Portrait #2: Oscar

Want to find Oscar? He’s up on the hill
cutting pipe among sprawling tyre towers.
Chewing seeds, spitting shells at his heels
mythologizing about behemoth rock-eaters,
the subterranean mechanical monsters
that shed the tyres in the first place.
Imagine. If the wheels are thirteen-footers
and coal dust camouflages their hideousness?
Oscar, the peace-loving Métis, smokes one-hitters.
Says he likes people. Rides the front-end loader.
Stacks cast-offs. With glowing-hot lances,
he pierces carbon black and mesh,
never flinching from poisonous propulsions.
He’s got a Montreal drawl. Buys you a pint
but comes back with a bottle. Yeah, he likes people
just fine, he tells me but it’s not like it used to be.
Under the hill. Down where there was nothing but shade
and those people he liked, well, it was just as easy to avoid them.

Shortlist, Red Line Festival Poetry Competition, Judged by Jessica Traynor, 2022

Portrait #3: Bec

Jackets and coveralls hang from rows of wooden pegs.
She kicks off her boots, I hunker to untie mine.
She stomps and I tiptoe over cool floor-tiles to the kitchen.
A cross-stitch sign above the door reads: Save a horse,
ride a cowboy. Max drains potatoes at a steamed-up window.
The table’s only set for two. Bec sits without invitation,
slings an arm over the back of the chair. Her house,
not mine. A bra-strap loops from under her orange vest.
Her shoulders are tan and sinewy like knotted rope.
Reset knuckles curl to a fist and unfurl. I don’t know
what the world’s gone and done to Becky Franklin,
but she stares it down like she resents its every grain of sand.

First published in The Waxed Lemon, edited by Derek Flynn & Joanne McCarthy, Waterford, 2022

Mindfulness

Don’t tell me about silence.
Don’t tell me you made yourself sit
cross-legged on the bedroom floor.
You gotta just be, you know? Don’t say it,
Without your phone, like, truly alone.
Don’t tell me about living in the moment.
Don’t tell me the bloody alarm bleeps when
ten minutes of being present have expired?

I already know what it’s like to lie in a darkened room
with nothing but my life to distract me. To stomp
over the slippery leaves and resilient needles
of a forest floor on a crisp November morning
and peer past bare branches at the bright grey sky.

And I know what it’s like to wait in line,
wipe someone’s breath from a train window
and hurry, forcing a path through the throngs,
just in case, god-forbid, I miss my stop.
Don’t tell me I should try it sometime.

First published in Poetry Ireland Review 124, edited by Eavan Boland, Dublin, 2018

Civilisations

Up there, where murder-
ous sets wheel and list
wrenching wretched cries,
incessant chatter,
unassuming jackdaw
raucous rook and look, look
she’s nestled aspy,
that magpie.

Now watch her watch
them build and weave.
Frantic flutter, then
dropping eaves
are carried off
by nature’s pretty thieves.

First published in Poetry Ireland Introductions Series: Taking Down the House, Dublin, 2023

Mining

I saw a car float past the park
sideways gently turning and driverless,
the owner wading behind clasping her ears
while waves the size of buildings
collapsed over the geological pier.

The granite was plundered centuries ago.
Torn from its bed of rock, from its past,
to be hauled along a rail to the shore.
Stubborn, serene, it remains set
defying the sea with its certainty.

And the quarry is a void to scream into.
Finger the scars, break your nails away
and climb, beaten by the blow and torrent
never intended for pre-celtic genes.
Roar! Your clamour will not echo.

First published in Poetry Ireland Introductions Series: Taking Down the House, Dublin, 2023

Cornerboys

You recall pearls, brittle cold
glass rattle and the paint peel
of a splintered window frame.
Paper globe shades a single bulb
reflected in the darkening pane.
Streetlight halos, orange October fog
and you. You were in the image too.

You were in school, double maths,
history, watching trees dissolve
approaching sleep. That feeling,
back of the Citroën, towels and blankets
covering seats. Suitcases at your feet.
Stay on your side for the eight-hour drive
and rain like a chain-gun barrage.

A rule snaps. Chalk hurled above drowsy heads
to clatter against varnished brick. Fingers trace
the wrong-us that your biro etched. Idleness
was always the occupation of corner-boys.
Now it’s, Oh, the middle distance, that liminal state,
in development can be useful. Fair enough, you say,
but the children, they already knew.

First published in The Cormorant Broadsheet, edited by Una Mannion, Sligo, 2019

Shannon Fields

A stoat slithered below
the surface of the water,
heron stalked the shallows.
The woman who exercised
every day wore a niqab.
Her husband counted
repetitions, smoked
and eyeballed locals
he didn’t trust. Who was it
that brushed their dog’s coat
by the edge of the canal?
I thought it was a sheep carcass
at first. A fluffy massacre
all the way to the bridge.
Then the river rose so high
it spilled onto the footpath,
reclaiming the land, the trees.
They got their toes wet.
Síonna, breadth of wisdom,
more than a god, I gave you my time,
my mornings for a year and more.
But I’m afraid. I passed unnoticed.

First published in The Ogham Stone, supervising editor Dr Carrie Griffin, University of Limerick, 2019

Something

About a borough nestled by the artery’s banks
and a castle raised to resist eight hundred years of rain,
disarming native airs found fished from their river
and words as accompaniment plucked among the reeds.

A worn armchair in a shared rental and I fearful as silver
light beyond net curtains turns to night and on the breeze
the warmth of a lonesome crowd whispers across the street –
locked in, house measures and mournful melodies.

Epic crumbling estates, the shock of the kingfisher’s hue,
two towns where tenements stood and redbrick terraces
from within shimmer blue, hoofs clatter cobbled Georgian symmetry;
and the ancient, enduring creatures of their own for gotten city.

First published in The Ogham Stone, Supervising editor Tim Groenland, University of Limerick, 2022