I would like there to be, at the forefront of this issue, an abundance of gratitude. Here it is.
Putting together an issue like this took a team that prioritised kindness, the power of language and a dedication to the work. Each piece that was sent to our team was read, analyzed and discussed in depth, sometimes for hours. I would first like to thank my editors: Emma, for your curious and fascinating interpretations; Anna, for your truly unique spin on pieces; Lucy, for your wonderful close reading; Eve, for making us see things outside of the literary canon and Ellis, for seeing the best thing about each and every piece of work. Thank you to my typesetter, Bryan, for your enthusiasm of spirit, and your extremely hard work in piecing together our entire issue word by word.
I would also like to thank Zara Meadows, who has been an invaluable friend to me — offering support, inspiration and reassurance from the interview process to the final printing job. Thank you to the Writers’ Society as a whole: Zara, Anna, Erin, and Brian for your laughter and your help. Thank you to Stephen Sexton: for your time, your invigorating conversation, and your constant support for student writers. Thank you to Alexandra Ward, who by taking me onto her editorial team last year, taught me all I know about editing. Thank you to Rachel Buckley who took on the challenge of creating our beautiful front cover, which is spotted with symbols from each writer’s pieces of work. I hope everyone has fun finding theirs.
And, of course, to the contributors. This issue would not exist without you. Each of your pieces tells us something different about the world; makes us sit back and close our eyes for a moment; forces us to get up and write something down. I am immensely grateful for each one of you. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the issue, whether your pieces were chosen or not. Reading your work has only enriched our lives.
Finally, to you, dear reader: without you all these words would not mean a thing, I would have no one to thank, and poetry, stories and art would have nowhere to go.
––– Olivia Heggarty, Editor-in-Chief
March 2023
Selecting a Reader
I imagine some scrawny wee lad fully clad in a grey tracksuit, ducking into Waterstones on Fountain Street for a free heat.
Moseying up the stairs to the first floor, shiting himself for fear of being caught in a bookshop. Who the fuck reads books? his mates would say.
Stood in the poet’s corner bent as a question mark, my mucker would lift my book from the shelf & half-smiling, take a wee look-see.
–––
Stephen James Douglas
Boot
Summon the lovers home. It’s late, there are strangers hovering at the fruit bowl; orange bodies oozing pulp, pip ticking in its pod, overripe grapes seething at the lip of a dinted plastic carton.
We spin the lazy boy, play the game — whose juicy nails will puncture skin?
I’ve been in love with you all this time.
Facts: fruit reinvents its shine in the morning, bruises on bananas are healthy, a kiwi’s skin feels like pubic hair, post-orgasmic vulvas are to the senses as the stone of an eaten peach.
In the supermarket, we shop for non-perishables.
John at the checkout says Carmel who replenishes candles for the hopeless at the church altar each Sunday (and works mornings in the shop Monday and Tuesday) never understands sell-by dates. I say, John, tell Carmel I have my own beliefs: everything goes in the boot. Stays there.
––– Maeve McKenna
All The Diet Coke in New York City
can’t compete with the empty cans in my bedroom. Love, please, don’t tell anyone across the sea that I’m a messy girl. Don’t tell them about the
piles of silver pill sheets in my waste-paper basket or my blood-spotted bedding. If anyone asks, I’m your pretty boy with the sparkling apartment
on Baggot St, Lower. When someone taller than me buys you a drink in a trendier bar than this, tell her you met me on Grindr. Tell her
I waited by the bodega while you paid for the condoms (you will call Tesco a bodega, at this point.) Don’t say I needed the latex-free ones.
When she laughs at your third joke, buy her a vodkadoke. Feel the light dim around you. Test yourself and win.
System Overload
––– S. Furlong Tighe
––– Josh Greene
The Little Cat That Followed Me Home While I Was Steaming
I wonder if you smelled the spirits and cider and sativa in my pspspspsp, and I wonder if you thought it immoral. Did you deem me fragile when I threw a rock
at that stop sign and scummy when I sang Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls, pissing in an alleyway? You walked with me and my friend till the road forked
and then there was us, a pair of curtains and a collar bell. Why me?
Maybe you thought my coat was nicer; brown, bulky, collar black,
side by side with your striped, grey fur. Did you judge my faltering step and the way I held my breath when we passed her house?
You disappeared before I got home, sensed the journey’s end before I did.
––– Brian Kerr
Sophie
Can I smoke inside? Sophie had asked me when she’d arrived at the house just after lunchtime, her soaked boots squeaking on the vinyl as she crossed the room. She turned and smiled guiltily.
I – uh. I stumbled. Her eyes watched, expectant. Alright, I said. She watched as I hooked a sock around the smoke detector. It dangled above the living room like a loose condom.
We sat on the floor, amongst cardboard boxes filled with kitchen utensils, cleaning supplies and fake house plants. The room was poorly lit, probably to hide the mould in one corner, only half-heartedly concealed by paint. Sophie tapped her third cigarette off into a spare cup and blew out. It felt certain already that our new house was destined to be perfumed by cheap tobacco for the rest of the academic year.
Sophie was the type of person who was very difficult to say no to. I have some notions as to what about her makes it this way, but equally so, a person who is difficult to say no to requires people around them who are quick to say yes. It had taken some time for me to see myself as that person to her. This past summer, with Sophie away interrailing, I found myself spending more time with other people. My dependence on her weakened. I gained a clarity that I had been unable to reach until I was distanced from her. I had, from a young age I suppose, developed a sort of submissiveness towards friends. I hadn’t always had many, and so I was desperate to keep the ones I did have. I remembered loneliness well and would do anything to stop it from returning. I felt as though this need to appease – which had become habit – was necessary if I were to keep my friends, of which Sophie had always been my closest. And so, I found the word yes dropping out of my mouth as if it asked nothing of me.
But I felt things shifting. This was the first time I’d seen her in three months. This new consciousness formed a lump in the back of my throat. It felt like something was trying to work its way up.
I’m so jealous of the house, she said, running her pink nails through her long blonde hair. She wasn’t living with me.
I think living at home will kill me. I’m going to be here every other night to get a break.
I laughed and tried not to sound too opposed to the idea. Yeah, was all I said.
~ That night we were having a housewarming party. After my housemates – Darcy and Dara – came home from their lectures, we set about getting the house ready. Boxes were shoved into rooms, anything breakable was hidden, and the speaker was put on charge. We got ready, and Sophie got changed in my room. She turned around to me in a pair of baggy jeans and a purple corset top.
Do I look good?
I told her that she looked amazing.
Take my photo sure. And she sat on the bed, leaning backwards, her arms behind her. I did.
~ People arrived slowly, a few at a time, until the living room and kitchen were packed out around 11. A lot of them were friends of Darcy and Dara, and a lot of them were friends of their friends. I knew a handful of faces but was only comfortable to talk to a few. I experienced again the feeling of being on the outside, of being expendable, going unnoticed, hanging on. I poured a drink, hoping it would help.
The room thrummed with music and the TV cabinet shook against the wall. A lousy disco light cast rays of colour into the darkened room and got stuck every few minutes until someone gave it a knock. I waded through the bodies, avoiding sweaty backs and sloshing cups. I found Sophie in the middle of a circle of people. They all seemed to be watching her. Her arms swayed above her head, and she sang all the words to Like a Prayer. I was immediately jealous of her confidence, her ease, how she naturally found herself to be a magnet. I slunk off outside to the back of the house, a small square of concrete full of conversation and cigarette smoke. A girl called my name, and I went over to speak to her.
Hi, I said. I recognised her from my course. Is this your house? She shouted over the blur of voices. I nodded. Just moved in. I was unsure of what else to say.
Sorry, her friend said, butting in. Could you show me the bathroom? It struck me how handsome he was.
Sure, I said, turning back into the house.
We went upstairs, the wood creaking like it might give way. I pushed open the first door on the right and turned to him.
Just in there.
Thanks, he said with a smile that was warm and certain.
~ Downstairs, Sophie pulled me into the circle of people. I made my best effort at dancing. She was drunk and I was tipsy. After a few songs she leant forward and put her arms around my shoulders.
