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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.

Limbed

By David Hayden.

A journey of light ending and ending and everything feeding off this, in one way or another, but the light just arriving, warm and buttery, letting us see; shapes, shadows, colours and a cottage and a field and a cottage garden with cornflowers, eye blue, heartsease, winking violet, delphiniums, risen purple, primroses, tooth yellow, upgazing, sightless, calendula stars, thyme, tight green spicing curls, and daisies, scattered wings, open palms; over all, fattening bees swing boozily in the warm air. A man or a woman stands smiling once upon the day. All the motion of the living world above and the worm-turned earth below and the breath of life rushing from warm to cool, from damp to dry, adds up to a seeming stillness, a closeness to silence in which one may be wise, be idiot, be almost nothing. If not for the faint tapping, heard and then not heard, and then the man—it is a man—turns to the sound, which is where it is not, and turns again, to where it is not, and turns again; but the knocks have stopped.

Live in the Living Room

Please join us at the dlr Lexicon library in Dun Laoghaire on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd March for the Live in the Living Room book fair, as part of the Mountains to Sea/dlr Poetry Now Festival.

ten thousand tiny spots

By Sheila Armstrong.

In the city, there are ten thousand thousand mouths. But a mouth is a terrible thing. A gash across the skin; a slit that has been widened and then healed so that two lumps of scar tissue trace the wound on either side. And inside, inside some instinct has caused lumps of calcium and carbon and bone to protrude out, sprouting in some awful facsimile of symmetry; each lump pointing upward, anchored with a cruel hook below the jaw, their surfaces blunted and ground down into flat planes that crush and grind.

April Truth

By Ilya Zverev, translated from the Russian by Anna Aslanyan.

Apart from the story with the deck, there were a few other significant achievements. Leo Makhervax, a crazy young naturalist, was shown a picture of a little bird cut out of a Polish magazine, and told that it’s a zoological mystery, a Papio nightingalis, which can be found in the south of Galápagos Islands only, and sings in a man’s voice.

‘Galápagos Islands are generally full of surprises,’ Leo said. ‘This is the only place where you can find giant tortoises.’