The Apiary Issue 3

The Apiary

Issue 3, Spring 2022

Editorial Team Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Ward

Editor & Typesetting Anna Royle

Editor Tiarnán Burns

Editor Olivia Heggarty

Editor Matthew McGlinchey

Editor James McNaney

Contents The Home/ Away Issue

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.

Thank you to the Alumni Annual Fund for funding this issue.

Icy River in Spring - Cover Art by O. Ferris Editor’s Note by Alexandra Ward........................................................3 Benjamin’s Kitchen by Gianna Sampoli.............................................4 Teh Tarik by Shaminee Salvakanu ......................................................5 The Kitchen Table - Art by Connie Gavin.........................................9 The Homesickness Helpline by Rose Winter..................................10 Westerly Approach to Naples by Night by Rose Winter...............12 I’m Going Home - Art by Marnie Mcugh........................................13 pears. by Freya Elliott...........................................................................14 Rental, a Mas in France art by Thérèse Kieran................................21 Spoken Alive by Ninon Georges.........................................................22 Manhattan by Eoghan Totten.............................................................24 A Belfast Student Sees A Hutterite Girl; Cat & Dog - Art by --Thérèse Kiernan........................................................................................25 No Money, No Bother by Zara Meadows.........................................26 Red art by Amy Cross .........................................................................28 Yellow art by Amy Cross......................................................................29 The Kop and The Kitchen Table by Zara Meadows......................30 Inheritance by Mac McClusky............................................................31 It is I Seagull, Everything is Fine. by H.R. Gibs.............................32 Twilight Sea art by Hanna Nielson....................................................37 Golden Horizon art by Hanna Nielson............................................38 Home by Karson Ó Laithbheartaigh..................................................39 The Green Owl on my Phone has a Habit by Karson Ó Laithbheartaigh..............................................................................40 Path to the Beach art by Connie Gavin............................................43 confessions in red by Akshay A.S.....................................................44 Patrick by Elle Cunningham...............................................................45

Editor’s Note My Favourite Room art by Amy Cross.............................................46 Pink Passion by Rachel Mawhinney..................................................47 What we talk about when we talk about home by Ríbh Brownlee...............................................................................................54 Sheltered by Ríbh Brownlee...............................................................55 Our Contributors.................................................................................56 Our Editors............................................................................................59

Dedicated to the Memory of Gregory Gamble When I initially envisioned the theme for this issue, I considered the concept of “home” as I felt that it was a topic that was very much open to interpretation: I wanted to see whether it was a question of what home is, or where, or who, and why. But the more I thought about this, the more I realised that a key part of understanding home was being away from it.

Our contributors explore the concept of home/away through a sense of belonging or unfamiliarity. They consider the taste of fresh fruit or a cup of tea, the rattle of a dishwasher, the feeling of an empty chair at the table.

They sift through sewing supplies in search of memory and delve into languages to strengthen identity; we find homes in and away from Belfast, and each piece crafts a vivid depiction of the meaning of home/away.

I am immensely grateful to the many people who have offered their guidance throughout theeditorial process of Issue Three. Firstly, I would like to extend my gratitude to Michéal Ó Fearraigh, Stephen O’Reilly, and everyone from Queen’s Annual Fund for funding this issue of The Apiary, which has allowed us to include the work of a vast amount of Queen’s students and alumni. I would like to thank Michael Pierse for supporting my application to QAF, and David Torrans for his advice on the publishing process. I am especially thankful to my editors, who have brought an incredible amount of insight, patience, and passion to every discussion, and spent countless hours reading and reviewing every single submission. I am eternally grateful to Anna Royle, whose meticulous typesetting has woven this magazine together with such care and attention to detail, and Jaimie Livingstone, who kindly let us hold meetings in his and Anna’s living room. I would also like to thank Ríbh Brownlee for her invaluable guidance and constant enthusiasm, and Amy Cross, Alice Vincent, Andrew Ellis, and Alex Danailov for their unending support.

I am eternally grateful that I can share the incredible work that has found a home within this issue, and I very much hope that you enjoy each piece as much as I did.

Alexandra Ward

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Benjamin’s Kitchen A fever forms a kitchen with all the locks missing from the doors.

Your glaucous clock and its adjacent mirror fog from risen soup steam.

Mosaic parrots live on a branch in one small frame, unified above an off-white fishnet sack for unhung potatoes we saw scattered over The Meadows and laughed but never picked up.

Walls of heavy sun spread from a can of paint we took from Craig & Rose.

The chairless window would be an uncontemplated view without your roommate sat there in anxious smoke.

So we know how many little symbols make up a room, a not-so-secret room, where all the doors are open and the word colorless never enters my mind.

Teh Tarik

Gianna Sannipoli 4

He thinks of his mother arranging the boxes of tea into his luggage before he left home.

“Here, ten boxes of BOH tea!” she said to him. “Fifty teabags in each box. So ... Fifty times ten? Ha! Ha! Five hundred teabags!”

“Ma, you’re becoming good at Maths lately, ah, and you sound like the Count in Sesame Street.”

“Yah, of course, lah. Count or not Count, I’m going to be the mother of a future engineer one day. I must be good in Maths too, what,” she raised her eyebrows, twice.

Shanjey’s mother continued packing the boxes of teabags along with two takeaway containers of dried anchovies; three large packets of shrimp paste; a few packets of Taj Mahal papadums; two jars of Alagappa’s mango pickle; and twenty packets of Maggi Pedas Giler Ayam Bakar instant noodles for the insanely spicy roasted chicken curry flavour.

“Are you kidding me, Ma? I’ve got no space for clothes now. Am I opening up a mini-market in Belfast or am I going there to do my PhD?” “Aiyoh, no point in bringing all your thin clothes and those shorts you wear here,” said his mother. “I googled, Shan. There are many charity shops there. You can get cheap, thick, second-hand clothes. One pound, two pounds. And branded too. But these foods? Huh, you can’t get there, lah.”

“I also googled, Ma. There are several Asian shops there.”

“I bet not much ‘Made in Malaysia’ stuff. Even if there are... No, no, no, they’ll not be the same,” she said, shaking her head violently. “When you arrive, get condensed milk, watch those ‘How to Make Teh Tarik’ videos on, what you call it? Ah, YouTube! You can’t pine for your favourite tea and get home-sick and all, OK?” And just a few hours before he left home to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, his eighty-year-old grandmother handed him something.

“Shan, my boy, here, take this with you,” she said in Tamil.

“Paati, really? You want me to bring this battered old spoon all the way?

They have spoons there, obviously.”

“Shan, my boy, this isn’t any ordinary spoon,” she said. “It’s antique brass and it’s precious. My mother gifted this to me when I got married

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to your grandfather, and I brought it along with me, all the way from Thanjavur.”

“Before World War II,” Shanjey’s mother backed up, raising her fingers in a V shape.

