Poetry Programme
RTÉ’s Poetry Programme discussed a selection of literary journals that included The Penny Dreadful, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Bus, The Stinging Fly and gorse.
Everything I write begins in a notebook
To celebrate the publication of Claire-Louise Bennett’s first collection of stories, Pond (The Stinging Fly Press), we’re sharing her reading from the essay ‘I Am Love,’ (gorse no. 2) filmed at our launch last year.
Subcritical Tests
By Ailbhe Darcy & S.J. Fowler.
TRUMPET
I want to believe there’s something in the bunker,
in the cowslip’s bell. stockpiles of shivery paper,
caffeine, nicotine and romance. and not just romance.
onion
juice and doubled tongues for the scurvy and
amnesia.
I want a double ration: The world to keep going;
the world to end in my time. I don’t want to miss it.
Medicine
By Darragh McCausland.
At eight forty-five in the evening, I stood at the hatch window of the medicine room, doling out little paper cups of pills to the loose queue of patients in the corridor. It was fifteen minutes from the end of my shift, my fourth twelve hour shift in a row. I was jacked tired. Of course, Gerry noticed.
‘No snoozing on the job Nurse Nally. What if the right pill goes to the wrong man and the wrong pill goes to the right man? What then?’
A Fine House
The Irish & Their Bungalows by Oliver Farry.
I was two years old when I saw what was going to be our new house, and it is one of my earliest memories. We were living in rented accommodation—an old victorian terraced house—in my father’s native village, Ballymote, County Sligo, and by the time my parents had managed to scrabble together the means for a mortgage there were three children—my newly born younger brother, my older sister and me. One Sunday afternoon in November, my mother’s aunt and uncle were visiting from Mullingar and my father offered to show ‘Uncle Mick’—a man we all loved because of his amazing ability to perfectly replicate the sound of almost any farm animal—the new house that was then under construction. I must have canvassed strongly to be brought along, probably by threatening to cry, and I was allowed come.