Sheila O'Hagan

September the Fourth

At four am today my lover died.
He didn't reach for me or call my name,
Dreaming he would waken by my side,
But turned his face and shuddered as some shame
Or haunting shook him and his mouth gave cry
To a portentous and unearthly pain.

Between darkness and dawn that cry of pain
And nothing warm has touched me since it died.
An ethos of cold starlight I can't name
Possessed my love while he lay by my side,
Something strange, unhuman, born of shame.
He had not said goodbye, called out or cried.

Some ghost or spirit left his mouth that cried
Out and he'd gone from me, had gone in pain
Into an alien world, yet as he died
He drew my spirit to him, gave her my name.
Something possessed him as he left my side.
His face was turned away as though in shame.

I cupped his absent face and murmured shame
To that which claimed him, for my love had cried
As though some shady trafficking in pain,
Some curse or Judas-kiss by which he died
Unknowingly in another's name,
Had come to term as he lay down beside

The one he loved. Perhaps lying by his side,
Fearful in sleep, I had called up that shame
And he, my love, unknowingly had cried
Out in redemption for another's pain,
As though a chosen victim. My love died
Because some curséd spirit took his name.

For he was loved and honoured in his name
And I, as I lay sleeping by his side
Guarding his innocence, knew of no shame.
On the stark cusp of dawn and dawn he cried
Aloud so strange my heart burned cold with pain.
Not one warm thought has touched me since he died.

Still I call his name. All hope has died.
My unspent love's my pain. I have not cried.
Such is winter's shame, all's bare outside.

Carol V. Davis

Are You Ever Going Back to Russia

friends ask in a tone precise as a cut to the tongue.
The unimagined life the only one acceptable.
But I could talk about the Petersburg canals,
the seduction of them. Even the muck and filth
of the water, contaminated fish only
the starving would eat.
How the first year I shied away from the crates
fish sellers stack on street corners.
By the second I began to stroke the translucent scales,
convinced I could restore life.
Then I started to eat the nameless fish,
working my way around the bulging eyes,
down the length of the bony body.

The canals took up residence, throbbing through my veins,
careening around hipbones, lodging behind knees.
I stole their bridges; hung their ornaments in my closet
for special occasions: gold-winged sphinxes,
lions with curled manes guarding the Griboyedev Canal.
An iron-muscled boy breaks in a fiery horse
at the Anichkovsky Bridge over the Fontanka Waterway,
The double-headed eagle wings back two centuries,
through assassinations of the tsars and the city's name changes:
St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and back again.

I hung the wrought iron filigree of Troitsky Bridge
from my waist like a belly dancer, the carved angels
gathered up as earrings to adorn me.
If these icons could protect this city, they could save me too.
This is how it begins, even before you adopt Russia as your own.
The bleached bark of birches stretches along the railway to Moscow,
the branches wave blessings like priests swinging incense
where once mothers waved their last good-byes as sons were sent to gulag.
Old men trudge along the tracks trailing small carts burdened with potatoes.
All they need for a half year of winter. Sustenance enough for their beliefs and mine.

Martin Dyar

In There

The swollen mare, an animate hillside dolmen,
was the warmest thing in the field.
In the rain we approached her
with the vet who would insert his arm
into the tight cave of her life,
under her tail, in there, where I imagined
tongues of Braille-flesh spoke things on his hand
that my parents paid him to translate.

And I could not imagine her insides as dark.
I thought there had to be something there,
clearer than daylight, the stuff and the place
so profound to be said of, life comes from.
She groaned but stood still, an inconvenienced
yet tolerant oracle in our inquiring midst.

Sunk to his shoulder in hot equine withinness,
the vet fixed his eye on the distance and read.
And then, the check-up complete, his sheathed arm
glistening with the grease of horse health,
he smoked and spoke to my parents.

With the sight of the mare's soaked oak neck 
big veins there like suede worms,
my eight-year-old mind pulsed,
her mane of treacle laces, her bulbous inky eyes,
maternal in ways that made me feel safe and sad.

Drizzle drifted through
where steam from her body met
our visible breaths,
two clouds of creaturely presence
diffusing together in February light.

Pleased, we descended the hill,
my ankles weak upon the hoof craters,
the Lilliputian castles of manure
unmade by Mayo weather; the rain
falling steadily upon
the ocean of sympathy that was
that sacred word,  foal.

Aidan Rooney Céspedes

Mongomery
Was the one repeat in our school that year.
Kept to himself. Came and went. Said nothing.
What are they like, I asked once, shifting gear
in the dip of Bessmount Hollow to bring
to bring myself alongside him the last stretch
to his house, all uphill beneath great trees
jackdaws made a racket in. Pretty much
like yours, he said, though shifting them's a breeze.

We hit a disco outside Aughnacloy.
And who might yous be when yous are at home,
these ones asked, their skirts awful summery
for the night that was in it. They had the foam
moustache of fresh pints licked off our lips, boy
za boys, before we could say Montgomery.