“It has been passed down for generations in this family. And when your mother got married, I gifted her this.”

“Paati, I’m not going there to get married. I don’t need that … spoon,” said Shanjey, hugging his grandmother.

“Bring it back with you, my boy, when you come home,” said his grandmother.

I miss you, Ma... I miss you, Paati...

Shanjey rolls over to look out the window now. Gloomy grey sky, weeping rain, no sunshine for days. He is approximately 10,834 kilometres away, across the globe, from the place where he was born and had lived for over thirty years, and away from the creamiest, sweetest, frothiest teh tarik served at the 24-hour Lingam Curry House – just a stone’s throw away from home: an instant boost and a must in the mornings before heading off to work.

Just after a few weeks upon his arrival in Belfast, Shanjey and his housemate from Londonderry walked to the Malaysian Student Centre at Adelaide Park street.

“So, what’s it that we’re trying?” asked Eamonn. “Teh tarik? Am I saying it right?”

“Yeah!”

“Aye. Teh is tea. What’s tarik? Is it like a special thing you could only get from your country?”

“Direct translation, it means ‘to pull’.”

“Pull? Tea pull? Pulled tea?”

“Potayto, pohtato. It’s simply, teh tarik,” said Shanjey with his arms wide open, as if presenting something to a crowd of an excited audience.

“You can’t translate that kind of stuff. It would lose the essence of its meaning.”

They took off their shoes at the entrance of the building.

“I’ve no idea how you pull the tea.”

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“You pour the tea, from one cup to the other.”

Shanjey demonstrated by interchangeably lifting two invisible cups.

“Concentration. Patience. Skill,” he said, sounding like an advert tagline.

They rustled through the crowded hallway.

“Many Chinese here,” Eamonn remarked.

“Malaysian Chinese.”

They joined the queue to place their orders.

“Looks like I’m the only Malaysian Indian here today.”

A cup of teh tarik cost Shanjey a pound and ten pence. He automatically converted the British pound to Malaysian ringgit in his head, a habit that comes naturally and is hard to undo.

He mouthed, “Five ringgit and fifty sen.”

Back home, it would’ve only cost him two ringgit and fifty cents.

After Shanjey had paid for the drinks, the Malay boy at the till passed him a cup and pointed at a plastic drink dispenser behind him.

“Teh tarik,” said the boy, looking over Shanjey’s shoulder at the next customer.

Shanjey peered into the stained cup and then at his friend. He slouched to the drink dispenser, which reminded him of the one his mother used to serve drinks for the guests during Deepavali, the Festival of Lights.

But his mother usually stored chilled rose syrup mix or Sunquick orange squash in it, never hot teh tarik.

Holding the cup below the drink dispenser’s tap, Shanjey turned it on and lowered the cup, mimicking the art of tarik, spilling some tea onto the floor.

He sipped.

The so-called teh tarik was lukewarm, flat with no froth topping it.

He poured the tea down the sink and walked over to the Malay lady wearing a headscarf. She was arranging halved boiled eggs onto a plate of Malaysian national dish, nasi lemak.

“Boss, teh tarik, kaw-kaw.”

The Boss lady glanced sideways at Shanjey, pointing at the drink dispenser, just like the boy at the till had done earlier. At home, an older Malay woman was usually referred to as makcik (aunty)

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or kakak (sister). ‘Boss’ was kept reserved for the men at serving counters without racial distinction.

“No, no. Hotter and more condensed milk, please. And give it a good tarik,” Shanjey pleaded, pressing his hands together and bowing.

The Boss lady looked at Shanjey for a second and took the cup from him before disappearing into the kitchen. She came back with a cup of steaming tea in one hand and an empty one in another.

She smiled at Shanjey, and then, with much expertise, she tariked the tea, back and forth into the cups, eventually making it foamy and frothy, without even once spilling a drop.

“Woah!” said Eamonn, his blue eyes widening.

Shanjey sipped the freshly made teh tarik while Eamonn and the Boss lady watched him in anticipation.

“OK?” asked the Boss lady, thumbs-up.

Shanjey could only reply with a smile.

How could he tell her that he felt utterly let down and that it wasn’t her fault?

Not the same...

Shahminee Selvakannu

The Kitchen Table Connie Gavin

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The Homesickness Helpline x Thank you for calling the Homesickness Helpline. We are experiencing a higher volume of calls than usual. Your call is important to us.

Please listen to this pre-recorded message and consider your options carefully. x Have you tried calling home?

Or anyone, really.

Anyone can tell you to stop looking back.

It will help you, so much.

Have you tried…

Don’t. We are so busy at this time of year.

Please don’t call again. x Dial tone. x

Rose Winter

Have you stood by the window as no-one picks up - let the phone ring out as days go by without hearing a word.

Have you tried hearing something else, or listening?

You must try, before you ask for help.

Have you tried anything at all?

We can only help you so much.

Have you tried going outside, Raking your trembling hands through the dirt or the grass.

Grow something other than your longing to return.

Have you tried reminding yourself that you might not be there - home but you are, probably, somewhere?

You can only be helped so much.

Now it is winter, have you tried going to places where there are many people?

In the dark seam of the late afternoons, Have you let pale faces look up at you from the street?

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Westerly Approach to Naples by Night The sky which is large between me and home, turns cream blush as I am lifted towards that abstract destination.

This becoming-pink is worlds away from the pitch dark tarmac of the drop-off, where I was embraced and handed bags.

Handover, from that segment of my life to the one I take home.

Already, that person sleeps, deposited somewhere in the strings of orange lights running beneath the window I am sat behind.

Day turns, doesn’t stop for a confused user of machine. ~ Believe me when I say you will be hard pressed to spot a volcano at night.

Approaching Naples on the Westerly route, seated.

Believe me when I say the scape of this city will hide its secret, a shifting horizon offering up black voids and fractured light.

You won’t see anything you recognise.

Believe me when I say there will be voices on your plane, louder than any flight you have taken before.

There will be more life, more fight, only a taste of what is to come when you uncurl legs and step out.

I’m Going Home Marnie McHugh

Rose Winter 12

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pears.

Path to the Beach Connie Gavin

I had hoped I’d be able to breathe again when I got here. After three semesters feeling so crushed it had kept me bolt upright, Rafael’s offer to visit his mother’s home in the Spanish countryside seemed like a gift.

The novelty of London had worn off on me quickly. Despite my childhood dreams of the freedom of the city, my vision of London had vastly morphed: from shining skyscrapers and constant, lively movement to my bedroom’s tiny window that barely touched sunlight, classes in sweaty lecture halls with stale, sexist old teachers, and an unending tightness in my throat and chest, as if allergic to the city. I’d been longing to feel something beneath my feet besides hard concrete.

The heat and my own exhaustion are weighing me down, so I cling to Rafael’s hand and wonder if he knows he’s keeping me standing. We’re almost there now, his home.

