her jumpsuit onto the walls, and trying not to rise to her mother’s words.

‘Jesus, Jules, you bring her like that to the gallery? What do the rest think?

She’s only got you-‘ 5

‘Oh, I forgot Mum! Really bloody nice…’ She tries not to slam the toolbox lid.

The wind gathers, and Rosaline’s head snaps beyond the arguments toward the tree’s shivering skin.

III/ - 2015 You can only see the ash trees from this part of the school hall, towards the back. Rosaline has to scoot to the left slightly to see past the regimented children facing forwards. The head teacher is thanking their partners and stakeholders, and the leaves on the ash trees are turning translucent in the summer sun.

Rosaline saw her Mum there 30 minutes ago. At first, she thought Juliet was embarrassed to be late to the ceremony, or to be late in front of grandma, but now Rosaline wonders if her mother isn’t just thinking something through. She looks like she is straight from the gallery, still wearing her heels.

Juliet had been sitting at first, and then pacing between the trunks and beneath the canopies. And now she is stood, in the presumption of privacy, smoking a cigarette. The trees are loose with leaves and they cast a patchwork of shade over Rosaline’s mother, as the smoke curls and curdles upwards into the light evening. It goes high enough to join the summer haze, and then disperses.

Rosaline hears her name be called and she is aware that she is standing up and looking forwards. As she gets on the stage, and she smiles and shakes hands in choreographed time, she is certain she saw her mother look towards the window. Depending on the glare, the two of them might have, unknowingly, locked eyes.

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ART BY AMY DEVLIN

Russia

BY MADELINE KINKEAD

Mum – 0798546731 23:22 We’re watching a documentary about Moscow.

You’d love to live there!

Your dad and I are going to visit!

Spring time! phone screen flashing, illuminating my bedroom.

I imagine my mother 40 miles away sipping her glass of merlot. a single droplet escapes her mouth, splatters crimson on a cream velvet cushion.

23:56 Mum, that would be dangerous. …

I don’t elaborate, she knows what I mean. she knows what would happen if someone were to see my girlfriend’s hand in mine, our footsteps echoing around St Basil’s painted halls. we ignore it, the heavy thing that resides 8

in the spaces between her messages.

We also ignore the fact that neither of us will go to Russia.

00:12 Everywhere is dangerous.

Communist I know.

Research! ...

Her discretions sink inside of me.

I feel them hit the bottom.

I stare at the borscht in my bowl, take a spoonful, let the magenta drip down my chin.

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A R T B Y C O N N I E G AV I N

Áine and the Chicken B Y J A M I E R YA N A N D E R S O N

It was her son’s birthday, and this year instead of gifts, he simply asked to know who his father was. This greatly displeased her, of course, but she realised that when she was his age, she too wished to know all the great secrets of the world. So, she led him into the garden, ordering him to cover his eyes, steered him towards the chicken coop which contained one lonely chicken and said, “This is your father.”

When he opened his eyes, he laughed, for there seemed no possible way that this could be his father. It was a chicken after all!

She looked at him reproachfully. “Do you think your mother would lie to you?”

He gazed at her, then at the chicken, then back at her again. “How could this be my father? He’s a chicken, mam.”

“Yes,” she replied simply. “He is a chicken. But he wasn’t always. He used to be a very important man, a bit like a king. He had land, and he had servants and he even had a crown which he would sometimes wear. I met him when I was only a little girl, much the same age as you. But he was much older, older than I am now. And he told me,” she ducked down, impersonating the deep voice of someone of authority. “Áine, you are glorious, you are as radiant as the sun, yet your eyes are as cold as night. What will it take for me to cool them so?”

The boy looked at his mother in giddy scepticism. The chicken stood very still, watching them both.

“But he was a bad man, my child. When I said I didn’t want to court with the 10

the likes of him, he took it upon himself to…” she trailed off, pondering on how to phrase her next words best. “Well, he just wasn’t very nice. So, one night when he was especially horrible, I put a spell on him to transform him into a chicken, so that he may never be horrible to another girl again.”

The boy erupted in laughter once more, turning on his heel to leave his mother alone with the chicken, shaking his head. “You’re very silly, mam.”