I think I might get some ket, she said. She was very close to my face, and I could smell blackcurrant and tequila from her breath. I’m going to text the guy now. She took out her phone and sent a message, the green blob popping onto the white screen.
You’ll come with me to get it? She took my wrists and tugged my hands up with hers, above our heads as the song reached the chorus.
Yes, I said, even though I wasn’t interested in it myself.
~ Maybe an hour later Sophie got a text from her dealer to say that he was here. Outside – after the heat of the crowd in the house – was freezing. The air stung. I hoped this wouldn’t take long. It was dark too, but Sophie recognised the black Audi under a streetlight just up the road. We got into the back seat, and he started to drive around the block. I zoned in and out of Sophie’s conversation with the guy, not properly listening until I heard her saying my name.
Conor, she said, flicking my arm.
Sorry. What?
Do you have forty?
Uh.
In cash?
Uh. Let me check.
I dug through my pockets. The guy tapped his fingers on the wheel. Do you? She asked, her voice a bit sharp, sounding a little cross but also like she was trying to hide it.
I found two twenty-pound notes creased inside my wallet, the sum of my tips from the past few shifts and handed them to her. She handed the money to the guy and his friend in the passenger seat passed back a small white baggie. He dropped us off and we walked back, Sophie a pace ahead.
In memory, the silence between us in this moment would only grow more significant. After our fight, I would look back to that moment, in that typical cycle of overthinking you tend to go through after a fall out and try to remember if she had said thank you, or if she had said anything at all. She was convinced she had. I was convinced she had not. I would only be able to recall a silent anger building in me, loud over the subdued slap of our shoes on tarmac, the vague hum of music growing as we got closer to the house. ~
The night had rolled into the early hours of the morning. Soon, the sun would show up for its day shift, and the moon would rest. The crowd had thinned a little, and people were spread out, balancing on the arms of the sofas, or leaning against walls, engaging in conversations that would be admittedly shorter if people were sober. I was sitting on one of the sofas, my knees pulled up to my chest. I was talking to the girl I’d spoken to earlier outside, the one from my course, and her friend who I’d shown to the bathroom. Lucy was her name, Noah was his. We’d been talking for an hour or so, and after I’d gotten past my usual, initial awkwardness, the conversation since had been easy and enjoyable. I felt relaxed for a change. Between the drink, new company, and Noah, I was giddy and light. I knew I was smiling.
Once they’d gotten into their taxi and left, Sophie flopped down into the sofa beside me. I hadn’t spoken to her since we’d come back to the house. Her head flopped sideways, and she looked up at me.
You like him.
I guess.
How do you even know he’s gay? Or bi, or whatever.
Trust me, I laughed. I think I have a better clue about that than you.
She wasn’t laughing. Instead, she was looking at me oddly, her lips in a flat line, like I’d said something unexpected, like she was trying to work something out in her head.
Well, she started. He seems like a party-type. And you aren’t.
She said this softly, sweetly almost, in the way she often did, then got up and walked through the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if I should wait to see if she was coming back.
––– Adam James Martin
The Talk
Summoning me to the living room, my ma says it’s time for The Talk.
Kneading the front of her thighs, her opener’s the stuff of nightmares: Stephen, your penis is a weapon
Scundered by her declaration, I envisage an Armalite swinging between my thighs, primed, ready-for-action.
When the sermon’s over, I thank her for her troubles & retreat to my bedroom, safety on, careful not to do anyone.
––– Stephen James Douglas
micky joe
––– Ash Caulfield
It’s a beautiful poem, but I know the poet.
Blind to what’s in front of him, yet can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the gears turning in his own head, as hands grip the sides of his skull, praying to slow them down. Because who is God if not you?
I know how he stares at the mirror for hours on end, trying to convince himself that he looks nothing like his father.
The way his jaw is set and how his eyes look too familiar, only found in polaroids of September 1972.
Except those are stark blue, and his are brown. Just like his mother’s. He learned how to take it, just as she did. He learned how to love, just as she did.
But every time his eyes meet his own, there’s a home, and it’s reduced to ashes.
Smoke hangs in the air like silence after a gunshot, - semi-automaticcrisp, clean, harrowing.
It’s a lovely poem, but my, what a poet.
––– Mac McCluskey
Preacher’s Daughter
We are burying our bodies in the churchyard
While your father is preoccupied with Condemning the congregation. Redemption - for what? I don’t remember-Through hell fire. God is a serial killer
From a slasher film stalking through the house. The final girls are the ones that go to mass
On the weekend.
We do not go to mass on the weekend.
Your father is howling from the pulpit like A leashed coyote, clawing at his clerical collar. We hear the weak mimic of the clergy
From our favourite spot behind the graveyard. They are clutching their crosses and I am clutching Your love handles in adulation and thinking About the many ways of worship.
Your father told my father we are heretics.
I am coming up like a dust devil in the wake Of your hallelujah. Inside the church they get on their knees while I am flat on my stomach Lying in a deep dark dirt casket with you. I want them to pour the soil over us both, Like a worm-ridden baptism, and seal us in.
I want to waste away with you.
Years later, your father will go digging in his own backyard And smell the rot before he sees it.
––– Elle Cunningham
Mappa Mundi
Stone and lysol, river and mirror, cylinder, man and tree, cathedral wall; how, where and who, on when, one-hundred-and-fifty-nine-odd centimetres by one-hundred-and-thirty-three, the world extends (called map) into being here.
And it used to be a beast: brown deserts of grass, brown houses, blackened gulf. All once were sheathed calf, deer having eaten and breathed, forming from bone and waste this odd flat earth. Men imagined centuries lasting gulfs in its skin, seas riches, cannibal fantasies.
The vitals discarded, anything can happen.
Yet would it have known, feeling epidermis tingle with distant islands, mouth without teeth, the heads of a hundred rivers, how to be (in death) Krishna’s galactic lips containing existence? Perhaps Iphigenia, sacrificed to the war of Agamemnon, stung with Iliads and a vision of classics students before she died.
Quite like the unfolded soul the map swallows gazes. (Flakes take in what you have drawing your attention out of your vellum.)
You’re looking at it, after all, through this scroll of burdensome words I throw your way. Where is Herefordshire? Where the cathedral, tiny on the skein of flesh?
But here you are: a miniature in your own petite ruined building as a god looks down on you from his own cathedral like you were a map.
Domesticated Silver Fox
––– Edward McLaren
She gave birth in Novosibirsk to a litter of six pups whose piebald coats, white above the right hind leg, along the throat, didn’t match her own—uniform, bold silver inherited from progenitors who, like her, had been Canadian, bred on fur farms until a Soviet geneticist called for scores of docile vixens, a few tame foxes, to discover how wolves once broke down into hounds.
She had relocated anticipating better treatment, not fully comprehending the bargain until she witnessed the vigorous wag of her daughter’s curled tail, her floppy ears, her almost obscene relief under the leash, and understood her as dog now—not assimilated, native in a way she could never imitate; she was foreign, separate, to what should have been her own.
––– Shakeema Edwards
––– Josh Greene
A Blackbird makes a Violent Sight
2013 was an awful year. I was working an uninspired and uninspiring job with people I didn’t want to know. Thinking of them now, I see faceless mannequins, and colourless, empty spaces where memories normally form. The promise of graduation was dead. The world seemed empty of common sense and decency. Half-remembered days piled upon one another, an avalanche of listlessness smothering a forgotten valley. My dreams were mocking puppet-shows.
My husband and I were fighting. Not threatening to break up but navigating a rocky and treacherous course, for sure. Family and friends worried about me. They looked on, through gaps in their fingers, breath held, as I ignored their offers of help and support.
Capping it all off? The nineteenth of June 2013. The great James Gandolfini passed away after sightseeing in Rome. A cherry on the sloppy, tasteless cake of 2013. The day the man who embodied the devastated and devastating Tony Soprano died, I killed the blackbird.
The blackbird was an ornament. It had been a gift, one of those gifts that make you sure whoever bought it did not know, or care, what it really was they were giving you. I’d forgotten who even gave it to us. If I ever remembered, I don’t think I could forgive them. Maybe by forgetting, I had already exacted blame on them.