After a long and jerky bus ride from the airport, with a driver who rode his bus the way my little brother plays video games, Rafael and I jump out at the bottom of a hill. Rafael says goodbye to the driver like an old friend, cheery and beholden, though when I ask him about it, he tells me he’s never met the man. Rafael is just like that - sunshine incarnate.

As we approach the hilltop now, his house reveals more of itself with each step, from its chimney downwards. It’s beautiful. Stone walls and huge windows, and it’s swimming in a garden of flowers. Then from behind a tree I see her running, flying through the garden gate as her shears slip absently from her fingers – Luisa.

Rafael’s mother is a beautiful woman. Her waves of shining black hair, splattered with grey, come loose around her shoulders as she shakes them out from a well-worn cotton sun hat. Her skin is tan and wrinkled, from a lifetime in the sun. I can see Rafael in her. She has his elegance, or he has hers. They both look as if they were drawn with a fountain pen: a series of straight, sweeping, and confident lines. And her eyes. Her eyes are just the same, impossibly brown, and impossibly kind.

She greets me kindly in flawless, but unconfident English, then turns to Rafael to adore him. She takes his face in her hands and speaks a fast flurry of Spanish I can only catch words of. My boy. So handsome. I missed you. Rafael smiles comfortably, he’s well accustomed to adoration.

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“Las peras?” He asks, hopefully. This word I know. Pears.

Throughout the eight months I had been with Rafael, I had spent many a hungover Sunday morning with my face buried in his chest, feeling his body move with steady breaths as he told me stories of home.

The vast fields, and the weekend markets in the next town over, his mother and her home; filled with music, food, and sunlight. But when his mouth felt dry and his stomach raw from alcohol, Rafael would tell me how much he was craving pears. His mother’s pears from his mother’s tree.

“No están listas” she says, hitting his arm to playfully condemn his eagerness. Not ready.

Rafael is almost buzzing with excitement. He hasn’t stopped smiling since we landed at the airport three hours from his house, and he speaks to his mother at such a giddy speed that I’m surprised the words don’t trip his tongue. I have never met someone so fond of home as Rafael.

Someone who saw home as a place to return to rather than escape from.

It seems as though his mother never even left.

In London, Rafael’s room was little short of an empty box to sleep in.

He kept so few possessions and spent so little time there (the commitments of an extrovert) it had never learned his character. I step into his room at home now, and it’s an exhibition of him. Twenty years of him curated in a hundred square feet’. There are pictures all over, smiling friends so lovingly photographed, and years’ worth of birthday cards, cherished. I have to smile at the pictures above his desk: a shiny red bus, Tower Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament, placed right in his eyeline to remind him what he was studying for. Of course, he’d told me all about them one of our Sunday mornings, but seeing is better than imagining, and I’m struck by it- he made it to his dream. It had been my dream too.

There are books too, hundreds of them. I’m drawn towards his bookcase, my hand slips from his as I step, but I catch his fingertips.

I admire the packed shelves and attempt to discern their order. Not alphabetical- perhaps chronological; date read rather than date written.

A chronology of his childhood into adulthood and his increasing preference for English over Spanish literature.

“My god, you’ve read The Iliad?” I exclaim, heaving the tome down to admire his handwritten notes, wrapped delicately around the margins and between the lines of battle and chaos. I sink to floor and Rafael

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comes to sit behind me, resting his forearms along my shoulder blades and leaning his head round the crook of my neck.

“It was my favourite.” He says and I smile, entertaining myself with the image of a teenage Rafael, settling himself between his mother’s flowerbeds to open Homer’s epic. I crane my neck back to catch the gleam I know I’ll find in his eyes.

“You liked the violence?” I ask, teasing him. Rafael feigns offence.

“I liked the passion.” He tells me, and I love the way his voice gets lost in the story, “Achilles who loves Patroclus so much, he literally can’t live without him, goes mad with grief and kills everyone in his path.”

“I’d go on a crazy killing spree for you.” I mumble, disgruntled. He laughs and ruffles my hair.

“In which case I’ll make sure mum knows to mix our ashes in the same urn. Just like in the book.”

He has me laughing now, and I spin round to muffle my smile in his t-shirt, and he kisses my forehead. I hug him tightly, ever grateful to him for humouring my self-indulgent misery.

The landscape is stunning, but it exhausts me. Luisa walks so easily, anticipating every stumble I might make, and reaching out her arm to help me. Rafael darts so brashly that if I didn’t know him better, I’d be terrified. When I woke in Rafael’s room this morning, he was so excited to show me the scenery of his childhood. I want to love it. I want to be amazed. I want to be present, but when I look around me and will myself to take it in, it’s fuzzy, like my eyes can’t focus. Rafael has stopped so that I can catch up to him. When I reach him, I take his hand and I’m grateful he doesn’t ask me why.

“You know they’re ready when the branches start to droop under the weight.” Luisa explains, when we reach the famed pear trees, and I strain myself to absorb it. Rafael looks at the pears as though he’s about to give in and pluck one from its branch, and I marvel that impatience might be his only flaw.

“Rafael has no eye for it. I tried to teach him.” she adds. I smile. Two flaws. Luisa catches my smile, and she seems glad, approving even. I realise then that she knows I’m unhappy.

Luisa is lying on the ground, her shoulder blades pressed comfortably

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into the grass and her arms open freely. I lie down beside her, attempting to emulate her relaxation. But even as I recline towards the earth my body constricts, the muscles in my back resisting contact with the ground, and there’s a feeling in my stomach like knots wrapping themselves further around one another. I struggle a long breath from my lungs. It inches out of me slowly, and a little too jagged.

“You don’t like it here?” Luisa asks. She’s latched onto my jittery discomfort, concerned but not offended.

“No,” I say quickly, eager to reassure her, to thank her for her hospitality. I’m not lying. My next words I say in the same moment I realise them, squinting at the sun above me and running my hands over drying grass.

“Actually, I love it.” I just wish I could let myself love it.

“But you don’t like home? Or London?” I laugh then. She’s even more perceptive than Rafael.

“Not really. Not like I want to.” As I say it, I think I feel one of the knots unravel. Just one.

Rafael is shouting at us now from across the field, something over the way has caught his ever-jumping attention. It takes me a moment to realise he’s talking about the pears. Luisa ignores him, she knows they aren’t ready, and I can feel her looking at me intently, though my gaze is still fixed firmly on the sky.

“You’re a lovely girl, Alicia,” she says quietly, as if there’s someone there to overhear, or as if I’ll scare if she says it too loud. “But I’m not sure you know that.”

My breath hitches for a moment, and I feel my nervous fingers start to shake. I’m scared that if I speak it’ll come out choked.

“And Rafael loves you. But I think you do know that.”

I turn to her now, water collecting beneath my eyes and hiccups in my throat.

