Neil Slevin is a 26 year-old writer from the West of Ireland. An English teacher, he has returned to university to complete an M.A. in Writing at N.U.I. Galway and to pursue a writing-based career. Neil writes for Sin (N.U.I. Galway's student newspaper), editing its entertainment section and culture column, Resonate, and as Events Reporter for the Institute for Lifecourse and Society. Neil’s poetry has been published by The Galway Review and numerous international journals.
A Mermaid's Song One day I went home searching for waters deep enough to drown my problems, but then I thought of you. As a child, in passing, I learned about you, heard your story spoken of but never told: how you grew unhappy in yourself, feared you’d be taken away; how you couldn’t bear the shame, you refused to. Now, I imagine you slip out and edge your way along shadows of fading light through the estate, hoping no hand will block your path, no mouth will draw you back. I follow you, sense your relief mottled by despair, then advance into the darkness you now own. I prowl behind you at a distance safe enough to know you won’t hear my footsteps over your own heartbeat and the voices in your head that pound against their prison walls, shrieking for release. You tramp for miles, yet finish in full view of a home you’ve now forgotten: you stop to turn your back on invisible, unwanted hands, unheard of, drowned-out voices and shatter the water’s veil. The sea accepts you the way your life never will, wrapping you with open arms; you go down gracefully, and for a moment you sing like a mermaid at home in her ocean, your handful of notes bubbling, bursting as they brace the air. Then your song ends. I listen to the silence, until strange men arrive to fish the deep waters, as if they’d always known it was here they’d find you. But I don’t wait for the boy who thinks you’re still at home hiding somewhere from him. The one who’ll always love that woman who wanders up and down the hallway, from room to room, as if the house conceals all of her life’s answers, and they are just sitting there at the back of a press, waiting to be found. The son who will always remember the last words you spoke to him, and know they were ‘Goodbye’. Walking On Your Memory There exists a gap you cannot fill; the hole in your heart betrays her missing shape. Her light creeps through still, into the dark, uncertain shade she left behind. She is gone but the space remembers, and even in those waking moments, ones when you forget, the ghost of her memory dances on the walls, her hair still blowing in the wind of dying storm. That breeze will always blow, however softly. No matter how you shelter from it, it will find you and gently claw its way back to penetrate the cracks of your long-broken heart. Hand-in-hand, her light and shadow will follow you like an echo of former existence, foreshadowing the life you will try to lead but always a few steps behind, walking on your memory. The Ticking Clock Your microscopic heart stopped beating like a clock forgetting the time. I wasn’t even there, was I ever? Do you watch us in judgement or pity? Do you look and think, “I had a lucky escape”? Are you nameless and wandering like both of us now? Are you happy, sad, loved, hated; all those things that we are, or at least could be in this mess called life that we took away from you, because we were too young – too foolish – too drunk on reality? Reality bites, drags me back to the present, to thoughts of what I have done, should have done and need to do. I wonder what and where you are, who you could have been, then I do for me (still oh-so-selfishly). What have I become, what will become of me? The clock is ticking. Our Tardis On wet, ill-tempered mornings, that perspex box of phone was like the Tardis of our town, abetting our escape and journey to place and voice unknown. Deep inside we ventured, sheltering from late dawning’s misery, its cold, while spiders webbed and must spread, and found ourselves a no man’s land of mystery, stories untold. But within its space grew less as we ourselves grew tall, grew old; the rain would stop, the sun would shine, the wind no longer wont to blow. And time passed in the same way we grew to pass our Tardis by: it no longer bore the space we craved – the room we had to find to spread our wings, for flight. Time left our see-through world all alone – enslaved; our phone box Tardis a copper gravestone – something we had out-grown: something else we could not save. My Escape In sobriety, singularity and silence, I search for and solicit me. I seek solace in syllables: sounds and senses that stream from somewhere inside – some space they spring from and stretch to fill. Socially, they serve others through simile and sublimation; solely, they shape me, and my soul: I write to be (and escape) me.
