A January Haircut

By Thomas McCarthy -

With songs we come into this world and my own

Best memories are my mother’s attempts to sing:

My shrivelled hair falls on the black cape

Of a barber’s shop, wiry silver and grey of time

That has passed over the top of my dry head

To fall now, as leaves devoid of sap escape

From the embrace of an otherwise sound Eglantine

Or Willow; except that after leaves have fled

From the modest tree that first gave them life

They at least contain the hope of another Spring.

We are humans with one Spring and one

Increasingly stretched-out Autumn. Here, this young

Armenian barber is the one true Spring

I can offer at this hour in late January –

Father of two, one child with a gift of poetry,

The other learning Irish songs, and willing to sing.

---

Thomas McCarthy is an Irish poet, novelist, and critic, born in Cappoquin, County Waterford, Ireland. He attended University College Cork where he was part of a resurgence of literary activity under Sean Lucy and John Montague. He worked at Cork City Libraries for many years. He was a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa in 1978-79, and International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994-95. He has edited The Cork Review and Poetry Ireland Review, and has published seven collections of poetry with Anvil Press Poetry, London, including The Sorrow Garden, The Lost Province, Mr Dineen's Careful Parade, The Last Geraldine Officer, and Merchant Prince.

His last two collections, Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019), were published by Carcanet Press, UK. The main themes of his poetry are Southern Irish politics, love, and memory. He is also the author of two novels; Without Power and Asya and Christine. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, The Alice Hunt Bartlett, The O'Shaughnessy Award, and the Annual Literary Award of The Ireland Funds. His monograph "Rising from the Ashes" tells the story of the burning of the Carnegie Free Library in Cork City by crown forces in 1920 and the subsequent efforts to rebuild the collection with the help of donors from all over the world. His prose-book, Poetry, Memory and the Party, was published by Gallery Press in early 2022.

Paris or Varykino

By Michael Durack -

They’d always have Paris or Varykino,

Lara and Zhivago or Ilsa and Rick

up on the big screen, we down below

in the darkened parterre, the warm glow

of compromised love washing over us from exotic

(remembered) Paris or Varykino.

Mind-hopping from Moscow to Morocco,

an ecstasy of escapism from the humdrum domestic

to the big screen from our seats down below.

For Bergman, Bogart, Christie, Sharif & co

had little in common with a Kathleen and Mick;

they’d always have Paris or Varykino

while we had Ballybunion, Salthill or Sligo.

But hold on a minute, here’s the trick:

between the big screen and down below

is merely a matter of scale. Picture show

and reality trade on the same emotions; the magic

of love means we’ll all have Paris or Varykino

whether up on the big screen or here down below.

---

Michael Durack lives in Ballina, Co. Tipperary. His poems have appeared in publications such as The Blue Nib, Skylight 47, The Cafe Review, Live Encounters, The Poetry Bus, The Stony Thursday Book, The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Ireland Review. With his brother Austin he has recorded two albums of poetry and guitar music, The Secret Chord (2013) and Going Gone (2015). He is the author of a memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (Limerick Writers Centre 2016), and two poetry collections, Where It Began (2017) and Flip Sides (2020) published by Revival Press.

A Poem for the Poolbeg Lighthouse

By Emma Jo Black -

why do you look at me like that

with your tall silence with your one red eye

the wind bowing in frustration to your stare to make a walkway of itself on which to sneer at the tide

watch a seagull pick the feathered flesh fresh from its kin twin mouths devouring a beak rotated back

how do you follow me to shore with your metal song

your blood shape in my sky

“fresh tears coming out of my eyes this morning”

laughs the old man on the pier his grin cut deep by the dark blade of the water

how dare you recognise my face looking down from above with your rust-covered gaze

I’m not lonely like you

in fact, I’m leaving

try chasing me down in this parched autumn mist I won’t turn back

as you split through the horizon I won’t cry not for the weight of the sky on your stooped silhouette

I’ve no tears for a lighthouse

lest the barnacles stuck to my skin

fossilise in their salt lest the barnacles stuck to my skin

bring us close, you and I

---

Emma Jo Black is a Paris-born poet and visual artist of Irish, French and American nationalities. They bridge seas through poetry and cultural anthropology, investigating migration paths and experiences of liminality. Jo hosts events at Spoken Word Paris and was recently published in The Galway Advertiser’s Vox Galvia and Lothlorien Poetry Journal vol. 6.

They have worked with indigenous leaders in Colombia, left stray feathers in Berlin and stalked the streets of Dublin as a vampire. Their stage performances combine poetry, physical theatre and drag in order to celebrate the queer and the unknowable in each of us.