“Yes,” I whisper, meeting her gaze, “I know that.”

As we cleared the plates away ‘wine with dinner’ had slowly become just wine. Luisa pouring so inconspicuously we’d quickly lost count of how much. We’ve let the night run away with us in Luisa’s kitchen; a slow and chatty dinner and wine running through me like warmth, easing and stilling each part of me it passes. I’m sat comfortably against Rafael, and he traces absent shapes onto my arms. I can feel him looking down

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at me, but I can’t meet his gaze. Sometimes, he looks at me with so much wonder, too much, and I won’t know what to do with it.

“I’m going to get some air.” he tells me, standing and squeezing my shoulder, which is code for having drunk too much. Luisa has been talking all night, stories about Rafael’s childhood, questions about mine, but now as I sit alone with her, she’s quiet. I sip awkwardly at my wine as she smiles at me earnestly. Before I can fathom a contrived remark, she leans across the table to me suddenly and touches my face, running her thumb lightly over my booze-warmed cheek.

“Guapa.” She whispers. I think it’s the first time she’s spoken to me in Spanish, but she knows I understand.

When I step outside to join Rafael, I find him leaning against the stone walls. It’s a sight I know well, he’s breathing slowly and coaxing the cool air to sober him.

“I love you being here.” he slurs.

“You don’t love me in London?” I tease.

“I mean it. You look good here, it suits you. This red in your cheeks.” I laugh at that last part, it’s the wine that’s done that.

He looks at me now, willing me to take him seriously.

“I feel like I’ve never seen you relaxed before. It’s like you hold your breath. But here,” he pauses “I think you’re starting to come untied.”

If he speaks any longer I’ll start crying, so I cut him off.

“I can come back next summer then?” I’m trying for cheery, but it comes out choked.

“You can come every summer.” He says seriously, pulling me gently towards him. I think about Luisa’s words. Rafael loves you. But I think you know that. I do. I don’t understand it but here, rested in his arms, I’m sure of it.

Now I’m really at risk of tears, so I pull away from him and busy my eyes with the skyline. There’re no streetlights for miles and the stars are the biggest and clearest I’ve ever seen. It occurs to me then why so many English people come to Spain once they’ve retired. You could waste away forever under stars like these.

I’m lying in Rafael’s bed, it’s a little small for us both but I’ve never minded being close to him. He stumbles in beside me, cheerfully drunk, and rests his face in front of mine so I can feel his breath tickling my

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nose. He breathes so evenly, so steady and certain.

“Alicia.” he says, as a precursor to nothing, his voice bouncing around the vowels. He says my name and it sounds like an endearment. When we first got together, Rafael had told me my name was beautiful, I told him only in your accent.

“Rafael.” I say back, forever in love with the sound of it. I like saying his name, it’s like a comfort. I always hated it when his friends would call him Raf, or any such derivatives. Rafael suits him. It suits his smile and his beauty. It suits his kindness, and his endless optimism. Rafael. An angel’s name.

I realise I’m drunk when suddenly the vision of him in front of me makes me want to cry.

When I wake the booze has worn off but left my eyes cloudy and my throat dry. I’m sober but shaky. I turn to reach for Rafael, but my arm meets his mattress, and I curl into myself. I know if I stand my legs won’t carry me and my head will start pounding. I hear the staircase shake and know instantly it’s him, his heavy footfalls rattling a house built for lighter steps. I sit up, and when he sees me, I must look like a zombie.

Rafael has a sixth sense for knowing when I need his arms wrapped around me. I try to loosen my body and let myself be held by him, but the tension in my chest and stomach refuses to waver, growing only tenser for the effort of trying to relax. I hate that I’m like this. I hate that he never seems to mind. He holds me for a few moments and when he pulls back, I see in his face a giddiness he’s trying to suppress for my sake.

What? I ask with my eyes.

From behind his back, he pulls out a pear. It’s beautiful. He looks so proud, and it makes me love him so much. Rafael holds the pear out to me. I’m too drained to hold it, but to humour him I take a bite from it still in his hands. I chew it slowly and as it falls down my throat I start to cry.

“Alicia,” Rafael leans to meet me and takes my cheek in his hand “what’s wrong?” he asks, a little concerned and a little more bemused. I inhale sharply, the air catching in my throat on intake and as I breathe out, I feel as though all the air has left me at once, and through my sobs, I start to breathe again. I look up at Rafael.

“It’s so sweet.”

Rental, A Mas in France Thérèse Kieran

Freya Elliott 19

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Spoken Alive

Shush I articulate with after-taste Of primal outbursts Salivate

I Estranged from native fields Engaged in foreign phrases

Shh

Vocabulary is besieged Sentenced my speech

Mouth fool Drooled

Broken to seed The lexicon

Through main course to dessert My own-twister No bland blended discourse My own pepper

Esperanto where do we belong I stamped on the tempo Tongue too lento False, tone wrong

Shoot

Chords not vocal Unique verse, sole

III II ‘Colloquial out of the palate Neutral if not local accent Anglo-sax sounds’ Hush

Starters served To converse is to convert

Excuse my verbatims for they hit touché! Amiss without guerilla over this malaise that slang mantra marked on my epidermis Scratched anxious for the patois to assign me A or lien?

Sax is Us and realities hide beneath pores of my sensitive Organ Ceci n’est pas une rime but riddles in a brisk embracing my soul in touch with its personal weight of words of this world

Ninon Georges 22

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Manhattan Twelve hours shy of four years apart, we left the same womb, diverging day after day.

I was Plato to your Aristotle when you put snails in your mouth, or carried bees through the house in the palm of your hand while I drove my toy trains round the table of my imagined Republic, or just lay on my bed and watched the shadows dance.

I remember the time in Manhattan when we covered eighteen miles in one day along the High Line gardens, perennials raised above the streets like smouldering coals baking in the Independence Day heat and the air felt heavy, two atmospheres in Greenwich Village. We watched the bassists jam and the deluge of fireworks in the dark.

Now you tell me to pick up the pen and write for a year. If we were from the Bible you’d be the steady one. I’d likely be the prodigal son, counting his mistakes.

A Belfast Student Sees A Hutterite Girl; Cat & Dog

In the Latin, he comes to his senses, and in the Greek, he comes back to himself.

Thérèse Kieran Eoghan Totten

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No Money, No Bother No one’s walked the back legs off hope the way I have. The lengths I’ve gone

of The New Yorker, the collected works of some dead fucker, a few novels I’ll tell you about

to hold on to its languages are long & troublesome as the unearthing of a family

but never read. These were once the turning points of our twofold future, fragments of

secret. On the burger van in Botanic, lunch is proclaimed by a sign promising balance

the six-hundred-pounds-a-month dream, I’ll remember, walking down past the Four

to the day, a fulcrum. My student loan is only after going in & my student loan

Winds bus stop, where an empty Glen’s bottle, like the rest of us, waits for something to come & come with diesel.

is only after going out – two bars in town we traipsed through like two men and a wee lad & one on the Lisburn Road are both missing our custom sordidly this evening. It was a flat

Zara Meadows

up the side of one of these we almost rented, a wee converted doctor’s office, wallpaper the shade of a thousand urine samples or a half-finished Frosty Jack’s cider in a field.