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Carter Vance is a student and aspiring poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently studying in the Social Work program at Algoma University in Sault Ste Marie. His work has appeared in such publications as The Baird's Tale, (parenthetical) and F(r)iction. He received an Honourable Mention from Contemporary Verse 2's Young Buck Poetry Awards in 2015. His work also appears on his personal blog Comment is Welcome (commentiswelcome.blogspot.com). Cherry Red I have felt the sun in shades, crossing creep from lawns shorn in humming of summer passes, in pitter-patter of misplaced hair strands, perfectly-figured dress cuts. Bathing in the milk-sewn pools of August starlight, lipstick glint bright as boyhood's blood, deep as bar glass port, you dance as light as breeze-blown cotton, as humid air. You're the kind of person I want to share 4AM under halogen with. You're the type to leave deep echoes where dreams had taken up their comfort. Leaving but the memory, but the notion. Wigilia Dinners A muddy patch on Greyhound windows, scraping clean in claret bath lacquer mulling heat rash ruddy amongst the stomach pain swirls inky acidic markers as testament to what gets left as unburned kindle, as untested steel, as chalkboard theory, as textbook framework. Embrace of asphalt arms, the model sparkling monuments to welfare states past which guide as gilded wire to weary dawns forward in militia march of white faced hours, leaking pavement shades in buckets for trenchant timing up is the strongest suit of cardstock to have handed. Plastic cups, plates of precious silver, like a mismatch of Wigilia and milk bar, wash against each as sandshore rocks the barring remove of aparting ocean; as still as life mural painting, stand up personable, but it’s not the sort of supper you have until you’re older, able to make sense. Infrastructure Gaps I was watching a World Bank lecture video on public-private financing for railways and ports, distracted by the speaker's gaudy bowtie, shining of reflective red, dotted with WASP anchors, nautically-themed and silently running through everything but the benefits of lower-run interest rates for finance by governments due to the security of return; rather than the history of roadways built to last the rainy seasons of Thailand, the way the slightly-sickly man's dress shirt hung at the oddest of angles from side to hip, as if he had not taken proper care in tucking, as if he had simply rushed out the door before fluttering in a mad rush of dot matrix printer paper to the elegance of roomy, wood-paneled bookshelves he stood astride distracted me from my own, equal dressing faux-pas: the colour clash of belt and shoes, mainly, or was it merely a lazy lamppost trick I played to claim some other cause for what I could call, by comparison: some unfunded mandate, some New Labour private financing initiative gone awry, some lack of water in Argentina's remote regions, though it would be altogether silly to compare. Grown Up Children's backpacks flood the city centre as Friday's makeshift parade begins in pinwheel swirl the same I'm sure it always has, but do not know. Pondered by the stone arches, Cheshire waterways, smiling sundown clouds above Ferris revolving lights, peak air breath drawn from Inverness down, how I could have been the pinwheel spinning sharp. I could have grown up here, and cheered for Celtic over Rangers, and learned to wince at tourist camera clicks, and ate kebabs with wooden fish shop forks, and walked the Royal Mile to school and back home. But I grew up amongst the maple keys falling, and slipped down the ice-slick hills in Winter, and scoffed at the American accents of summer beach travelers, and picked strawberries in August at the farm five miles out and rapped on suburban fences with replanted oak branches. Reprise in Blue The victims of history speak not to their plight, they speak not through arrows and gunshots, through shirt factory fires, through schoolhouse stands and rural church steeple bombings. They do not speak, for they are gone: no labour law reform, no signed bill of housing redress, no so-called progress shall make them whole. No signal can cut through the white noise cloth down draping post-to-post in passage rites, warnings unheeded by the number-crunching clan, except in their moments of unearned regret. Except in their mirrored lenses making new liberal order of darker voids, starring deep not long into the cold maw depths of the thing, but to some construction of tabulated script, some monument made in ignorance of due cost on plains of gold where greater men than they shall ever hope to be starved for lack of compass to guide to berry bush and water spring. They stare not into grim meaning of coin collections, nor into spindled red lines on FHA maps, nor into the thin ice-water stew they ladle-heap upon the cups and plates of sickly figures. They stare not; they cannot face the victims, the bombings, the fires, the bullets, the arrows, they cannot face the calm wake of them all the more. They cannot stare too deep to history's gaze, it is too disorderly. Still, voices emerge from riot smoke, casting arms and rising as a last held note of Coltrane, of Shorter, held in blue midnight shade of strung Christmas tinsel. They go unheeded as ever, but cease not. It makes nothing the better, but has some conscience at least. I’ve been dreaming about poetry my whole life- the first girl’s kiss I ever stole was the responsibility of Ted Hughes! – ‘Song’. From