Blood Brothers
We dragged you from a yellow house,
over to my family home, passing
potholes that held secrets of stolen
breath and silence.
We poured you red wine in my mother’s
wine glass and unrolled you a yoga mat,
the bends
of spines and twists of waists
were knives that carved pumpkin-eyed
slits
onto our fingertips, to spell
iron-bound pacts
of black leather jackets, wide-eyed
dances.
How far can one person stretch before
they snap?
You were the gnarled toe bent
in a shoe a size too small. A few days
earlier your father was found
floating in heaven. I always said
October
felt like something I couldn’t put my
finger on,
bright grey days that pushed the light away.
Mí
Eyes widen at the window
breezed wind whips
over long green grass
songful burst whisked up
only to echo away
Hazily the sky took on a sudden thirst
of crisp light peach
once I watched you tiptoe
through
trespassed fir trees
like bottle
cleaners in a sink
the gluggy suck and blow
of suds,
a tidal storm twists glass
clean.
Then a tractor bounces past
a
hum of gravel crunch and puff
Inside, a lone tulip
mouths its way towards
Summer, passing on a float
freedom,
her cheeks a frigid blue-pink
birds become bass
drum
for early morning eyelid
blink
you lay next to me nose-up on pillow,
as a shrew bending its way through clay
your skin a blanket of toned
milk cream
thin curling seabed kelp
are
dark hairs knotted on chest
legs rooted into forested trunk
while the sound of season
outside
mirrors a rhythm like this one
choral singsong pounds the ebb
and swirl of inhale and
exhale.
The changing pulse of two
everlasting beats
Spinning Class
Again winks the first touch of Winter
frost. I mount the bike, jockey
leg extended tight
away from imaginary horse, down a hill,
spinning spokes are sounds of
cobwebs spun into silver cloak. The fir
trees stand tight, forested as
pencils wedged in a clear plastic case,
maybe some giant sneezed frost as
far-reaching cloud, or a baker
dusted icing-sugar over their spruces, the
bike spins on along,
narrowly escaping ditches cramped with
brambles growing in and out
and up and over; pin and needling its way
in ragged dance,
thorny fingers trace slender curvatures to
carve iced morning air, one
stem reaches out to pluck me in, entangle
me down to underworld
ditch. The sun is a blind pulled tight over
eyelids, dazzled, down I
focus to a brown puddle that conceals the
first quiet glimmer of ice,
gently resting like a frozen square of
cling film, floating down and
melting like some candy floss to warm
tongue, the pace uplifts and I
keep spinning up a country hill that makes
tree-logs of tiring thighs,
before, I, breathe, breathe, spin past a
herd of sheep huddled in a
sheltered corner, their skin the colour of
murky ground beneath. They
seem to look at me. The bike sluices
onwards through the air,
passing the priest's house wrapped in
leafless tree's embrace, their
prickly branches vesselled like lungs on
the horizon, a quick error in
the change of brakes and suddenly
my legs are like puppets, momentarily,
dangling all limp and pokey, an
octopus trying the pedals, or an
upside-down woodlice legging its way
nowhere.
Redeeming myself back on cruise control
through air that chips away
at temples, the tip of my nose remembering
being a child with you,
spinning our way down country lanes.
You told me you felt you'd die young. Not
long after a game of Lego,
hiding from your big brother behind the leather
couch in the good
sitting-room. Above a jet white trail
slices through the morning sky,
geometrical successes delight! It cuts like
a saw through the faint
smell of roast chicken escaping from an old
farmhouse in the distance,
potholes empty and fill like molluscs in
the seabed, wide-eyed round
like the slow blinking eyes of cyclops, or
the lashy stare from a cow.
Faster and faster I spin, spinning bike
turns on wheels spinning, the
spokes hum like a steady sound from a snare
drum, cycling in this new
place I learn to call home.
Sunset
A hot-red pool
piled into a sea of bright cherry
gore that channelled its way
into
that bloody sunset in Skibbereen
then a broken egg-yolk
turned and
churned
quick hit
hardened splat
coagulating its way towards me
a window-pane stood between us
tapped heavy
with handprints heralded
the unknown
fingering their way feverishly up
and down
whispering an amplified hysteria of their own,
a child's palm planted in washable paint
oh the noise of it all
it smouldered my
eyes blurred drunk
my double vision the genesis of a sunken day
like yellow butter spread ablaze
veiny clotty clouds
wet the bed
in its own blinding light
an arsenal of charged dreams
finds its way to a fine-pink
neon line
to rest electric
above the windmills
that moved like magmatic
scarecrows
cartwheeling deformed
radioactive
blazing orange
to settle
down
below
where’ll we go
Looking at you I wonder where’ll we go
towards half-light, orange, licking the bay of Galway
I promise to search for you in its afterglow.
To Fanore where time seems to quander slow,
with waves that slurp and sting in spray
looking at you I wonder where’ll we go.
On Flaggy Shore that time the sky drank dark and indigo,
gripping your fingers under a dinner-table, like devil’s
play
I promise to search for you in the afterglow.
Between us there grew a steady, swelled tempo,
piercing low, with the blue of your eyes that sang of the
way,
oh looking at you I did wonder where we'd go.
In that sitting room we knew of feelings powerless to throw
where grá grew around embers of birth through
break, decay—
I'll promise to follow you in the afterglow.
You said you’d count the minutes, or was it days, no?
Until you find me again, waiting, someday
looking at you I wonder where we’ll go
Oh! I promise to search for you in that afterglow.
Canteen
the cupboard opens to
coffee-stained cups
heaped
together fleeing as sheep
their cream turned murky around the rims
a nineties pop song teases its way
through diluted morning air
softening the already-softening edge of a balloon
for the woman who pledged
no more than forty
the other day
a drop of milk rests drunk
in the village that’s the multicultural fridge
stacked pots of cream cheese
spills a moulded bridge
on soup carton bungalows
unclad bricks tomatoey-red
all not to be borrowed
à la canteen château
a sliced avocado slouches
in a plastic-filmed sac
hoping to be
the boat rowed away
Áine Rose is an artist and poet from Donegal,
Ireland. She has a bachelor’s degree in Speech & Language Therapy from
Trinity College, Dublin (2017) and a postgraduate fine-art degree from the
Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Clare (2021). She has been awarded the
Emerging Artist Bursary Award from Arts & Health funded by Irish Health
Service & Irish Arts Council (2022). Her work has appeared in Morning Fruit, Icarus, A New Ulster & Irish Arts Review. Website / Instagram
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