We said we could change around almost every part of it: the low leather chairs resembling sick cows for Ikea plushies, the bench press for an actual coffee table, a place to put books which should help guests in their quests to decide the extent of our intelligence – issues

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27

Red

Yellow

Amy Cross 28

Amy Cross 29

The Kop and the Kitchen Table I owe so much to Liverpool, so so much.

– Fernando Torres Home There is poetry on the green tonight, where the men in blood-coloured coats dance around each other like ampersands. It could be winter, or spring, in the place they visit conscious in their dreams, the black air full as fullness is known to a thousand composers of breath. I was old enough to know how history rebooted itself every Monday night, reconfigured under rectangular headlights & rebuked in the smoking area, where the men dressed as the men in blood-coloured coats coaxed their lungs back down to calmness. None of these men were Wordsworth, none could turn a phrase out of a body of water, but Torres could twist liquid through centre-halfs the way a volta can look in the mirror & recognise itself. Any metaphor you showed him was first his – the pocketed corner, the golden touch, the spring as it coiled, close & tight, to launch into those hum-loosened evenings. Across the city a new father will look up from the placenta rush, unknotted relief, as beauty is born proper on the hospital TV. Away 4-4-2 is a decapitated sonnet, its missing quatrain severed by the squareness of its form. 4-5-2-1 tells you it knows how to couplet & chooses not to. 4-4-3 is only one-third biblical, Psalm-like and defensive. Stanzas are not the rooms we walk into but the tunnels we find ourselves in fortnightly, fabric skirting the tops of our knees as shin sweat dogpiles under plastic. In being elsewhere we are finally this familiar. Isn’t it the best case of somehow that we manage it, outdoing the outdoers on their own land like an ambush of arrogance? It could be in green, or a semblance of grey, the yellow of a backward sun, silver etchings of a medieval scribe coming down with a fantastic plague. We keep within the white as if it’s restriction & the rest is radiance, a sea of perfect red reddening the afternoons of London, Newcastle, Manchester. I felt like a baby, like something just pushed out of something else & then a world. It felt like forgetting how to read & then remembering what came before words.

Inheritance I come from a place that’s scorched with heat and monsoon rains Each drop, each wave bouncing off the tin-roofed trains.

I am the riptide pulling you into the irresistible blue As hot sands are met with the feet of those passing through.

I come from a place scattered with tea leaves and palm trees, Stretching from the tranquil mountains to the turbulent sea.

I am ancient temples, mosques, and churches belting songs of prayer, Lined with crumbling statues and flower petals that will always be there.

I come from a place floored with concrete and topped by ceiling fans That never stop spinning, And walls lined with photos of those who are no longer living.

I am an array of grandmother’s potted plants resting in the shade, The clothes drying in the sun, Strung up by clips with colors that have started to fade.

I come from a place with creaky old mattresses And piles of my mother’s old oil painted canvases.

I am the blackened feet of the grandchildren running through the house, Shouting and playing with family: those who we cannot live without.

I come from a place with engine smoke billowing into the clouds.

Streets littered with garbage and stray dogs beside fields already plowed.

I am newly built highways and newly settled slums Overcrowded with hazard signs and ceremonial drums.

I come from a place where tensions still rise.

Among all the rubble, I still look to the skies.

I am the old civil war and the springtime bombings, I am new resolutions and bonds everlasting.

Zara Meadows 30

Mac McClusky 31

It is I, Seagull, Everything is Fine. after Ben Lerner

The first woman in Outer Space is still there. This is a theory devised from the known fact that she is not here. The space left behind, known as absence, is not a location, but rather an action which is too often described as passive. Absence is not a singular non-event; it happens differently every time and it is nearly always disappointing.

When Anne Carson was talking to Godot about his own non-arriving, he said it was all a matter of perspective. He said we got too impatient, said he had arrived once before and gone onwards. Said, once you leave, you can never go back. This is one reason why women do not desire to travel to Outer Space.

The first known woman to go to Outer Space is Valya Tereshkova (we do not know the name of the first unknown woman in space). On the day Valya is shot up into the stratosphere in Vostok 6, it is 1963. She is 26 years old, a textile worker and an amateur parachuter. The strategy is simple: Valya will stand for three days looking at our earth from a new perspective. She will orbit it 48 times, standing in place for 49 sunrises.

She will confirm that the sky is blue with a darker strip across the rim and then she will land in Kazakhstan.

When Valya Tereshkova is shot into Outer Space something goes wrong. There is an error in the spacecraft’s automatic navigation software which forces the ship to cut the ribbon of the earth’s gravitational pull.

Valya identifies this fault, and the scientists below quickly develop a new algorithm that will allow her to land safely. But the damage is done. Here Valya realises she cannot come home again. Or rather, she sees that in order to go home, she must first accept that home is a place that she has never been before.

The official records say nothing about this. However, they do note that Valya vomits at the taste of the space food, and that the scientists who packed her bag included toothpaste but forgot to give her a toothbrush.

When Sputnik was first set into orbit in 1957, its transmissions were available on public airwaves. After all, all sports, political or otherwise, must have their spectators. In a bid to be included, civilians began to build their own experimental listening stations.

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Achille and Giovanni Battista, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, took their side-line surveillance very seriously and claimed a disused German bunker as their plot. They scavenged and improvised their equipment. They scoured static radio for signals and ripped meaning, using techniques borrowed from Hedy Lamarr, to successfully record transmissions from the Russian Sputnik and American Explorer 1 programmes.

During the next seven years, Achille and Giovanni Battista release nine notable tapes, including one of the whirring heartbeats of Laika. In November 1960, they hear the fading transmission of a morse code SOS signal retreating from the earth, making them audient to the final breaths of an unknown dying man.

Alongside these recordings are two simultaneously agreed but contradictory hypotheses: 1) that the Soviets were operating and covering up secret space missions and 2) the Judica-Cordiglia brothers counterfeited the audiotapes.

In the winter of 1961, they receive the final message of a cosmonaut re-entering the earth’s atmosphere in a malfunctioning spacecraft. Cosmonauta is an unknown woman in space. She may not have even existed so what does it matter if we call her the first.

From my window I can see a formation of V-shaped v-birds flying. The time in the year when the birds take up skywriting is always much sooner than I think. The sky is bigger in the winter, with more space for writing, and not nearly enough light to see what it says.