his first collection. She loved the poem, and me speaking it. Sadly that childhood romance didn't blossom to anything, but my love of poetry has never left me. Nor will it, ever, like either a loved one, or a cancer you just can’t shift. I live in Eastbourne, right at the bottom of England. Next to the ocean. This is my first publication. An Alien Spring To be born anew we want to be born anew shake off this coil, remake our destiny far from... all space laid out, stars too far to tan skin, too far to care which dream is taken, which philosopher's school made fashion. I dream to be, yes! far away from the dozing masses, a rocket can take me into the dream the christian’s seek their god an alien who blessed some wine; an interstellar joke on our perpetual dependencies and made for himself a religion the exact inverse of what he meant, is so very easy to see, if you have eyes we travel worn roads of unforgiving, a merciless track where no friend traverse a deceit to mask a truth But… walk to the plains of Mars and find a face their gods shorn from rock, to Europa where beneath a crust of ice dolphins swim in perpetual circles, to Bernard's star where don't you know, Bradbury, Asimov and all the greats took their first baby steps, To Foundation… and brains that think in tanks of liquid, where a conscious robot dreams of being human, ruled by laws encoded in circuits by his gods, where ambassadors of shadows crawl among the stars to turn the epochs of the galaxy to their liking, where i have spent all my childhood days locked, and tumbling in weightless worlds freed from absurdities of earth's cooling heart, where lovers played with insectoid creations of minds like mine; trapped to be released from the tyranny of a society impenetrable, a literature failing in modern times, to make sense of any of us, how wondrous to face an alien spring, to touch and reach out, without shame or its corollary hate, and break the spell -- the rolling green hills of earth seen not as fat feed for the masses but a magicians’ beautiful playground -- Lift up your heads! you poor race of men, to the beckoning stars the eternal empty vacuum, so swelling with all kinds of life, reach out and dare, to touch those whom walked amongst the stars when we were all young, and by doing find some measure, any measure of what it is to be human after all. attempt at a narrative #10 Break this spell upon the ocean let it drift into the day break this spell upon the ocean let it drift unto this one day. Break gravity's spell or photons slow quantum wave speak: brown dwarfs' baying in full light's sheerest wake. Don't speak to me of madness not whisper in my ear, nor smooth my brow, nor kiss my lip, not hold my cheek from running tear. Or tell me there is any hoping left, for minding mercy kindness, from a world spun and bound to darkness to your opaqued one God’s holiest, divine. [i've read your papers skimmed a twitter feed watched the youtube videos captured all your sickness] i need no further evidence to pass a full sentence on your world: you are limited to a violent, violent chattel, that no one would ever... ever bother reaping. Any imperial alien species, haughty in their perspective, would leave you to wither wither, as thine will always do. A. Looking from the Hill Childhood fortress of dreams playing drivers with wireframe cars pulling on string and rubberwheels underneath the hot African sun. Planting dreams and winking at the camera, as the mother snapped shutter looking over the rainbow t-shirts of friends finished with their pitch black faces, returning home to the grey finite sky, rain all thru every season, roundfat face staring over neighbour fences, into muddy ground, foreigners' lives. To divine how the english live, so far from the roots that burrow the fat unformed of adult lives swirling down the toiletbowl with drunken fever, standing outside and looking in, where is the centre of a bastard race, fading photographs of a garden tendered by black-servant-gardeners who stole whiskey and frightened siblings to distraction, trying so hard to recall a life that's lost surrendered, to the dull leaden daze of an adulthood spinning, the focus gone the roots brittle in their amnesia, antinomian life, a consciousness at war with itself, its social peers. Do the cells of water know the course of the sea to divine the tides the moon's sway with the consciousness of a bubble rising to the surface, how does a child understand, what it means to be, a member of this or that race, to follow unwritable laws, and failing so offend the righteous to be struck dumb and blind, an outcast, befriended by nothing other than the moon, and spend one's whole life, repeating errors unmentionable, patterns unintelligible to reach the final understanding that never comes, of why, the unseen mark must so be painted on the forehead of hated alien, the interloper from foreign shore. And no matter how I hide with perfume, or pant airs of religious incense, the broods of righteous have the smell —the hair on the neck's back pricking-- the true smell will out, and no matter how my eyes dip to authority, or feign insouciant manner to buy support; I am lost before I am born. And the wake of magic rites stir no longer the fields and suns once prayed over, now reaped by imagination’s mechanism, tilled by steel hands and the coldest science; the maypole, the all-souls-night turned to quaint spectacle; no matter how far the fathers of mankind have travelled from hunter's spearing oxen washing their blood-hands in sanctified pools to the