It stood on two scrawny yellow legs, head inclined toward the ground, tail feathers pointed toward the sky, rear-end on display for the world to see. Its face and beak turned askew, giving the impression it had been interrupted midway through scavenging. The pose was probably for practical reasons of balancing the delicate ceramic, but in my heart, the bird was frozen in a glare, furious with whoever had intruded on its carnivorous pecking and allowed a desperate, invisible worm to squirm to safety.
I’d wrinkled my face at it a thousand times, wishing it would just fly off and leave us alone if it was so unhappy. It had stared pure spite back. For years, we waged a private battle of disdain and disgust. I hated that bird.
I told my husband it was an accident, that it just happened, like dropping toast, or spilling milk. I was using the vacuum cleaner, and before I even had a chance to grasp for it, the stupid thing had shattered across our living room.
I can still remember the smile on our cat’s face, the sheer delight at such an act of violence only a cat can enjoy. It purred, staring at the mess of smashed pottery strewn on the floor, as my husband and I added another argument to our everexpanding collection. A bestseller for the ages, alright; Arguments, Anxiety, and Chaos: One Woman’s Guide to Disappointing Her Loved Ones.
The cat knew the truth. I was glad the bird was dead. And it knew, as we shouted and spiralled, that even in death, the blackbird had had the last laugh.
The blackbird was afforded a small, simple burial in our utility room, laid to rest in the rubbish bin with only me in attendance. No eulogy, no solemn music. I stared down at the broken fragments, allowing myself a smile devoid of honour or magnanimity, a great general standing over a vanquished adversary.
I really hated that bird.
That night, I dreamed.
A granite tower, the work of a dispassionate, disillusioned architect, grey in colour and personality, rises into a sky coloured like a fresh bruise, in the middle of a boiling sea. Within, tall stairs ascend ceaselessly. From an echoing chasm beneath comes the hissing of brawling cats, a roiling maelstrom, a cacophony of panic and uncertainty and the end.
Above, a bird squawks.
My legs burn at each huge step. Rainwater and ocean spray whip through crumbling concrete and twisted metal. Between the gaps, I see huge, tempestuous clouds. The tower shakes, rocked from all sides by this storm from some ancient fable. I curse, try to climb on, but my limbs are useless.
The bird squawks.
My eyes flickered open to the echoes of gurgling, rising water. My heart thumped. Dum-dum.
I closed my eyes, breathed slowly and deeply, rested my sweating hands on my stomach, palms facing down, fingers interlaced. Meditation straight out of some trendy lifestyle blog. I know, I know, but who really has time to read whole books on meditation? Not me, I had intrusive thoughts to obsess over.
Eventually I eased my eyes open and rolled out of the twisted blanket. The digital clock next to our bed read four-fifty a.m.
Very annoying. Right at that junction between not enough sleep and the fading likelihood of getting enough rest if I was to close my eyes again. A sigh escaped my lips. Passive tense, I know, but it did. The sigh wanted out and I certainly couldn’t do anything about it. I got up from the bed, trying not to wake my husband. We had fought, yes, but we had also made up. We might have been married, but we were friends, too, and never fought for long.
I held the kitchen door handle to stop it slamming behind me. A smooth orange glow from a streetlamp outside bathed the room, and I left the lights off to savour the gentle half-light. There was silence, a still pool of water undisturbed by wind or falling leaves.
I wanted three things.
One. To sit on the sofa, savour this slice of peace. You take the small moments of serenity where you can find them, in 2013 or anytime, really. Well, especially in 2013.
Two. I wanted a beer. Easy, there were some cold ones in the fridge.
Three. I wanted a hot water bottle. Why? If you must know, I was on my period, and periods are the worst. Not that it’s any of your business, really, but I am sick and tired of people mumbling their way around menstruation.
The kettle boiled, one long, growling exhale. I looked through the window into the street below our first-floor apartment where dark branches and leaves from the trees lining the road danced before the streetlight in patterns that never repeated.
I became aware of another noise crouching underneath the kettle. It was not wind; there was no undulation or variation, only a long unbroken tone, like the noise of a plane taking off endlessly repeating. The kettle clicked, water churned, settled, but the drone pitched ever up, never resolving.
Gooseflesh prickled up the backs of my legs, over my lower back, before stretching itself across my shoulders, draped there like some grinning, dreadful snake. I clenched my fists. They were slick with sweat. My bare feet moved toward the balcony facing out to the trees and road beyond. I had no choice in the matter.
My breath came in white puffs. Sparkling droplets of frozen air danced in the light, dimmed from an orange glow to the pastel-yellow astronauts on the moon must see when they look to the distant sun, cold and uncaring as a broken-hearted mother. A metallic glint caught my eye on the road outside our building.
A car.
A taxi, from the illuminated sign on the roof. It had stopped. Not parked, not pulled over to let a passenger out. Stopped. Frozen. Suspended in the middle of the road, headlights still trying to wave off the darkness. The trees lining the road were motionless. There was no swishing of leaves, no creak of branches in the night breeze. My heart picked up again.
Dum-dum.
I was at sea, bobbing alone across a shiraz ocean of panic, no way of knowing what awful thing might reach up from the depths. I clung to the chill metal of the balcony railing as my legs became two cold, soggy noodles. I hung my head over the side and stared down at the small garden before our building.
A lone figure stood there, looking straight up at me.
“Good evening,” said a male voice, all cracked paint and rust and dusty boxes forgotten in a mould-covered attic. The figure wore a trilby hat and a long coat reaching down to his calves. His feet were shrouded in a layer of icy mist that had settled on the ground.
A bird sat on his shoulder.
A mysterious man, appearing from mist, wearing a fifties movie detective get-up? With a bird on his shoulder? In silhouette? This was ridiculous. I was well on my way to a derisive scoff and a roll of the eyes when another sound broke the wintery silence, stopping me in my tracks.
The bird hopped on the man’s shoulder, leaned towards his ear. There was a clicking, static sound, like tape being torn from cardboard, heard through a long metal tube. The man nodded and looked up toward me.
“He says good evening, as well. Says it’s a nice night. Cold, though.”
“Good...good evening,” I said, in a trembling, tiny voice.
More static. More clicking. The man nodded again.
“He wants you to show respect.”
“What?”
“Respect. Basic courtesy.”
“Wh-- How?”
“Take him out of the trash. Would you like to be thrown in there when you died?”
It didn’t seem appropriate to suggest I wouldn’t know where I’d been thrown when I died.
“No, I suppose not.” My shaking voice was under something resembling control. Less ‘scared for my life’, more ‘conflict with a stranger’. Both are bad, but I know which I prefer.
More static.
“He wants you to put the ornament back together.”
“What? Why? I don’t even like it.”
“Look, ma’am--”
“No,” I said. I’d heard enough. “You look. Taking him out of the trash is one thing. I can do that. But putting him back together? That’s hours of work. Days. And I--”
“Listen, ma’am,” said the man, raising a slender, dark finger toward me. “I think--”
The finger fell off his hand. Dropped right off, like a rotten apple from a poisoned tree. The man made an ‘oh’ sound. I stood, mouth agape, frozen air caught in my throat. He scrambled to gather the runaway digit from the ground.
“You should probably ignore that.”
It was already a piece of bloody roadkill in my rear-view mirror, something I could not forget quickly enough.
“Who are you?” I was eager to change the topic from rotting body parts.
“This place, the one you live in. It’s old. Very old.” He paused, tilting his head, as if examining a map marked in a foreign language. “I lived here, once. A long, long time ago.”
“This building?” I asked. “The building I live in?”
“The place you live in. The one you are trying to escape.”
Something sleeping within me stirred, something curled tight and closed to the world, a feral cat abused and starved. It flicked its ears, slowly opened one eye. This man, this...well, whatever he was, knew sadness and loneliness. Who was I to judge him, frozen and fingerless, translating the broken speech of an unreal bird?
We were both in thrall to the blackbird, to emptiness and dreams of tempests and lonely towers.
Tears swelled in my eyes. “I’ll do my best. I will. I promise. I’ll try.”
Static. Clicking.
“He says thank you.” A pause. The man’s shoulders shuddered. A stifled noise. “And from me too, thank you.”
