Poetry

Burren Wall

By Drucilla Wall   In summer the cattle graze the high patches made rich on limestone leaching into thin topsoil, rain generally...

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GRANDMOTHER: AFTER SCHOOL

By Eamonn Wall   —the best teacher lives outside, the best teacher lives inside you, beating blood, breathing air, the best...

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At the Heart of Every Stone, A Bird

By Angela T. Carr   Nest of pebbles on the doorstep – a pagan offering, the work of small hands – its matted grass walls,...

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Bull Sharks

By Anthony Lawrence   In a river that still reeks of decay, in a time before the weir divided fresh from salt among mangroves that...

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Intact

By Anne Walsh   Visible in the wild wreck I am is the empire I was. My ruin is the most beautiful architecture. Wreckage has made me...

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Moses

By J.W. Burns   hunched against the orange sky, a white horizon nibbling at his bowels. Far below, his sheep hungry, thirsty, horny to...

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The Divide

By Anthony Lawrence   While the other boys were drawing their guns and falling into the ruins of an open pavilion of sky and pines, I...

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Pathways to Gifts

By Hélène Cardona.   when my soul turned round, perceiving the other-side of everything…...

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After Hieronymus Bosch, perhaps.

by Peter Boyle.   Saint Germain des près, St Martins in the Fields — what are so many churches doing in the meadows? Why are...

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Abercrombie Street

By Kristen de Kline,   + we loved like demons our kisses, fresh and fugitive we snorted lines as Cave wrestled skeleton trees crooned...

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The Colour Grey

By Bernadette Gallagher.   He talked of grey, of blue, purple and all the possible pigments that make up grey. He talked of trees, of...

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Eden (breaking free)

By Matthew M.C. Smith   Dream on a breeze of summer eve’s tree-dappled light Do not fear the advancing shadows Let Autumn storms...

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Threads Entwined

By Bernadette Gallagher   For John Philip   You came already formed a silken scarf blowing in the wind.   To unravel would...

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Intangible Flight

By Robyn Rowland   whirling Dervish, Istanbul   Unworn as any adolescent son, the youngest Mevlani Dervish trembling on the cusp...

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The King’s Exile

By Matthew M.C. Smith   for Anne   We fly over girded earth trailing the rise of Apollo light thousands of feet high   The...

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Roots

By Marilyn Humbert   west of Alice Springs the Finke River rambles roots of ancient eucalypts Namatjira paints his soul   ghost...

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RED LIKE BLOOD

By Dr Wendy J. Dunn   Red like blood I plucked a rose Grasped its beauty close to me uncaring of its thorns   Blood red red blood...

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The lost cantatas of Mozart

by Peter Boyle.   The lost cantatas of Mozart are being performed on an island in the wide fork of a river not far from here....

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Lapdogged

by Ian C Smith.   To visit their son, a bearded adult now in what feels to him a fast-forwarding of years, she drives him to the...

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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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