leering citadels of progress and science warring with itself in paradox -- The children of our time still turn, to the bitter consequence of the unnameable soul, troughing animal or mother of three, pale faced boy or liquid saint, pouring thru our callused hand, we all still tied to the tropic urge that i can not name that governs our breeding, as surly as the sun we worshipped, brings its night. John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Least Bittern Books published his second collection, Under the Mountain Born. Black Mountain Crest Sky at the eagle black height where the mountain arose broken from my chest above the frozen stream still in its movement of blue rain. Days of the sun and the light I despised for my tiredness, weak and ungrateful, disease in the water where an elk fell through ice in the shallow. I fall asleep among the rocks where I was born, being one with no one, my outstretched arms become a winter tree giving nothing to your want. The Falcon Towers A tree in the sea fog wall, the falcon towers where the hill descends to follow her contours empowered by their rarity. The sky changes water where her fierce eye masks desire. I gather bones from the cliff to pierce my skin as she departs. Mistress in disappearance, I will not waver as your unknown throes beset the reckoning world with a fire world inside your heart to conjure. In Beginning When a crow touched the earth of stone an ocean grew from the water in her womb. Black valleys she came from the sun to give us love for the world she took from darkness. I undressed in a circle of feathers inside the trees with my mouth to her mouth of the winds. Yuxing Xia is an author and poet who has been published in 10 different countries in journals and magazines such as Society of Classical Poets, Strong Verse, and many others. He hopes to retire to an ostrich farm. Candy Bar
in my back pocket. I motioned to take a nap with eyes half-open while you stared at the TV, waiting for me to sleep.
into this cruel world where there we could only have one candy bar per family. My dear brother, you never considered I would eat it all the day before and leave a candy wrapper full of toilet paper.
of processed sugar. I wonder what our parents think when we meet again on opposing sides of a world war and we wrestle over a country flag like it was full of sugar, those chemicals that change adults back into kids again. On the playground of bullets and mortar shells, we dance to the sound of crumbling sand castles and play tag in blood puddles. The decade-old candy aftertaste will never be sweet again no matter how long we try to hold on. Cathy Bryant worked as a life model, civil servant and childminder before becoming a professional writer. She has won 22 literary awards, including the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize and the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, and her work has appeared in over 200 publications. Cathy's books are 'Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature' and 'Look at All the Women' (poetry), 'How to Win Writing Competitions' (nonfiction) and 'Pride & Regicide - a Mary Bennet Mystery' (a novel). See her listings for cash-strapped writers at www.compsandcalls.com , updated on the first of every month. Cathy lives in Cheshire, UK. Umbra, Penumbra Over your face, when you think I’ve lied. When the day is dying, and mocks the mountain with a god’s-hand-shadow that dwarfs the peak. The small flits of people on streets, spit-split, doing their swish sweep speedwalking to work, shop, home. Oh, home, the cold dark stretch of it, waiting and empty. Silent patches twisting in the garden like arguments, distorting amiable shrubs into monsters. No, these dim threats are not what I hoped for, are not what life should look like. They have, though, their own beauty, like the sculpted angles of your face, with its sharp planes and shadows, when you think I’ve lied. Robert Knox is a creative writer, a freelance journalist for the Boston Globe, a blogger on nature, books and other subjects, and a rabid gardener, who makes his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Boston University (M.A. in English literature), he is a former college teacher and newspaper editor, whose stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. His poems have recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal, The Poetry Superhighway, Bombay Review, Earl of Plaid, Rain, Party & Disaster Society and Semaphore Journal. He serves as a contributing writer for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. A collection of his poems, titled "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty," will be published this year by Coda Crab Books. Sidewalk Madonnas ("Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon make up 27 percent of the country's population" -- Lebanese Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk) Sidewalk Madonnas Figures of endurance Black-robed, mourning their murdered country Childed, uprooted, dependent on the unreliable love of strangers, charity: rain in a dry country They appear, a flash of darkness on a street in Hamra, back to the wall in the busy light of the Lebanese day, The mourner at the feast, Face hidden, grief exposed Speaking words of the world’s betrayal distilled to an appeal we cannot hope to understand The child you hold or sits helplessly hopeful by your side, or roams the unwelcome pavement hand outstretched, irrefutable proof of your claim to our attention, our humanity Our humanity is scattered, mere