In her conversation with Godot, Anne Carson asked if the sky is the name we give to what is left over, because everything else has edges. Later she says that edges are what we need in order to survive, but she does not mention how in daytime the sky itself is the margin. Perhaps this observation was beside the point she was trying to make. In any case, from inside Vostok 6, Valya sees the dark blue edge which is beside the point.

Valya Tereshkova is the second part of a dual mission. Her time in space will be shared with Valery Bykovsky who is 29 and will break the record for space endurance in a solo mission. Their spacecrafts take different orbits and will come within 3 miles of each other. They exchange radio communications, but both report not to see the other.

When we are small, we learn to communicate outwardly with bodily actions. I would raise my arms to make the letter V when I asked to be lifted

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up. I was very concerned about the birds’ annual migration. I was worried they would never come back home again.

In my mind, I saw that obsolete outwardly sprawling V could very well be the last known sighting of a bird whose name I did not know. Those wings in flight could equally have been arms, outstretched arms calling out, asking “please”, “let me up”, “let me be where it is safe and warm.”

Something Valya does not yet know, but soon will and will never admit to, is that Outer Space is the final frontier of institutional violence towards women. She stands for three days taking more photographs and notes than any cosmonaut before her.

For her accomplishment the Soviet Union will help locate the body of her dead father, but Valya Tereshkova will not be allowed to go to Space again. A return would be too dangerous, although who it is dangerous for, it is never revealed. Besides, she will always be the first known woman in Space.

It is winter when Cosmonauta crashes and we do not know if the scientists who packed her bags gave her a toothbrush. This detail does not matter so much when we have peppered in reasonable doubt of her existence, but surely giving a non-existing toothbrush to a non-existing woman is less cruel than not giving her one.

Giving Cosmonauta an existing toothbrush is not to say I place singular trust in the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, but rather I trust women more than I trust government programmes which trust Outer Space. This is to say I have no desire to travel to Outer Space.

Out the small window of Vostok 6, Valya sees Cosmonauta sliding off the curvature of the earth. How beautiful the earth is. From Outer Space, it looks like an ocean filling up the southern hemisphere of peripheral vision. When Valya is not exchanging communications with Valery, she looks at the world and listens to Cosmonauta’s last phone call.

Below, Achille and Giovanni Battista pick up the phone. Neither woman knows that there is anyone else listening.

Five, four, three, two, one, one.

Two, three, four, five.

Listen, listen! Come in. Talk to me.

I am hot. Yes, yes, yes. I am hot.

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.

Listen, listen! Come in. Talk to me.

I am hot. Yes, yes, yes. I am hot.

Isn’t this dangerous? It’s all breathing, Oxygen, oxygen. Talk to me.

How should I transmit?

Our transmission begins now. This way.

Our transmission begins now. I feel hot.

That’s all. I feel hot. FORTYONE. I see a flame. I can see a flame.

I feel hot. I feel. THIRTYTWO. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes.

I am listening. I am listening.

I will re-enter.

How beautiful the earth is. The first or second or third unknown woman in space is still there. She holds herself, suspended on the curvature of the earth, not-arriving back home every 8 and a half minutes.

In all my concern about the birds flying south, I failed to learn that many species of bird choose to spend their winter in Ireland. West Siberian bramblings, Canadian geese, fieldfares, and redwings from Russia, all arrive in October and stay as late as mid-May. When walking around a frozen lake, the winter birds cross my path, but I do not see them. In my mind I am mourning the gone v-bird whose absence I feel as an ever-growing conglomerate without the relief of return. In the path there is one of those ‘YOU ARE HERE’ maps. It is a little comical to have placed maps around the walkway as all sides of the small lake can be seen at all times. Maps would do better to be planted in places you are more likely to get lost in, like shopping centres or university office buildings or Outer Space. Still, we pause to make sure we know where we are.

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Notice how the ‘YOU’ on the ‘YOU ARE HERE’ sign is always getting rubbed off. It is worn down by fingertips. Everyone wants to hold a part of themselves when faced with the possibility that they could be lost.

Touching the ‘YOU’ on the ‘YOU ARE HERE’ sign ties a thread to the pathway we are coming from. It is a means of return. Being held, even being held by your own fingerprint impersonally on a board marked with a ‘YOU’ which really means ‘ALL’ is something like being found.

During her time in Space, Valya Tereshkova kept her thumb over the little flashing dot on the telemetry screen indicating the flight information of where in her orbit she was. Perhaps to steady herself, or perhaps holding herself in place so that she could be the first woman to find a return home from Outer Space.

H.R. Gibs

Twilight Sea Hanna Nielson

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home

Golden Horizon Hanna Nielson

the word sticks to my teeth as if i'm not quite ready to finish it yet i want to know how a four-letter word can hold the alphabet i’m scared if i open my mouth i’ll lose it spill it onto the laminate wood floor i haven’t been able to bring myself to clean my language didn’t equip me with the tools necessary to make a house anything more than woodchip walls and nicotine paint you see you can't see the dirt if there was only ever dirt to start my father always wanted a son to bear his name so i was born caked in rust i've been trying to scrub myself clean ever since expecting water to do the job as if rust isn't born from water as if the body can forget

Karson Ó Laithbheartaigh

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the green owl in my phone has a habit

in english falls away

of shaming me into learning irish

i say baile and my childhood home collapses at my feet

i don’t know why i’ve been so resistant

i say teaghlach and my mother’s voice becomes a breeze

for so long i’ve hungered for the blank space in my mouth

passing over but never through me

to give shape to a world i’ve only ever known

i say doire and the irish sea stretches its jaws a wee bit wider

in half-light but i’m scared of what might

this is not new where i come from

leave with the shadows

decay takes root in the throats of children

the way dawn deafens the quiet of night

flowers our mouths into loss

the more i learn the more the world

it’s only fitting that this should be reversed

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i say gairdín and the weeds bloom into saxifrage on my tongue purple petals spilling from my lips

Karson Ó Laithbheartaigh

by lamplight

Hebe Lawson

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confessions in red I call amma less than I should and from across the smartphone screen she smiles at me

I remember home it is the vermilion dot on amma’s forehead I do not remember ever having a father

I remember home but I do not miss it

but I have his name – buried in the graveyard of my throat and when I speak all you can hear are letter-claws slashing and digging into sanguine tissue

I remember how the sunsets there would set my curtains on fire but I can’t remember what it made me feel

an absence

Akshay A.S.

never felt until I had to introduce myself with a full name maybe that’s why amma calls me achu like a sneeze but I worry that I make her sick I remember her politely asking my wounds to leave but the scarlet tinge of my scraped skin reminded her of punching gloves and she was on the verge of throwing hands

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Patrick Home has not been home for a while now.

You are the spectral figure across the kitchen counter reading a day-old newspaper with his same cracked-tooth smile and dusty work uniform you are there and you are him and you are not.

