Issue Six Poetry

Anne Casey reflects on Issue Six.

“The road is full of perfume. Urine. Bile. Death.” These nine initial words from Jayant Kashyap’s poem ‘History’ in this issue...

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History

By Jayant Kashyap *   The road is full of perfume. Urine. Bile. Death. People walk the road, up and down, in high boots, heads...

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Historically Sensible

by Kevin Higgins   You knew for a fact, they’d never allow a pair of mad eyes with a pistol near the Emperor and his wife; and...

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Beelzebub asks the virtuoso of sadism for advice
(from Satan Repentant)

By Michael Aiken   Beelzebub fallen to disease, absent himself willfully, to muster some inkling, some new insight born of nothing...

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Sometimes the Alligator Gets to Write the Ending

By Jack B. Bedell     My daughter has been watching the news every night this week, anxious for word   on the soccer team...

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L’Inconnue de la Seine

By Cheryl Pearson In the late 1880’s, the body of a young woman was pulled from the Seine. The pathologist at the Paris Morgue was so...

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Paper Stone Circles

By Paul Casey stone turns to paper in her eye as she filters cycles of light into circles of paper stones her eye is a stone circle a...

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For Pointing at the Sun

by Paul Casey.   1. Just as the pillars meet a mile above the architrave A sky splinter plummets to puncture the floodplain A standing...

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For Helen

By Brian Jerrold Koester     The deepest blue-burgundy you will ever see in stained glass, that is the colour of my love for you...

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On the Boat

By Jane Clarke   On the boat we were mostly virgins, we talked about who we were going to be – waitresses, seamstresses,...

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coming out backstory

By Sandra Renew     1933 lifelong partners charismatic lives           no mention of the other in orbituary Stella was a...

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Frida Kahlo Visits Ballinasloe

By Nuala O’Connor   Frida Kahlo likes to walk in colour, but she is hard-pushed on Society Street.   We wander together up...

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The Darmstadt Year

by Cynthia D. Nelson   The Darmstadt Year               I read out the sign at our new base:            ...

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Calcium

by Anne Elvey   baíte tipiche         typical huts formaggio            cheese taleggio   ...

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An Afterlife of Stone

by Jenny Blackford The lumpy wrinkled flesh of some great ancient beast a woolly mammoth or elasmothere lies mummified beside the Hume...

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Samhain

by Patrick Stack   A long way off Through fog that veils all else Faint voice is heard So faint no mortal ear Can catch the pitch Save...

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HOW TO MAKE SAND

By Natalie D-Napoleon   First, a star must be formed; bodies colliding into hot bodies   through infinite time and space...

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Fifty-five days

By Denise O’Hagan   We shrugged at bomb scares at school Locked our doors, watched our bags and our steps And skirted any lone bag...

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Memory Box

by Fiona Perry   A collection of mementoes to stimulate long term memory and a sense of identity in dementia patients.   Inside:...

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Some slight redemption

by Jenny Blackford Coventry Cathedral had been bombed, I knew, during the last great conflagration of the world, had lost some of its roof...

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Black Saturday: 7th of February, 2009

By Wendy J. Dunn   When we arrived Another car was there   Strangers at the Lookout We gathered together And gazed at the hills...

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Trial

By Cheryl Pearson   Quick to scuttle in with the cattle sick, or an ankle twisted fat on a root – the caps wring flat by...

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