happenstance, thin as April sun in New England, far from the Mediterranean blue of sky and sea a mere trickle when a flood is needed Where is your river, pilgrim of desperation, your music, your song of the generations? What rivers, borders, highways of death, bomb-shredded cities did you leave behind with losses we cannot imagine? Whose face will you never see again? Women of endurance, caregivers, lifegivers from whom the future is born, oracles of devastation ripped from your country's womb, Tell us of the future in exchange for the slender paper note we hand you What hope do the children of earth have When we turn our eyes from the republic of your grief Sick Being sick is the price you pay for forgetting to be grateful for the little things in life Eating, for instance Water. Would you like a sip now? Not on your life. Can't risk it. How about chocolate? How long can you go without chocolate? How much do you wish to avoid, once more, the mad dash to prostrate yourself before the throne? the king, the power that holds sway as you sway, sometimes, the kingdom of the body poised for overthrow, regime change by microbiotic subversion, sick it is -- really -- the need to maintain some plurality (veto-proof, at least) of the little creatures who live inside, fighting the border wars that protect us from downfall, from the violence of extrusion, emptying the insides outside Let us adore them, these minute particulars, Let us nourish them Let us send them warm blankets for winter, and phone cards to call home Let us pledge the little sacrifices demanded by a better world: simply by giving up sugar, chocolate, coffee, booze, lactose (milk and cheese to you lowbrows, but also ice cream, yogurt, cream sauces, Fettucini Alfredo and all his masticating buddies) the whole beloved tribe of simple carbohydrates -- Let me have about me only carbos who are sleek and fat -- (Where are these complicated carbohydrates , anyway? Rotting neglected in my garden?) I promise to do better I will serve the good and the true, abjure the rich and indolent life of the senses I will practice moderation, offering the things I love only the occasional peck, brushing lips in the doorway, bidding farewell before some momentous journey such as a dark ride home on the blithering interstate I offer these promises to the micro-millions inside who keep me well and happy, nourished, erect, and free of the all-night vigil by the throne of the savage god And I know just how long they are likely to last Parallel Lives In one of those other universes the awareness of which leaks in, at times, when we're asleep I am a reporter (as occasionally I am in this world) and have got on to a story whose subject, import or nugget of truthiness has on waking completely escaped me, just as the story board data, information, plot lines and all recollection of those other-worldly events so often do And while I am able to deliver the goods for John Q. Public (or X%&F#22 as he is known in one of those other universes) the consequence for me is somehow bad Because (stay with me now) the source, female, human enough, I suppose, for an alien, inhabitant of Planet MMCXIX in Glammagolblin Galaxy ... but, alas, that's all I remember about her... now objects to my story's depiction of her character, role in the events under consideration, discrete particular actions (or perhaps indiscreet, appalling to the general), state of mind, personal tics -- having something to do, I fear, with a suspicious smell -- in the course of my bringing to public notice this now wholly-obliterated-from-memory (mine, in this world) burning issue, surprising new development, balanced sidebar, salient backgrounder, dark conspiratorial suspicion, pale slice of onion-skin gossip for the edification of John Q. X%(etc.) and his analphabetical ilk The gentle she-creature is, human or other in that last fading brink-of-consciousness incarnation simple, heartstring-tugging, sympathetic, sincere, all that I am not (certainly, at least not the last), and my treatment of her has apparently not only fouled itself with a scent of the Snark but, worse, for after all who is she to me (or Hecuba to her?; and perhaps she is not truly grieving over old Priam; that being merely another something else I just dreamed up) ...but worse, as I discover, only semi-sleeping, my true mate, domestic companion, and alter ear-go has been poisoned against me by this purported victim of unnecessary Snarking and now believes that she is credible, sympathetic, and deserving of support, while I, apparently, judging from the severe glance in her mirror-mind, am no longer, and plans to attend my detractor's silly self-esteeming public session performed at whatever passes in these other-worldly venues (Galaxy Gammagloblin, and all that) for highly self-regarding suburban high schools, in itself a despoiling of all we both hold holy in this universe, the one I went to sleep in, or so I have always believed and if it is so, or even so-so, as I have long since been persuaded by explorers of the demi-monde of sleep, perchance to dreamboat, such as Sigismondo Schadenfreude and his Jungmann that in dreams we send encoded messages to our self, that self we straight put on, as we do a favored suit of comfy (or at least familiar) garments, a second skin, when once we wake to find ourselves yet again on John Q.'s Pedestrian Planet, then I can only ask myself to look beyond my waking snit and -- discover -- precisely-- what it is -- that I am doing wrong |
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