The trouble was, he’d never counted on her love dying. At first he didn’t believe it. Assumed it was a mood, a temporary sulk. Reached for her hand, she pulled away, and he grumbled good-naturedly: ‘Ah sweetie, stop teasing.’ ‘I’m not teasing,’ she said kindly but distantly. ‘Yeah, right.’ Then a week later, feeling a Read More
Alert, morning sharpened by pre-breakfast sun you turn under orange descents foretelling in rowans. Pathed ginger, bright past crocosmia flames, thrown at this garden’s end. Monitoring summer’s last breath, you skinny in – amber, aware. © Beth McDonough</blockquote >
She’d been hit, and laid on the verge. Slinging her dead weight round the shoulders for a two mile walk to the cottage that drew stares, her head walloping this and that way, my hands held her paws at peace. Under the hedge all summer she suffered the usual. Her snarl deterred nothing. Beetles decided Read More
It’s nobody’s fault that shifting tectonic plates once split this kingdom, blessed one half at birth with coal and a black economy. And who is to blame if fortunes also shift, slide, luck gets all mined out; only shadows are left now and dust trapped in the fault-lines. @Eleanor Livingstone
Is that love on the tip of the tongue of the river, never too wounded to care for the wounded, singing the single-flowered clubrush to sleep like a prodigal daughter returned from the deep, raising the black-hearted ravens as though they were kith, having a fling, now and then, with an agate or freshwater fish Read More
By the time I come down amongst the trees around the house, the last reflected daylight in the west has faded to uniform grey beyond their branches, and the stream which feeds the big pond is loud over the stones. Still air, dimming and thickening. The light has gone completely where the boughs of the Read More
“Before I Knocked” – the title is from a Dylan Thomas poem – focuses on three images from the past: a postcard sent from California to Belfast in 1931; a photograph of two British soldiers in Jerusalem during World War II; and a family snapshot taken on an Irish beach in 1954. The essay unravels/imagines Read More
I know you your face like a pool of leaves your long hands that way you have of speaking in many quiet, wayward tongues. Grass, rivers, vole-fur – when you fall you fall from grace into more grace and if the sun gets too close if its light blinds you hide from us, in the Read More
We shared Octoberfuls tasty with appletea under tangerine trees. I asked what he did. Ah The Royal Bank pays me, but I source old harpsichords which I restore. Some need me for years. I play them then pass them to others who love them. My passion. That’s who I am. So here’s to that man Read More
A woman, a certain kind of woman, loves a red dress. She seizes upon it; she is not afraid. She selects the dress from rack upon rack of dresses, takes it up in her hands, in her arms, tries it on and keeps that dress for her own. This woman, this certain kind of woman, Read More