You are the space we make for grief to sit at the table and join us for dinner.

You are there and you always were and we hold you close.

Elle Cunnigham

Home was not the last place I saw you but I decided it was because that was not you.

You were not the empty body made-up like a replica of the real thing, laid out to admire like a tone-deaf museum exhibit I never wanted to attend. it was not you, but you were there and I held you close.

Home has not been Home for a while now I stopped calling it Home because you are not there.

You never were.

You are cans of Guinness at the gravestone and Mum’s smile when she sees a robin in the yard.

You are the starring role in every story we tell and the greying sweater that never lost its dust-and-cigarette smell.

You are the candle on the windowsill that we light every Christmas.

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Pink Passion It’s the name of a kitchen bleach, as if pouring it down the sink drain to dislodge a small fatberg will incite rolling ecstasy.

The dishwasher sings and it is a song of myself. Hours drip like honey from the day and I am two years off thirty seven.

I have reckoned this room and every room a thousand different ways.

Every house is a world, innumerable worlds.

The bend of a body as it hoovers, the stretch to set a curtain hook, the measure and cut of dough, the rare art of loafing, all parts of the act of being homely.

Amidst the accoutrements of habitation; radio, television, duvets, soft carpet, bath towels, body wash, lamp shades, flower pots, wind chime.

Our bones glow at night like fireflies in the grass.

My Favourite Room

Rachel Mawhinney

Amy Cross

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Stripling Ribcage

TW: mouth/ teeth trauma, infection There’s a grief to childhood homes. A kind that sits furiously, radioactively, in my stomach. It wants to cross the threshold; or maybe it wants to be left alone and forget I was ever a child. Birds have magnetite in their beaks, so they never forget where home is. I have lead in my guts for the same purpose. It reminds me: moving on is not an option.

You don’t tell a ghost to move on. You force it. Destroy their last tether, their heirlooms and paintings and houses. Bury them for good. Bury them right. Destroy the memory and finally lay that screaming phantom to rest.

Remembering is its own kind of necromancy. Resurrecting a phantom of myself, half formed and wild, from old memories of dry heat, broken wrists, and rattlesnake tails. I am at that mausoleum of childhood. I am staring at its entrance.

The door handle is temperamental. In the summer its metal would burn my hand, superheated in the harsh sunlight. A reddened palm with forest fires illuminating the crevices. The winter was too cold, moisture of my sweaty palm gluing it to the handle. Like the house refused to let me go, refused to move on itself.

I crack my mouth open and breathe in the air of each room. Vestigial neuronal link, a ward from poison and rot and danger. Taste and smell are so tightly linked to memory. This is where vestigial memories lie; in the place of something primal. Hiding away in crevices that cannot be excised.

I’m a stranger to this place, but my body remembers what shaped it.

Every scar and blemish and bruise: yanking out all my baby teeth like it was a competition.

With whom? I whisper. The words whistle through the gaps of bleeding gums. Crowns of white are already emerging.

No one. They respond. Who wanted to be near you?

The hallway

jeers with darkness. Hardwood floors held down with metal

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tacks. I’d once split my feet open on them, running down the hall.

Didn’t notice until mom saw the trail of bloodied footprints.

It’s illuminated by the cyan thermostat, by the faint golden sunrise, midday, sunset. Dark again. The lights all catch on doorhandles. Doors to different rooms. I’m sucked in, the pressure too great. There was nowhere else to go.

I blink. In the burst of darkness, the house shifts.

The kitchen

holds the heavy scent of beer and cigarette smoke and heat, I’m too small to see the top of the dining table, and the tiles are cold under my feet.

I pad over to where everyone else plays cards and talk business, under the stained-glass lampshade. Cattle and pubs and family secrets dancing with the haze, turned purple and green and red. My dad puts his big hand on my head and draws me close. I can feel his skin, work-rough and callused, against my own. He kisses my forehead and tells me I should go back to bed.

It’s late, baby, what’re you doing here?

I look out the window and the trees hold buds of springtime. Blossoms grow and grow until they’re full bodied, green leaves. They go up in autumnal flames, falling away to leave the cellulose skeleton. Snow begins falling on the ground, catching on the branches. Then spring comes round again. Years pass by. But they don’t.

I’m supposed to be older, I tell him, looking away. And different. Not the way you’d like.

He’s quiet, for a little bit. Do you want to stay a little longer, then?

His face blurs with the smoke, an old memory sanded down to soft edges. I shake my head.

I should go back to bed.

The bedroom

is dark. Always dark. Always night in memoriam. The green numbers of a digital alarm clock are barely enough to pierce through the blackened shroud of 3AM. I shouldn’t be awake right now, pain ripping me from REM sleep. A shotgun blast with every heartbeat, ears full of pus and infection. They’d

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seep out runny yellow and green sludge, smelling of rot. My head hurts my ears ring. All I can do is wait for the hours to tick by. To wait for sunrise so my parents can take care of me, tell me I’ll be alright.

Hours pass. Years. Eventually the pain is taken over by ringing. The pus runs out. It is still 3AM. The bathroom smells the same. Hand soap and bleach. The purple step stool is tucked between the toilet and sink. Meant for a child to wash their hands without help.

I’m leaning over the full bathtub. The water climbs up my shirtsleeve desperately, like it cannot stand itself. Like it has to leave. Plastic dinosaurs float along the surface, open mouths drinking in what can’t be quenched.

There’s a moth struggling amongst them, ash brown wings only driving it further down. I cup my hands and lift it up, like this is a holy act. The water seeps between the corners of my fingers. Leaving its little gasping body behind.

Lepidoptera rapture. I look down and realise how it feels to make the Garden.

It looks at me, with blurry black eyes.

Don’t stay too long. It whispers, voice as loud as wingbeats. Your soul will prune.

Mummified by retrospection, the nostalgia will preserve me. Halt me. I can’t look back forever: there are roots in the path ahead I could trip on if I’m not careful.

How do I move on? I whisper to moth, my voice warped and distorted: younger, older, neither all chorusing together.

It’s quiet for a moment, drying its small wings in the humid bathroom air.

That’s the problem. It replies. You don’t realise you have, until it’s happened.

I look up and I’m facing the exit.

morning, too early to be awake and all you can do is shiver some warmth into your body.

I was wearing a grey hoodie, one with thumbholes stitched into the sleeves. My backpack was sagging with the weight of my books and games and art supplies. A tower of a suitcase stands sentry, almost my height. Bulging with clothes and shoes, and childhood stuffed toys with black glass eyes and worn away fur. My eyes ache with the dry predawn air. There’s a hunger settling in the middle of my torso, gnawing at my ribcage. The moth is whispering, again. I’ll miss my flight if I stay here too long.

The home

- no. The building is quiet. The doors meshing with the walls and the floor and the ceiling, sanded down by memory. It’s starting to shrink, as I grow taller.

