Eoin Cassidy is a second year Creative Writing student in University of Galway. He is a 21 year old male with a great love for writing. He is from Killybegs, County Donegal, Ireland. His poems seek to explore his dialect and the place that surrounds him.
CARLUCCIO’S, EALING, BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Antonio,
big smiling man with the puffball hair
it’s almost like we’re on first name terms
you rich old mushroom hunter
how I might adoro your pomodoro
you master of corporate rusticity.
Your customers worked all week for this
if they want to sit down
they’re going to have to stand up
eat in
eat out
it’s all been worked out
black shirts
white shirts
it’s so cold tonight
your red and gold wrappings and trappings
your vibrantly green beans
your snowy mozzarella
your tanned, smiling staff melt my cynicism
100g at a time.
You dug up a good one.
Sooner or later
we’ll bore of your flavours
all the window dressing
your one-stop Italy-to-go
but somewhere
as long as there are forests
there will be mushrooms.
John Lanyon lives in the Cotswolds. He works as an organic gardener, linguist, musician, and writer. Having failed his English Literature O Level, he came to love literature through reading it in French and German. He writes about art, the body, childhood, society, nature, the spirit of places, the secret lives of words.
Casey Jarrin is a poet, painter, and educator whose writing appears in Irish, UK, and US journals (Banshee, Abridged, Washington Square Review, Belfield Literary Review, Banyan Review, Buzzwords, Grand Journal). She’s received the York, Goldsmith, and Fingal Poetry Prizes, been on the Bridport shortlist, and performed as a featured poet at Lime Square and the Nuyorican Poets Café. A Jewish-Catholic atheist raised in New York who’s since lived in Dublin and Minneapolis, she received her PhD in modern literature/film, taught at Macalester College for several years, and is founder-director of Live Mind Learning. She’s now completing her debut collection, The Naked Dinner. Website: www.caseyjarrin.com
Retired and living in Orkney, Huw comes from a line of poets in the Welsh bardic tradition, though he denies ever having worn a druidic robe. His work has appeared in ‘Acumen’ and ‘Tears in the Fence’, and his debut pamphlet, ‘The Art of Counting Stars’, was published in 2021.
Tonnie Richmond is a retired local government officer who has spent the last couple of decades as a volunteer archaeologist, working on digs in Cheshire and on Orkney. Many of her poems reflect her archaeological experiences and love of Orkney. She has had poems published by Yaffle, Dragon/Yaffle, Driech, Leeds Trinity University and others. She is currently working on her first collection.
Sort
What sort are you?
Tea or coffee?
Victoria Sponge,
or a rich fruit cake?
Dark chocolate Bounty,
or a Milky Bar kid?
Would you choose
a bag of lemon drops,
or a sherbet dip?
Would you prefer
a large gobstopper,
or an Extra Strong Mint?
Milk Tray or Green & Blacks?
Are you a suck it and see type,
or a gobble and go individual?
Do you think birds of a feather
flock together, or rather that
opposites attract?
Maybe you are
a Foxes Glacier Mint?
Me? I’m a Licorice Allsort
Sarah is interested in words, words for well being, people and nature and the connections between these elements. She has poems in print journals, anthologies and on line.
Coventry
Invented;
bicycles,
jet engines,
black cabs,
roads shaped like rings.
A brief annotation;
a sad association -
Women putting cats into bins.
David is a novelist, freelance writer for Slash Film, and radio presenter. David lives in Coventry with his wife, Aslan the cat and a beard. David’s wife once asked him if he’d write about how great she was, and David said he would because he specialized in short fiction. Despite that, they’re still married.
Starless
Set to amuse an empress of India, diamonds are
not even fruit – but flush with satsumas
alone, try getting someone to love you for
money. Made in the whirl of a stellar
ballet, tangelos yield to the cut of my Japanese
blade. The crush of my hand makes me wonder
how diamond and orange are brought to our shores –
and what old blood we spill into new Mason jars.
PATRICK CHAPMAN has published nine poetry collections since 1991. Other books include a novel, three volumes of stories, and a guide to the work of David Cronenberg. His next poetry collection, The Following Year, appears from Salmon in 2023. He lives in Dublin.
Cumbria native Terri Metcalfe moved to Ireland with her Mayo born partner and two children in 2019. From a down-to-earth, tools of the practical trade family, she only recently in her forties thought it acceptable that she might be a serious poet. Terri has endured several decades of mental and physical ill health which she draws on in her work. She has been published in Abridged, A New Ulster, Green Ink Poetry, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis and Skylight 47, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the Open Window 2023 mentorship programme and will be a featured reader at the 20th anniversary of Over The Edge Literary Events held in Galway city library this coming January.
Dearly Beloved
This poem is
gathered here
to celebrate
the matrimony
of Couplet and Tercet.
This poem is not to be entered into lightly.
Thus, we need to confess
that Couplet hath played
fast and loose
with a sestet, thrice,
and Tercet hath also succumbed
to the tenderness of carnal union
with a haiku, in an act of confused
orientation. Nonetheless,
as a measure of forgiveness
and a certain degree of apathy,
if no-one can show just cause
or impediment, I proclaim
Couplet and Tercet
to be a quintain.
John has recently moved to Cambridge (voluntarily) from Worcestershire, and writes poems (involuntarily) because he feels he has to or something bad might happen. He is a popular (reportedly) performer and has published a collection The Boy Who Couldn’t Say His Name.