With a begrudging squawk and a flurry of feathers, showering shimmering droplets around them, the bird took off and vanished in a wisp of disintegrating, icy vapour. The silhouetted figure reached his four-fingered hand toward his hat, tipped it, nodded, and faded from sight. The mist covering the ground swirled in haunted tendrils where he had stood.
I could never say how long I stood on the balcony, staring at the spot where the man and the blackbird had been. The deep freeze on reality stretched out, a circle of cold fire, spinning ceaselessly in a dark void, arcing into some unknowable distance before and behind me. They had gone in one direction and I would go another.
There was no melting process, no thaw. One moment, all was still and arctic. In another, power was restored to reality. The sound of an engine erupted from nothing. The once-paralyzed taxi sailed past with no evidence of the icy embrace that had held it in place. Branches swished in the breeze; leaves whispered. I let out a breath from deep within myself. No vapour cloud. The astronaut was coming home.
That beer was the best I’ve ever tasted. You might think you know what I mean, that you had the best cold one of your life on a hot summer’s day by a pool in the Mediterranean. Good for you, really, but that beer, that moment of solitude -solitude, mind you, not loneliness; there’s a difference -- was a soothing balm applied to the friction burn left by the nineteenth of June 2013.
Eventually I wandered back to bed, enjoying the warmth of my husband and a deep, dreamless sleep.
Next morning, I exhumed my erstwhile nemesis. I emptied the contents of the bin onto the floor, picking up each shard, collecting them in a plastic lunchbox, and prepped for surgery. A crusty tube of superglue would be my scalpel. The kitchen table would serve as my operating theatre.
I had just re-attached the (somehow) still-whole head, with its (somehow) still-peeved expression to the blackbird’s shoulders when my husband came in. I looked up and he smiled at me, before making coffee. He turned on the radio and pottered around. Kiss From a Rose was playing. I hummed along and he turned the volume up.
“Babe?”
“Yeah?” I replied distractedly. My brow was furrowed as I poured attention and superglue onto the patient.
“Do you think Seal wrote this song?”
“What do you mean? It’s a Seal song, right? Stands to reason he wrote it.”
“Yeah. No. What I mean is, did he, Seal himself, write it? Or was it written by a committee of faceless PR folk looking at a whiteboard with ‘SUMMER HIT 1994 BRAINSTORM’ written on it?”
I paused my ceramic surgery. The patient wouldn’t mind. Probably. My husband’s face was open and honest. He really cared about that question right then. I looked away, thinking.
“I’m not sure,” I said, finally. “I’d like to believe he wrote it.”
“Really? That’s a nice thought. We could check online. Right now.”
“No, don’t,” I said, and smiled. An actual smile.
“Sure?”
“Yes, I want to believe it.” And I did.
Now, don’t laugh. Or do. Whatever suits you. But this conversation with my husband, as he made coffee and I stuck my tongue between my lips performing surgery which would have made Frankenstein clutch at his pearls, at the behest of a shadowy man and a talking bird, is what I think of when I knew things would change.
Soulless Nights
––– Ronan Hart
Not everyone is kind here but I sure wish they were. Outside Georgian manors of America’s south, decayed opulence waltzes with country-western kitsch while something stalks these soulless nights.
Musicians croon over spurned love, fried chicken, and liberating lipstick. But underneath dolls & cowboys inflating that settler frontier, destiny manifests manifest destiny. Surely, everyone’s grave is haunted by the violence these sartorial choices resurrect.
Discovery’s buried in ashes of burnt buildings and bones, history’s in every body, moulding, thrashing against Aquarius moon. Far above, stars simmer and a songbird rips harmony from the bark of poisoned oak. Industrial ruins glow tangerine. The frontier picks itself up off blessed ground to reveal that it is nothing.
––– Morgan L. Ventura
Sunday Morning Epiphany
Breath
August 2021
I have spent the sleepiest Sunday morning happed up in satin sheets and watching pottery guideson the off chance I might come across something or anything for you.
A discovery at eleven!
You have been doing the samewatching half hour pasta-making clips. For me.
Let us rejoice in the humanity of our acts. Instinctual - the pressing of thumbs manipulating life into terracotta burned orange and the cascade of fettuccine through my fingers, like the soothing lilt of a willow’s wig. This is what we were always meant to do.
It is not lost on me that our passions are converging. What could it be that makes us crave the primal intimacy of shaping and kneading together?
And what else in this human world could be love?
––– Molly McKillop
––– Edeline Lim
An Dearmad
When the news broke, you avoided going on social media for as long as you could. You saw the first of hundreds, thousands, millions of posts and felt your stomach turn slick as oil and sat your phone to the side for the rest of the day. Years ago you would have read as many posts about it as you could, feeling as angry as they are, relishing feeling united in outrage. Now…now it just makes you want to go back to bed with the lights off to curl around the heavy stone that has settled in your stomach over the years, that pushes down, down, down until you think it will bring you to your knees.
So you don’t look at social media until two days later, searching for an ad for a new restaurant to show Emma when you see a post by a coworker. It reads, absolutely disgusted by the news about Roe v. Wade. There are times when I think about moving back to America but now I’m glad to live in a country that hasn’t gotten rid of this essential right. Devastated. It takes you a moment to actually take in the words. You read it again. Read the comments underneath it. See one of your managers agree with her and feel yourself grow more confused. The coworker’s never really been someone who thinks about the things she says, has never really understood the new country she lives in, the politics of it, the history. Maybe that’s why it takes so long for the words to sink in, to realise why they leave a bitter taste in your mouth. Does she not understand? Does even your manager not understand that we are in the same situation as some states in America, that we have been since the moment we were told abortion was legal?
You tell Emma you can’t find the post, feel the stone in your stomach fester, limpets forming along it, sharp against your soft interior.
Emma’s face turns clammy and she tells you she’ll see you back at the flat. You find her hours later with her soft cheek pressed against the bathroom tiles, eyes swollen and red and she only has to look at you and you know. You know before she even unwraps her hand from around the pregnancy test. You know before you even see the others piled in the bin like a game of KerPlunk, sticks fighting to hold back what Emma feared most.
“Oh Emma,” you say and hold her as fresh tears dampen her face.
You wait until she’s ready to sit up, hands still in yours, to ask if Paul knows. She tells you she called him after the first test, tells you about his silent shock and how the two of them just breathed together through tears for most of it.
Emma’s eyes are so blue when she finally looks at you and says, “I can’t do it.”
Her hands in yours, the smell of bleach in the toilet, the cool porcelain of it pressing against you brings you back to year 9 and the science class on reproduction your parents had to sign permission slips for. It brings you back to the boys laughing at the unshaven woman giving birth on the rolled in tv screen. To your teacher, a man in his late sixties, who had bonsai trees in his classroom he’d planted on the days his daughters were born. To your teacher using a plastic model of a pregnant stomach and detaching the baby from it. To your teacher cradling that baby in his palm and saying this is what abortion is. To your teacher tossing it against the far wall. To the clack! of it making contact before dropping into the bin. Emma had burst into tears and you took her to the bathroom until she caught her breath. You had sat in the cubicle just like you are now and it makes you grip her hands harder.
“OK,”
you say. “OK.”
Paul arrives and the two of them retreat to her bedroom, their soft voices lulling you as you search abortion services northern ireland on your phone and feel the bones of your knuckles tighten and whiten as you remember. Nothing. There’s nothing here. Nothing in this limbo country of not Ireland but not quite England either. This inbetween country who had to have another government enforce equal marriage and abortion rights. This country that has been forgotten and left in the past where its politicians want it to be.
Emma finds a clinic in England while you book a hotel and plane tickets. It’s agreed that you will go instead of Paul, his work not allowing him the time off at such short notice and anyway Emma thinks it’s better for it to be you, it’s easier if it’s you.
Paul tells you to look after her when he drops you at City Airport with a hug and you hear the emotion rising in his throat. You give him and Emma a moment. You can hear their tears, their words of love and you think of the girl whose text you’ve been waiting for. You think of her as the plane trundles through the air, of your first conversation at her art show, the dark stain of her lips as she talked through the process behind her screen-prints, about Bernadette Devlin, about Northern Irish feminists, about her piece with a photo from a Repeal the 8th march with a Father Ted reference: REPEAL THIS SORT OF THING. You ache underneath your ribs and check your phone again the moment you land.