She rose to her feet, and the way the sun seemed to catch itself in her orbit made it look as though she were glowing. She watched her son nervously, for he carried with him an air that sat quite unnaturally with her. Too like his father, she thought.

With a smile, she turned to the chicken. It tilted its head at her, almost knowingly.

“I’ll make a banquet out of you one of these days,” she said, grinning. “It’ll be glorious.”

But the chicken only did in response as chickens usually do, and that’s not very much at all.

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i have never been so in love

BY ELLE CUNNINGHAM

We are sitting in the beer garden, And I have had a realisation Or rather it has come to me And tapped me on the shoulder: Your friends have left you here In search of taxis, and I’m glad they did: Now we can sit in silence, I can want without worry.

You are drunk on vodka, And your head is in the crook of my neck, Cradled and half-asleep.

You are wearing my jacket.

Your friends take you away.

I should be happy – the secret is safe, And you are far from me – But I’m sick to my stomach:

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I am in love with you.

And it disgusts me.

My friends talk about you.

And I don’t stop them.

I should probably go.

If they see me here –

I am in love with you.

And it disgusts me.

c r ownership and i have some feelings to work on at couples .... therapy next week

this work is mine trying to write a concrete poem about Yves Klein se jeter dans la vide sauter contentement but all I can think about is Vantablack is not the blackest black it's a patented painting process for military applications and the only idiot to publicly secure the rights to it sure, maybe he's a dick? but anyway, he got everyone all riled up over something we’d never be able to access manufactured desire

t

TdBBBB

with stories of control in the form of a license drove some innovation we had some black, we got some more black you can buy it online so long as you swear you’re not that bad man in particular we got the first new blue in over 200 years necessity and spite are the mothers of invention no matter what the patent office has to say art for the people ultramarine, cerulean, IKB, YInMn from finite resources

enfants Befog

aether are

t _dney

Wollen

from the long colonial road trips never find out how the sausages and the law get made with industry in mind while creatives make similes simulations perfectly well on our screens wait - built from parts mined by children faraway the material world abstracted, therorised but never far from the minds of the 17% minority countries holding the money from the new robber barons and we create to feed the machine the network la vide, le plénitude no buy if you don’t work no work if you don’t network no network without your screen no screen without innovation and we only capitalise brands access, resources, processes secured by patents layers of materials owned mined mine mine mine mine mine

µ

gm.w.ae

Io

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B Y M E L A N I E K HAY E S

ART BY THERESE KIERAN

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To Do List B Y B E T H RO SE H E A LY

To do: Wake up.

Pull your consciousness out from its hole in the ground.

Weave yourself into the fabric of your life again.

To do: Get coffee.

Pour liquid dark as blood, and dirtier, into that vessel of yours: Something to add a little weight to your existence.

To do: Summon love.

Reach out an imaginary hand to touch the pink flower you meet on your way Wish you could kiss it how the sun does.

To do: Feel despair.

Imagine laying down in a puddle and staying there Passers by passing by; you don’t exist.

To do: Make a to-do list.

Fill it with minutiae. Look at it for a while.

Think to yourself: yes, I really must do that.

To do: Put on a song and move like you used to.

Have an encounter with a robin. Speak to it.

Create an empty red room and try not to fill it.

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ART BY MEGAN MCGARRITY

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The Felt Remembers B Y D A R A M C WA D E

He’s been in there so long he’s forgetting what existing feels like. He’s forgetting what the wind feels like against his face, the way it bristles and scathes his coarse skin. He forgets the colour of his own body, stretched out and worn. He’s forgotten his own name.

But he remembers what it feels like to be touched. He remembers how it would animate him, stick-thin limbs moving uncontrollably with the caricatured desire. The special and unnatural feeling of being driven by the passionate soul of another.

Touch was the only thing that made him come alive.

He waits, now, in his dark prison, forgetting everything but that breath of life, and the master who gave it. In memories he is a tall man, with a deep voice that commanded more respect than he would ask for. But when he was with his master, the man found a lighter aspect; soft and silly and sweet.

His master was his voice, and he was his master’s joy.

When they performed together, his master’s movements would become his own, finding harmony in the navigation of fingers and hands, mouths and tongues aligning, sneaking words through uncompromised lips. Their bond grew, two becoming one, united in purpose. His master’s guiding hand filled his body completely, creating all that he was, would or could be.

