The Hysterectomy Tree

by Mona Lynch -

The girls stood around the hospital bed,

“We bought you a plant in a pot.”

Discharged, I took it to the fertile soil.

Gifted it a mulch of fallen leaves,

Covered it in its warm blanket and waited.

Slowly, my Magnolia Stellate responded

to the warm-hearted sun, the loving moon.

Pulled upwards by the sky, it began to sprout

star shaped flowers, delicate petal-like tepals,

they came even before its leaves.

A dwarf, a treasure with a low profile.

A haven for finches and sparrows.

A friend of the glitzy Cherry.

Its stars lead us out of Winter

into Spring.

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Mona Lynch graduated from UCC with an MA in Creative Writing in 2018. She is a poet, a short story writer and memoirist. Her work has been published in the Irish Examiner, The Echo, The Holly bough, and the Quarryman. While working with Travellers in Cork prison, she produced a book of stories and poetry which is in use in their literacy classes. She has been awarded a Munster Literature Centre Mentoring Fellowship.

Rembrandt’s ‘Christ on the Cross’ 1631

A Café in Mullingar

by Jimmy O'Connell -

Howard Jones’ ‘No one is to blame’

pipes through a café in Mullingar

in the beat and thrust of electronified

syncopation. Am I the only one here

stopping for coffee and a blueberry muffin,

reflecting on Rembrandt’s painting

of a sun-deprived, grey-jaundiced

Jesus nailed to a pitch-singed cross

of cheap carpentered wood? Where within

the frame of shrouded silence he realises

his own abandonment, his fear-paralysed

eyes and gnarled screaming mouth tasting

the anguish of hope lost; this same cry

unheard in the agonised etching in an earlier

self-portrait wherein we too become

the Dutchman who has surely painted

the symbol of man as artist forsaken

between speech and dumbness, between

a God absent and the brittle belief in a

rolled-back stone and an empty tomb.

His Christ hangs bereft at our casual forgetfulness,

our walled-out emptiness now brimmed

with desires unfulfilled, and spent treasure

wasting. Is he with us now watching out

for Summer Sales and supermarket trolleys,

this café filling with shoppers and wandered-souls,

heedless of piped music in relentless loop?

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Jimmy O’Connell was born in Dublin. He is a graduate of UCD. Jimmy has been writing and performing his work for many years in the Irish Writers Centre, Sunflower Sessions and other venues. His poetry has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Stepaway Magazine, Flare 7 & 10, and Poetry for a New Ulster among others. A collection of his poetry Although it is Night was published by Wordonthestreet in 2013. He has recently published his first novel, Batter the Heart. He is at present working on a play based on the life of Margaret Cusack, The Nun of Kenmare.

Asleep-Awake

by Mandy Beattie -

My eyelashes flutter and flatline crescent-moons on crests of cheeks

behind iris-lids is sky inside a pearl-mussel a swirling ocean

swell pitching me deeper, deeper, deeper until I am skinless-skein

and silver umbilicus-ectoplasm from The Cup Bearer I track Ptolemy

to waltz past stones of sleep to swoop and soar I am a Sky-Traveller

in a Starship The Plough’s my jib and I fly elbow to elbow with fluttering wings

I trail mountain folds, isobars, snow caps and seeds, air-swim

over oceans and niblets of sand I am a wind-horse

weaving among clusters of gypsophila with star-petals in my hair

I shadow the Big Dipper to the North Star as I cartwheel around

The Northern Cross a giant harp strums my skinless-skein

and silver umbilicus-ectoplasm and I forward roll to Andromeda to foxtrot

with El Morya and Merlin on a magic carpet through the maw

of the Milky Way until fingers of light edge around bare bones and Saturn’s

curtain rings and Orion's Belt is the launch-pad through the veil

of thin-air when the long and short hand siphons me back into bones

my heart the drum beat of a Shaman and alchemy

as my bones uncurl and unfurl from its question mark — When

will it be, ‘As Above, So Below?’

Published in The Haar, 2021

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Mandy Beattie’s poetry is a tapestry of stories & imagery rooted in people and place, often with an element of other-worldliness. Her poems have been published in: Wordpeace, Poets Republic, Dreich, Wee Dreich, The Haar, Purple Hermit, Wordgathering, The Clearance Collection, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, Marble Poetry Broadsheet, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Book Week Scotland and The People’s Poem of Scotland.