You had bumped into her again at a mutual friend’s art performance and ended up in a cramped corner of the room, wine glasses clutched like holy chalices while you fought against the impulse to place your thumb against the hollow of her throat every time she laughed at something you said. You wrote your number on her arm at the end of the night, her lips pressed against your cheek, the tack of her lipstick sticking against your pillow as you fell asleep.
The appointment is the next morning and you wrap your arms around Emma in the hotel’s double bed, thinking of all the forums you had painstakingly read of others who had to make this journey, of their fears, their reassurance, their frustration and tiredness. You think of your coworker’s post.
You press a kiss to Emma’s cheek as she goes in, feeling every inch of her trembling and feeling useless, the stone in your stomach turning to lead and you’re grateful for the seats in the waiting room to catch you. You send Paul a text and soon find yourself looking at your coworker’s post again. You type a response that goes on for lines and lines, feeling everything you tried to stay away from, feeling the need for someone, anyone, to hear you, hear Emma.
You get a text, expecting to see Paul’s name and instead see hers.
A nurse calls your name. “You can see your friend now.”
You delete your comment.
Another thing forgotten.
Busby
––– Ash Caulfield
In conversation with Stephen Sexton
Last December, our Editor-in-Chief Olivia Heggarty sat down with the accomplished poet Stephen Sexton for a chat. Stephen has been a huge champion of The Apiary over the past several years and we felt extremely fortunate to be able to put our questions to him, about mentors, methods, magazines, and melon mousse.
Olivia Heggarty: I’m really interested to know what your first ever exposure to poetry was.
Stephen Sexton: I don’t know what my first exposure to poetry was. I was told a lot of weird fairytales, a lot of bedtime stories, and when I think of [my initial exposure to] poems I think of things like that. So not necessarily poems, but something of the essence of a poem. Practically, though, it was probably in primary school. I certainly remember being about seven or eight and being asked to write a poem, and finding it really, really fun.
OH: What was your poem about?
SS: My poem was about a mayfly, because I was a morbid seven or eight year old and I knew from reading an encyclopaedia that mayflies live only for one day, and I suppose I was interested in that scale between a person’s life and a mayfly’s life. So I think the first poem I wrote was about that sense of scale––life and death and all those big themes.
OH: When did you realise that you wanted to take poetry seriously?
SS: I think I was probably writing poems for a long time before I thought about taking it seriously, by which I mean, like most people, I was a teenager at some point. I think I was writing a lot of probably angsty, tortured poems at the age of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It was a creative act but I don’t think I was really thinking about them as poems. It was kind of an extension of my feelings, which is not really a good way to write poems a lot of the time. I think I started taking it seriously when I first found myself at university. It revealed itself as something like a social function, a possibility of community––it exists very differently when someone else sees it. I think I started taking it seriously when I found myself in classes with people, where you’d have to justify why you’d written something and talk about it. I think as soon as other people get involved it becomes a different kind of thing. That’s when I thought, yeah, this is something I will do.
OH: Great answer. Did you do English with Creative Writing? Were you at Queen’s?
SS: I was at Queen’s. English with Creative Writing wasn’t an option for me at the time. I started doing creative writing, it must have been in second year, the Creative Writing Poetry module. I really liked the thrills and the embarrassments of bringing creative work to a group of people and talking about it. As long as the thrills
just outweigh the embarrassments, it’s probably doable!
OH: Yeah, you’re right. Who are your biggest inspirations, both in your work and in your life?
SS: That’s a great question. When I think of the kind of work that excites me the most, I think of someone like Anne Carson as being a poet beyond compare, a writer beyond compare, an artist beyond compare. There’s sort of nobody who writes anything at all like her, and to try is to fail terribly. She’s someone who I think is this incredible balance of what we might think of as ‘higher culture’ and ‘lower culture,’ and is deeply emotionally present, and is hilarious, and is fascinating and endlessly creative with works written thousands of years ago. She’s someone who is very much everywhere in what I’m trying to do, although I’d never try to write what she’s writing, but she’s someone I read, always, with such incredible excitement.
The other person I suppose I would mention is Ciaran Carson. He was a really important poet, and person, for me. I think he’s a really incredible example of how to work as a poet and as an artist; he was someone who constantly reinvented himself between books, even between poems to some extent. I think that’s a remarkably inspirational thing to do, to not be stuck as yourself, to be able to be someone else over and over again. That’s something I find interesting about poetry, about books in general, that sense that you get to participate
in another kind of consciousness. You never get to become someone else, but there’s an empathetic part of it, where you get to feel like someone else, which is very exciting, because most of us are ourselves and that’s it.
Who has inspired me in my life? I don’t know, I think my poetry and my life are very close to each other, I don’t know how to separate them.
OH: Were you taught by Ciaran Carson?
SS: I was, and he was my supervisor for a little while as well. He was just someone who was fascinated by language––he would frequently pause our classes and send someone upstairs to get the OED to really work out what something means. He had such an attention to language as something that is living and pliable and also historical and political, since we’d all be in a room speaking English and writing poems in English and he’s someone for whom English is a second language. That whole idea of thinking of English, not as something that is apolitical, but understanding that there is a reason why we speak this language––and for all of its problems and its complications, it happens to be a language I love. What Ciaran admired in it, I think, is the only way to approach it.
OH: It must have been amazing to be taught by Ciaran Carson. Would you say you have any poetry rules that you hold quite tightly, any personal rules you have for your own work?
SS: I think I make them up on the spot. It’s a similar kind of question to when it comes to how we feel about poetic forms. I don’t know how you feel about the sonnet or the villanelle or the sestina, the European forms, but they all have very particular rules and must exist in particular ways. I think they should exist in these ways, there’s not much point in writing them if you’re not going to do what you’re supposed to do with them. So when it comes to poetry rules and the idea of form, maybe?
I think all poems should have a rule. It doesn’t mean that it has to be obvious, or that a reader should be able to describe what that rule is, but it’s very instructive for yourself as a poet to have a reason for what you’re doing. That might just be that you want the next poem to be better than the last one, and that you won’t stop writing until it is better than the last one, or that you want to catch yourself developing some kind of tic so that you can say, “No, don’t do that again, you’ve already done that, find another way to say that.” That’s one I’ve been adhering to recently, trying to escape or outwit myself so that every poem feels like a surprise. I try to maintain that as a rule, that the next poem should be surprising.
OH: Do you feel like every poem that you write is better than the last one?
SS: It’s not necessarily that you get better at writing, but I think there’s some subconscious part of you that stops serving you bad ideas. I think what’s happened to me is, at some point, the
bad ideas stopped being sent up to my imagination. I don’t think it’s the case that you get better, I think you get better at not pursuing bad ideas.
OH: That’s very interesting for me as well. I’ve been writing for a lot less time than you have but I do find myself now knowing exactly what I don’t want to write about. Would you say, for yourself, that you have a poem that you’re most proud to have written? Not necessarily the one you think is best, but your favourite?
SS: That’s an interesting question, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that before. I was talking to someone a while ago, a marvellous poet who said “I think I’ve written five good poems in my life,” and I wanted to say, “Oh no, you’ve written lots of great poems.” I think, for me, there are maybe two poems, but that might change. I did enter one of them into the National Poetry Competition, and it won. The only reason I entered it is that the poem came really quickly, in the sense that I don’t feel like I had a lot to do with it. That’s kind of a cliché, people saying things along the lines of “poetry was talking through me,” I don’t like any of that stuff because it seems to undermine the work, because you did write it, it took all of your life up to that point to write it. Maybe I would say that poem, a poem called ‘The Curfew.’ I entered it into that competition because I thought it was quite good. I was surprised by how it moved. I don’t remember how it happened at all, and I feel, therefore, like I was less involved in it, even though I did write it.
OH: It’s an excellent poem. I understand that, though. Sometimes it just comes to you and it’s good, but you feel almost like an imposter. Like it was your hands that were writing it and not you.