It’s time to go, isn’t it?

I push open the front door of an old childhood home, and step out past the threshold.

It clicks shut.

Faye Nixon

The doorway

is lightless. No morning rays leaking through the door jam. There’s a chill, seeping past the wood. The kind you feel in early

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What we talk about when we talk about home

Sheltered

After Nina Mingya Powles Here we are, flushed pink from heat over strips of tofu and neat blades of seaweed the crushing of lavender peeling potatoes her hands reaching for a thimble glass of

by the garden gate over the sink the biscuit tin of sewing supplies ochre brandy

dusting of an oxo cube on

his hands, the slice of a knife through lamb

winds of swell up and surge, carried nothing forgotten nothing lost

cold air and sea spray and dry December sun from the south to this place nothing blown away

with sides of takoyaki. We discuss fish markets and your plans for flying home, heading east in the summer to see the places you last saw when you were six. All autumn long you have been dreaming of golden pearls, thick braids of sugarcane and your grandmother’s perfume.

Later, I will cling to your arm, grip my umbrella and try not to slip on the gloss of rain as you zoom in on my phone maps– look at us, that blue flashlight!

Ríbh Brownlee

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Ríbh Brownlee

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Our Contributors Ríbh Brownlee (she/her) is a bookseller, recent graduate from Queen's and current MA Publishing student at UCL. She was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2020 and is the founder of Catatonic Daughters literary magazine. You can find her @ribhbrownlee on Twitter and Instagram.

Amy Cross (she/they) is a third year architecture student, fearfully about to start their first year in practice somewhere within Northern Ireland.

Picked from their drawings filled out from a selection of colored coded sketch books their work explores places, people and experiences from their daily life as they navigate their turbulent early 20s.

Elle Cunningham is a QUB Liberal Arts student from the Mournes and occasionally, she writes. Her previously published work can be found in The Apiary and Holyflea.

Freya Elliott is a third year film student originally from Leeds.

O. Ferris is currently studying Art & Design for A-level and hopes to attend Art college starting 2022. They enjoy using a range of mediums, however, Cyanotype is their firm favourite. They take inspiration from their life and surroundings to create unique artworks.

Connie Gavin is a struggling freelance photographer, hobbyist artist and permanently distressed final year music student.

Ninon Georges is a 21 year-old from Normandy and avid word-seeker to write down her vivid daydreams on paper.

H. R. Gibs (she/they) is Hannah Gibson. She lives, writes & hopes in Belfast.

Thérèse Kieran lives in Belfast. She writes, draws, paints, makes things.

Her work has been widely anthologised in magazines like The Honest Ulsterman, Her Other Language, The Valley Press and others. She’s a proud contributor to Poetry Jukebox and The Apiary 2.

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Rachel Mawhinney has just completed an MA in Poetry at Queen's University Belfast. Her poems have appeared recently in The Honest Ulsterman and in performance at the Music and Mind Festival in Whitehead. She lives in Holywood with her husband and two children.

Hebe Lawson is a 21 year old English and Politics student from London. Her poetry and art are fundamentally methods for her to take thoughts out of her brain so she can stop overthinking them. Sometimes they're good, sometimes she’ll be the only one who ever hears them.

Focused in radio and screen she loves reading her texts out loud. They are mostly storytelling, of events small and large but paint an image of a moment in time that others might want to/have or may never experience.

Mac McCluskey is a multiracial multilingual nonbinary student of color at Queen's. They are New York based, but currently residing in Belfast.

They've been writing for three years now and don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

Marnie McHugh is a trans photographer and poet studying in Finland.

With no idea how to write an artistic bio.

Zara Meadows is from Belfast. They are in their first year of an English with Creative Writing degree at Queen’s and their work is published or forthcoming in Banshee, Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, and Bath Magg.

They were a Foyle Young Poet in the year 2020.

Hanna Nielson is a Los Angeles writer-artist with close ties to Belfast.

She is a self taught artist and studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Currently she is Fiction-Stage Editor at Storyteller’s Refrain Magazine.

Faye Nixon is a second year student at Queen’s, studying Zoology. They have a background in, and a passion for, STEM, which tends to bleed out into aspects of their writing.

Karson Ó Laithbheartaigh is a 27-year-old poet from Derry, Ireland.

He currently lives in Belfast, where he is working towards an MA in

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Poetry at QUB. His work explores themes of identity and inheritance within shifting and conflicting environments. His poetry has previously been published in Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, Nightingale & Sparrow and Lighthouse. Twitter: @karsy__ Instagram: karsy_ Gianna Sannipoli was born in California, U.S.A. She graduated from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic and is currently undertaking a Master's degree in Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. Her work has been published in The Cardiff Review, London Grip, Bacopa Literary Review, The Fieldstone Review, Mason Street, Red Coyote, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor for San Antonio Review.

Shahminee Selvakannu is from Malaysia. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast. She writes stories on the contemporary experiences of the Indian community in Malaysia as well as in Belfast.

Akshay A.S. is a poet from Kerala, India. He has been in love with literature for as long as he can remember and he is committed to getting others to love it too, or die trying. He is currently a part of the Poetry Masters at the Seamus Heaney Center in Queen’s University, Belfast.

Akshay’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Honest Ulsterman, Press Pause Press, Samyukta Poetry, The Poetry Unbound Podcast and other vague, nondescript places.

Eoghan Totten (he/him) is currently reading for an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast as a Michael Longley scholar. His latest poem is due to appear in the ‘Local Wonders’ anthology by Dedalus Press. He recently defended his PhD in Seismology with success, and runs in his spare time.

Our Editors Tiarnán Burns is from Belfast and is currently studying English and Linguistics. He mostly writes poetry and scripts, but has also written articles for online magazines in the past.

Olivia Heggarty is an English and Creative Writing student. Her favourite thing to do is reading and writing fiction and poetry, and she is also an avid herbal tea reviewer.

Matthew McGlinchey is a candidate on the Poetry MA at Queen’s University Belfast.

James McNaney is a writer from Belfast. You can find him on Twitter @JamesMcNaney1 and his blog paper-sail.blog.

Anna Royle (she/her) is an English with Creative Writing student at Queen’s University Belfast. She is passionate about telling stories about women via script or prose.

Alexandra Ward (she/her) is a writer from Merseyside who currently lives in Belfast, where she studies English with Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast and works part-time as a bookseller. She loves to read and write about women across various times and places.

Rose Winter (she/her) is an MA student and bookseller living in Belfast.

Her writing has been published in the Honest Ulsterman and Unlatched Podcast, and is forthcoming in Terrier Magazine and the Coming of Age in Covid-19 commission. She is interested in writing on what being away from home means when home is not one recognisable place but many.

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£6.50 The Apiary is produced by the Queen’s Writers’ Society Instagram: @qub_scribblers Twitter: @qub_scribblers