And then it all stopped. Weeks, months - uncountable time passes through rotating slits of light, seeping through the cracks of his new world. Friends are hard to come by, so he settles for the rags that are his neighbours. But their fabric has never felt life like he has, and he holds onto that memory.

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When the door opens, he has forgotten everything else.

“So this is it? The famous Sammy Sockson? Ugly little guy.”

“I think he’s still cute.”

“Jesus, the smell of it.”

His space fills with his master’s hand, and for the first time in a long time, he feels life again.

WELL, HI, JENNY! IT SURE IS A PUH-PUH-PUH-PLEASURE TO MEET YOU! “Dermot, stop.”

OH I’M NOT MR. DERMOT, SILLY, I’M SAMMY! SAMMY SOCKSON! “This is creepy, Dermot, please.”

AW, I’M SORRY MS. JENNY. MR. DERMOT JUST WANTED TO HAVE A LITTLE FUN, LIKE THE OLD DAYS. “Alright bud. It’s time for us to say goodbye.”

NOT THE CLOSET! DON’T PUT ME THERE AGAIN! PUH-PUH-PUH-PLEASE, I’LL DO ANYTHING MR. DERMOT! “It’s okay Sammy, I won’t put you back in there. You deserve something different. Somewhere you can retire.”

The feelings stop when his master’s hand leaves him. He’s dropped into a new home. All feeling has been stripped from him. His beaded eyes witness the sky above him again, the blue overwhelming his vision until a rolling cloud of black totally cuts off all light. The world shakes, violently thrusting his soft body around the dark. The shaking stops, and then the world tilts, and a small tug of gravity grabs at his waist, dragging him further down the floor. Heat rises around him. Orange light burns its way through the cardboard wall. For a second, the fire’s warmth reminds him of his master’s touch.

He could never forget his master’s touch.

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A R T B Y H E B E L AW S O N

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BY LUKE MACPHERSON

Notice B Y E N YA H O W E L L

NOTICE Residents of all apartments are politely reminded that only milk cartons which have been thoroughly rinsed can be accepted through the recycling chute. We understand that this is an easy mistake to make, and we thank all residents for their co-operation.

Kindest regards, management.

NOTICE Management would like to commend all the apartments of floor 6 for their continued dedication to recycling. However, we unfortunately cannot accept bottles of industrial grade bleach through the recycling chute, regardless of how well the inside has been rinsed. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Kind regards, management.

NOTICE Due to repeated misuse, management would like to make it clear that the recycling chute should NOT be used for general waste. This includes: food wastage, ropes, broken handcuffs, old DVDs, ball gags and fairy lights.

Food waste should be put in the compost bins provided. If any apartment is lacking one of these bins, please contact reception. The ropes, handcuffs, ball gags and fairy lights would be better disposed of elsewhere, such as the refuse centre in town or any local incinerator with owners who don’t ask questions.

Also, to the owners of the DVDs, management would like you to know that you are being judged. Harshly.

Regards, management 21

NOTICE Management would like to inform all residents that a severed thumb has been found in the recycling chute. If this is your thumb and you would like to claim it, please inform reception. Aileen also has the contact information of a fantastic doctor, which she would be happy to pass on. If the thumb is not claimed within 72 hours, it will be disposed of discreetly. However, management would like to make it clear this will NOT be a common occurrence and any more appendages found will be handed over to the relevant authorities.

Management has also been informed of anti-social behaviour on floor 6.

This is a residential complex and we politely ask all occupants to keep any screaming, hollering and melodramatic begging to a respectful volume.

Regards, management NOTICE Occupants of apartment 66S (yes, we know who you are!) are being warned that further misuse of the recycling chute will be reprimanded. While it is company code to not interfere with the personal lives of residents, we will have no other choice to fine you significantly and/or contact the police if this misconduct continues.

Also, get some help.

NOTICE Thank you to all residents for co-operating with us over the past week.

Rest assured that no further action will be taken against any occupants. In addition, we would like to reiterate that we are happy to accept milk cartons through the recycling chute, provided they have been thoroughly rinsed.

Kindest regards, management

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ART BY ETHAN REA

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