SS: I mean, that’s when it feels the best, right? When you lose time and look up and all of a sudden three hours have passed and you were just sitting there typing. It’s a really profound feeling.
OH: It’s fantastic. You said there were two poems?
SS: Yes, I did write a very long poem in memory of Ciaran Carson. I wrote it during lockdown, he died in 2019. It’s long because it had to be––how do you write a poem of admiration and gratitude that’s also short? I would say I’m proud of that poem because I worked really hard on it and it took months of late nights working on it, thinking about how to approach this private and slightly public poem of commemoration, how to do it right and honour everything I’m indebted to him for. It’s probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on a poem because I wanted it to be right.
OH: That’s a really special one. Here’s a question for you: if your first collection If All the World and Love Were Young [Penguin, 2019] is a ‘concept album’ then Cheryl’s Destinies [Penguin, 2021] is your ‘greatest hits.’ What was the transition like between writing your first and second collection?
SS: There was less of a transition in some ways because a good handful of the poems in Cheryl’s Destinies were written before the first book, so in some ways it is my first book, even though it appeared second. But you want to keep learning, so although some of the poems in Cheryl’s Destinies predate the first book, you want to keep writing, to keep ahead of yourself. I was trying to work out what the structure of Cheryl’s Destinies would be, and then as I was coming to the end, there was a oncein-a-century event, the pandemic. I’m never certain what kind of responsibility there is for anyone writing anything, but I like to think that poetry is something that is socially involved and has a relationship with community. It seemed responsible to me that there should be some way of representing the pandemic and the experience of lockdown.
It’s a different experience, also, publishing a book that doesn’t have one unifying concept because it’s very hard to talk about. You can’t say “this is a book about this”––it’s easier when you can just say Super Mario. So I don’t know what the transition was like, except to say that writing both books brought about very different experiences.
OH: What do you think the hardest part of putting together a collection is?
SS: One of the things that’s useful about a ‘concept album,’ especially one about Super Mario, is that there are seventytwo levels in Super Mario World, and
if you’re writing a poem for every level, you know how many poems will be in the book. For the second book, there’s not the same sort of ‘paint-by-numbers’ structure to it. You’re building your own structure, you’re not following a map. Structure has to be developed organically, and that’s challenging. You’re trying to think of movements, how sections play with each other, you’re trying to maintain the attention of your reader. It’s a very different thing to know that it only is what it is, since you aren’t imitating something else. You’re trying to build something with integrity, coherence, and thematic development, and you just have to sort of work out what your book is about when you pull all that together.
OH: That’s amazing, thank you. The next few questions, we’re hoping, will be really helpful for student writers reading The Apiary. With that in mind, when do you know that a poem is ready for submission to journals and magazines?
SS: I think some of it is in the gut. For me, it’s when I stop being drawn back to think about it. I’m working on a couple of things that I know aren’t ready because I keep reopening them. I think when that impulse to return to a poem stops bothering me, that’s a good sign. The other thing I would say is that sometimes editors will publish things because they like the work, but this is ultimately a relationship that you, the poet, has with your own work and your own future. I would say just be as happy as you can be with something before you send it anywhere, because you’re the
one who might look at it differently at some point in your future.
OH: That’s something we’re very careful with, when we’re reading submissions. Sometimes a poem can have amazing bones, but you know it’s not ready yet, that it can do with a little bit more time.
SS: That’s a really responsible thing to do.
OH: Do you have any go-to poetry magazines or journals?
SS: There are a couple I think are marvellous. Abridged Magazine is a really beautiful publication, and I often recommend that people send poems there. I would also think of a magazine like Banshee, I think they publish wonderful work. There are some slightly more established ones like Poetry Ireland Review and the Stinging Fly, but I think there’s something important about journals like Abridged or Banshee, or like The Tangerine which is based in Belfast.
It’s good to develop relationships with the people who publish magazines and to do your duty as a good literary citizen by supporting their publications––reading them, attending their launches, meeting new people. But it all depends on where your aspirations are: some people want to publish their work, others don’t. The important thing is to read as much as you can so that you know what kind of company you want to be in.
OH: Would you have any advice to give to someone who is starting to send their work out to journals? How would you advise someone to handle that rejection that inevitably comes when you’re sending work out anywhere?
SS: I think rejection is the most authentic aspect of the publication experience. It sounds cliché, but everyone gets it. It really doesn’t matter how ‘established’ you think someone is, they’re going to be rejected all the time. The best way to take it is to return to the work and ask yourself questions: “could this have been better? Should I have made different choices?” The worst thing to do is to think “how dare they? They don’t know my brilliance.” That can be a very dangerous way of thinking about writing and publishing. It’s not a transactional thing, you’re celebrating language, that’s why you’re writing.
Publishing is important––for selfesteem, for the confidence it can give you to try different things––but it doesn’t automatically make something good. I think if you’re proud of it and you can find someone to publish it, that’s a wonderful thing. But having something published won’t solve the problems with your work. Publishing is a tiny part of the whole writing experience––you’re developing your relationship both with language and with people. Those are the important things, publication is just a part of that.
OH: That’s very reassuring to hear. I don’t think there’s ever a situation where you can’t say something lovely about a piece of work, there’s never something you receive as an editor that doesn’t have an element of brilliance in it.
SS: It speaks well of editors who are able to find that brilliance too, because this is a two-player game. Someone has to read the work, and whatever meaning is, it’s built by two people. You have a choice to handle things kindly when you’re an editor.
OH: Absolutely. I’m very curious to know if you believe in ‘writers’ block’? If you do, do you know how to get ‘unblocked’?
SS: I read Sylvia Plath and that usually unblocks it for me, or I go to a museum, or I try to read a poem. I don’t really think the ‘block’ is a real thing though, so to speak. I think it’s probably a lot of other things. It’s probably concentrated around writing because that’s the thing you want to do most.
OH: What’s your favourite work from Plath?
SS: I just read Ariel over and over again if I forget what a poem is. There’s something about it that tends to unlock whatever my problems are at any time. It’s not Keats or Shelley or anyone like that, for some reason it’s always Sylvia Plath.
OH: We’re getting towards the end now, so what would you say is your favourite thing about working at Queen’s?
SS: The exposure to poetry and language. For my job to be what I love doing is a ridiculous privilege. I mean, as well, you asked me about rules, and there are so many rules that you may hold that you don’t realise are rules, and as soon as you try to explain that to someone else then you realise why you think certain things. It’s some part of your thinking that is preverbal and you have to find some way in language to say it. Thinking and talking about language all the time is such a luxury.
OH: If you weren’t a writer, what would you do if you could do anything else?
SS: The feeling that the act of writing a poem gives me is the same feeling I get when I cook something that goes well. What I’m discovering about myself is that writing poems is one way to express creativity, but it’s not the only way. I suppose then I’d have to choose something that gave me creative satisfaction. I really like cooking stuff. I’m not going to call myself a chef, but I derive so much satisfaction from cooking.
OH: It’s the same sort of process as poetry in a lot of ways, a lot of practice and a lot of drafting. Some people definitely get it and others don’t.
SS: Some people like melon in the form of a mousse, some people think melon should just be melon.
OH: That’s a very good metaphor! This is our last question, what is one thing you’d tell a student writer that you wish you knew sooner?
SS: I would tell them that in order to be a good writer you have to be two people, which is hard. You have to be a writer and you have to be a reader. You have to be able to write something without reading it and read something without being the writer of it, creating a separation between your two people. You should be someone who is able to tap into creative and imaginative chaos, and someone who can soberly ask questions of your work. I don’t have a solution for how to make yourself two people, but it must be done.
OH: That’s very good advice. Thank you so much for coming, Stephen, we really appreciate it.
SS: It was a pleasure, Olivia.
––– Stephen Sexton and Olivia Heggarty
Firelight
There is no such thing as the true self.
You’re wearing a maroon jumper with balls of fluff on the sleeves
Your hair copper in the fire-light.
Long silhouette by the mantel.
Fingers in the flames.
I draw forward but It was a joke, just a joke, and your smile is rueful, the hands you raise unmarred.
Fruit gin.
Watch the gleam of moisture, the swell of your lip
And a too-sharp canine.
It’s new, this side of you.
I’m buzzing inside like a hive of bees.
There is no such thing as the true self but if you saw me, as I see me,
Hanging from the ceiling, hooked by the ankles,
In the back of the butcher’s shop
Hidden away because of the smell.
Tender-pink, pig-pink.
What should I become to make you want me?
You lift the glass of gin and I do too,
Wondering who I am, what I am,
While you bring it closer to your mouth and ask me what I’m thinking of.
I saw we need to change the kindling.
––– Sarah Michaelides
––– Sylvia Bosky
Bitter, Honey
I reinvent her on a hill, absent she is a swishing blade of sand-reed grass, a washed-up compass jellyfish I share secrets with, that tetchy autumn wasp unaware of lifespan, even a withered branch, one I’ve passed so often it controls me to consider it once was alive.
Nothing is left to climb, everything is forgivingly flat, even the dunes slip from under me. Although, running from the house this morning, a memory of the spider who the night before dashed across the floor — the sight of its eight legs — to let it live was the kindest thing in me in that moment, and before.
Here on this beach walk, Benbulben rising as colossal regret ahead, bees who flit at my hair hone-in on the recent scent of a mandarin at my lips, perfect segments opened in trust, orange flesh dumped on the path like placenta. Unannounced, my missing companion is bitter yet sweet, somehow.
––– Maeve McKenna
They had gone to the beach. All of them. The house that had buzzed with life now lay quiet, save for the comforting sound of waves not too far away. I left my room, the hard linoleum chilling the soles of my feet. I hadn’t slept in. At least, I didn’t think I had.
It wasn’t a strange thing; they went to the cove every day, bounding down there armed with various inflatables and sheathed in thick black scuba material. But not this early. I squinted against the harsh morning sun that would have been softened were it not for the lack of curtains. They had been pulled back, the glow now highlighting the half washed plates and glasses that lay scattered around the sink. The day had already begun, without me. My stomach rumbled, more disappointed than me that we had missed breakfast: probably a big greasy fry.
I retreated into the shaded heat of the narrow staircase up to the rooms above. Checked the front door: locked, and the little blue key that had been given to them gone. The barman, who had let them rent the place, was the kind of man who probably wouldn’t appreciate his keys being misplaced. The way he would stare at you from behind little thin spectacles as you queued for yet another round when you knew very well the sun was going down. They always sent me up.
I rubbed my eyes and juked my head around the bedroom doors. It seemed that some wild animal had been let loose and hadn’t just stopped at one room. I waded through the overturned kit bags and odd rogue trainer to the storage cupboard and sighed with relief: the wetsuits were gone. I had avoided the watersports with no rigorous mental planning. The foam uniform in my size was meant to be hanging by itself. I don’t know why, but I reached out to touch the second suit. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who had missed the athletics in the Atlantic.
The cat that liked to wander in was sound asleep downstairs. The suit didn’t belong to him. I took a seat on the top stair, my phone now in my hand. The small blue icon wouldn’t take its eyes off me. Connor and Alex were one tap away. But why wouldn’t they go? They’d be the first ones strapped to a boogie board. I scratched the scab on my bare knee, grazed on a rock yesterday while searching for some poor creature that inevitably wasn’t there, and opened Sean’s chat. Here was a chance to actually type something. The miniscule tick turned from white to blue and the fine letters asked him where he was.
I tried to steady my thumping leg. If I had it my way, it would have been still. The light rain was shut off. I looked ahead of me, ducking slightly to see out of the main windows. We had been lucky enough to get a place parked on the sand. The stuff looked as fluffy as ever, not darkly speckled. A sharp sound pinged. I jumped. The rain began again, but quieter now due to the blood rushing around my head.
“In the shower.” The message read.
I swallowed hard. I knew he hadn’t gone with them; I knew the vague shape of him and knew somehow that the suit was his. The thin carpet stapled to the wooden stairs long ago tickled my palm as I pushed myself up onto my feet, pocketing my phone, the weight of it causing my shorts to slip down my hips at one side. The shower stopped.
Under the bay window, the cat stretched. It never stayed long. The little creature sat in its sun spot nibbling its palms before staring at me with crocodile eyes. It barely blinked.
“I think you’ve found a friend there.”
He didn’t look too different from yesterday: a towel hung around his neck and his hair lifted from his head in half dried tufts. Only, no wetsuit needed.
I turned myself on the old sofa. “You’re up early.”
He stood at the sideboard, chuckling as the cat rubbed itself against his bare feet. “I went for a walk. To the caves and back.”
“I would have went.”
“You were catching flies. Anything on?”
He padded over and retrieved the remote from the glass coffee table that always blinded you. He clicked through the four channels, having to dig his thumb into the ancient, faded buttons. It jutted out slightly at the knuckle from where he had broken it in year eleven. A hurley stick is no match for a thumb.
“Does RTE ever come in?”
“No. It’s a nationwide fact that it does what it wants.”
“Much like him.” He nodded in the direction of the feline now perched on the sofa’s arm, watching our every move. “We’re going to Glenveagh when they come back apparently.”
I had been to Glenveagh as a child. My parents, sporty people that they are, had decided it would be wise not to take the bus to the castle. I’m sure it’s a beautiful place, but my legs were just sore.
“We’re taking the bus.”
“Oh come on, Ben, surely you can manage walking?” He smiled and opened the fridge, now just a pair of legs in oversized shorts. He was swigging from the carton of milk. Quite a few of us liked it in our tea. He wouldn’t be told.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked as he dug into the cupboards, the carton hanging from his hand. In one he found a very small plate and sat it on the ground. A pleasant screech sounded behind us, four little white feet trotting over to lap up the milk he had poured. He dropped to his hunkers and stroked his rough palm over the fur on its back.
“That’ll keep him going. Do you want anything?”
Cats like high places. Makes them feel more secure. I had one that used to sit on my shoulders. They like to be on our level, like to think themselves similar. This one bent under his hand, flicking its pink tongue around its mouth before bucking its small head against his fingers.
“Ah, naw, I’m grand.”
“Tell that to your stomach.”
I crouched down beside them, hoping that crumpling myself would make the gurgling go away. Sean straightened up and watched as our little furry friend ambled underneath my knees, leaving its coat tangled in the thick hairs that dotted my legs. He fished into the white cupboards once more, producing a dinner plate, loaf of bread, and tin of beans.
“Beans on toast?”
“Sure you can’t beat it.” He somewhat smirked, coiling his finger around the ring pull and tugging hard. By now my calves were starting to ache. An unused pot was retrieved and the bright orange globs tipped into it, some of the juice spurting onto his thumb which he quickly wrapped his tongue around. The cat wandered away, flopping down on its side on the hot wooden floor. A perfect sunbathing spot.
A tangy aroma now filled the kitchen, only made stronger by the heat. With one hand Sean stirred the beans, his other fiddling with the knobs on the old toaster.
“I’m not sure if it has any other setting other than ‘burnt’.”
“Awk well, you like it well done.”
I dipped into the fridge to get the butter, cooling my burning face as I did so. Why was it always only one of my cheeks that took a beamer? I set the tub down beside the toaster almost ready to pop.
“Anymore, don’t be afraid to wake me. I would have joined you.”
Everyone goes mad over blue eyes, but I’ve always had a thing for dark.
“You could have joined me there now.”
“Look at the speed of him!”
The small visitor had bolted, his lounging place now wet from dripping feet. Sean still stared, despite the company and now burning beans.
“Ben! We thought you’d died!” Connor took a seat on the arm of the sofa, his wetsuit half unzipped and around his hips. Alex and Thomas had already made their way upstairs. The rogue trainer thudded as it landed on the floor above.
“Wreckin’ the place, as usual. Were youns not foundered?” Sean asked as I leant my back against the sideboard, arms crossed. Connor hadn’t noticed.
“No! Not with these bad boys!” He stood and slapped the rubber that hung around his waist. “Right, I’m off for a shower before one of them nabs it. Were any of you two in?”
“Just me.” Sean answered.
“Well, put the heat on again. And then we’re off for a hike!” He strutted towards the staircase on air.
“Aye, and we’re taking the bus!” Sean called after him as he disappeared from view.
The toast was charred by now.
––– Hannah McCormack
––– Ash Caulfield
Tightrope
Work, Larkin’s squatting toad, keeps me from my children. The perpetual cycle of term-time routine leeches laughter from their lips, as daily chores are checked. Today I remember:
bulb-like your hand planted in mine
A stolen hour when online class is cancelled. We sneak out. Hushed, we creep along the curb, peeking round the sleeping dragons parked outside the neighbour’s house. Each step is set to centre your balance; little feet that tangle together, gradually striaghten with time. But my balance does not hold –
I fall to work and you funambulate alone
There is no need of me to keep your balance any longer. Skirting the edges of the path, you have learnt a solo act.
Help me skywalk with you.
––– Emma Lutton
History Teacher
I
Over the fuzz of bad signal, Eoin’s voice buckled under the news, already choppy with cigarettes and cottonmouth.
It was raining when the Vice told us. I didn’t have to listen, just focused my eyes on the skyward climb of chaplaincy incense, its sweet nausea.
No classes that day. Just walk the corridors flooded with aimless bodies, interacting with offered hugs and no eye contact.
The teachers all drank coffee and ate a Mars Bar at break, like he had done every day. He would have said something witty.
The line for the wake stretched into the street, a mixture of suits and uniforms exchanging condolences in the throng.
I told his wife about him discussing Westerns with an awkward pimple of a teenager. She smiled. As I left, I heard her tell someone: “He just didn’t have any more fight in him.”
I met with Eoin that night. We needed bitten by Winter air to remind us we were still breathing. Better than chewing nails in the dark.
We walked with carryouts down the Ormeau. The tst of our Harps in the darkened park was a ritual death could dampen, but never defeat.
The rain started and we sought no shelter, letting skin become sodden, hair glossy. Exit when the words started slurring spoken in toasts and tributes.
We sat on the tops of bins, no telling when, yellow under the streetlights.
“I fucking love you man.” I fucking love you.
––– Brian Kerr
Samhain
clear-skied moonlight shivers on sleeping ground Arcturus shares its traveller’s light above the oak
the tree lets wind unstopped by leaves blow through I hear it sough branches creak and flex as sap withdraws into the core bark hardens in seasonal retreat
the oak makes ready for the shocks of frost cherishing the future showing us the way
––– Sue Steging
Contributors
Stephen James Douglas is a Northern Irish poet and secondary school teacher. A self-proclaimed enthusiast, Stephen’s love for literature was born under the rueful gaze of his former English teacher at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Frank Ormsby.
Maeve McKenna spends her time telling her secrets to native trees of rural Sligo, Ireland. She is widely published in print and online. Maeve’s debut pamphlet, A Dedication to Drowning, was published in 2022. A second pamphlet is forthcoming in 2023. The trees know the rest.
S. Furlong Tighe is from Dublin. They live in Belfast, where they are studying for an MA and working in a bar.
Originally from Leeds and studying music in Belfast, Josh Greene also has a love for art. Usually working on figurative and anatomical oil studies on canvas, lockdown allowed him to explore digital art. Making the stylistic shift from realism to more abstracted colours, shapes and forms in his much simpler prints.
Brian Kerr is a writer from Belfast, attending Queen’s University. His work mostly consists of poetry. If he doesn’t listen to LCD Soundsystem every single day, he’s just not himself.
Adam James Martin is a second year student of English with Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Ash Caulfield is a queer, disabled, Northern Irish-born amateur photographer. He enjoys candid photography, tending to shoot with his Canon AE-1 camera on 35mm film. He also occasionally writes, having previously published a piece on the Stonewall Riots as part of GCN’s New Voices campaign.
Mac McCluskey is a Deaf, queer, poet of color. He is Sri Lankan-American, but currently resides in Northern Ireland, pursuing a degree in Economics at Queen’s University Belfast. He has been previously published by The Apiary and Dedalus Press
Elle Cunningham (she/her) is a Liberal Arts student and occasionally, she writes. You can find her other published work in Holyflea, The Apiary and buried in a trunk six feet underground.
Having finished his undergraduate English degree at Oxford, Edward McLaren has just started an MSc in English Modernism at Edinburgh with an emphasis on the role of Chinese culture in the poetry of Ezra Pound. Besides academia, he has a strong interest in Haneke films, psychoanalysis, and drinking coffee like a vampire.
Shakeema Edwards is an Antiguan American poet.
Ronan Hart grew up in Limavady. He started writing in 2018 and has been featured on Literallystories. He lives in Belfast with his wife.
Morgan L. Ventura is a writer, curator, and ex-archaeologist who recently completed their MA in Poetry at QUB. Poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in Shoreline for Infinity, The Honest Ulsterman, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Romance Options (Dedalus Press). Find Morgan on Twitter: @hmorganvl.
Molly McKillop is currently in her final year of her Masters in Liberal Arts. She is focusing primarily on the poetry of Rita Ann Higgins. She spends most of her free time with her Springer Spaniel Frank, who is a menace to society.
Photography has become an instrument for Edeline Lim to capture snapshot moments of natural beauty. It was a rather delayed epiphany that no scenery could be seen the same way twice which prompted her to take up casual photography. Among her many other pastimes are playing music, reading and napping.
Níamh Busby (she/her) is a Northern Irish writer who enjoys picking apart her family’s memories and turning them into stories (sorry fam!). She has previously been published in QUB The Gown, orangepeel and Gypsophila. She won first place in Sonder Magazine’s Morning Coffee Competition 2022.
Sarah Michaelides is a second year student at Queen’s University Belfast where she studies English with Creative Writing. She enjoys reading, writing, and all things fiction.
Sylvia Bosky was born in Budapest, Hungary and now lives in Belfast. Originally trained as a fashion designer and receiving a BA degree in Music, she works in various mediums, such as oil, watercolour, and digital art. Her work is inspired by nature, spirituality, and dreams. “Rebirth” is an oil painting on board with digital retouch.
Hannah McCormack is a recent Queen’s graduate of the MA in Creative Writing. She is currently working on making her name in the screen industry and on her debut novel. Hannah is especially interested in writing queer and female stories and hopes to publish more in the future.
A former English teacher and graduate of QUB, Emma Lutton works as Communications Coordinator for CMSIreland. She enjoys reading a good novel, penning the odd poem and playing music with her children. You can keep up with her musings at AttentionSeekers.org.
Sue Steging was born in Liverpool. After a career spanning education and psychotherapy she now lives near the Giant’s Causeway and writes about what she sees. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies and was longlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing in 2021 and 2022.
Stephen Sexton’s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.
Cover art by Rachel Buckley, an illustrator and graphic design artist from Northern Ireland. She is currently studying Digital Media at the University of Stirling and her work can be found on Instagram @halfheartillustration.
Editorial Team
Olivia Heggarty is a writer based in Belfast, studying English at Queen’s University. She is the very proud editorin-chief of The Apiary and her work has been published in various journals and anthologies.
Emma Buckley is a writer and editor currently studying MA Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Her poems can be found in The Honest Ulsterman, Superfroot, The Lumiere Review and Catatonic Daughters
Anna Gordon is a second year English with Creative Writing student and the PR officer of the QUB Writers’ Society. She enjoys writing screenplay and prose.
Lucy Hatton is a Belfast-based writer, editor, and final year English and Linguistics student. She is VicePresident of QUB’s English Society, and loves discovering and uplifting Belfast’s new literary talent.
Eve Henderson is a History & Politics student who loves watching, observing and studying the world and its working. She has found the most beautiful way to do this is through writing and has thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the incredible Apiary team as her first involvement in a literary magazine.
Ellis Hociej is a Liberal Arts student who has heaps of enthusiasm and a deep rooted love for words and the art of putting them together.
Bryan Sim is a year 1 student. He enjoys doing a bunch of stuff, including (but not limited to) designing, animating, watching movies and films, playing games like Stardew Valley, chess, tetris, eating, making food, climbing and bouldering.
The Apiary is part of and organised by The Writers’ Society of Queen’s University Belfast.
Thank you to the Queen’s Students’ Union for helping us to fund this issue.
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The Apiary is produced by the Queen’s Writers’ Society
