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Our Take Me Home issue.
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Abridged 0__40:Take Me Home
CROWS ON THE WIRE:Graphic novel available as a free downloadable app for iPads and Tablets from September 2014
Crows on the Wire App_Ad.indd 1 16/06/2014 13:10
Michael Gira 5
Paul McMahon 6
Olaf Brzeski 7
Adam White 8
Joanna Grant 10
Adrian Ghenie 11
Gerald Dawe 12
Pieter Hugo 13
Emma McKervey 14
Maroula Blades 15
Adrian Ghenie 16
Gerard Smyth 18
Pieter Hugo 19
Jennifer Matthews 20
Pieter Hugo 21
Benjamin Mitrofan-Norris 22
Olaf Brzeski 23
Stephanie Conn 24
Jane Robinson 25
Adrian Ghenie 26
Helena Nolan 28
Pieter Hugo 29
Barbara Morton 30
Adrian Ghenie 31
Claire Savage 32
Pieter Hugo 33
Daniel A. Nicholls 34
Olaf Brzeski 35
Marion Clarke 36
Adrian Ghenie 37
Janet Shepperson 38
Adrian Ghenie 40
Peadar O’Donoghue 42
Pieter Hugo 43
Joanna Grant 44
Pieter Hugo 45
Aoife Mannix 46
Olaf Brzeski 47
Michael Dineen 48
Cover Images:
Olaf Brzeski; Adrian Ghenie; Pieter Hugo
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I’ll Go There, Take Me HomeEditorial
What did the virgin say when he sold his innocence?
What did the dead man say when he whispered in my ear?
Did I know who I was when I opened up your door?
Do you have the right to lay your hands on me?
Is this place a home that will shelter you or me?
Is this world a place where anything can be known?
Am I free to describe what my imagination denied me?
Were we born from a mother whose compassion exceeded her greed?
Do you love the girl who left you there to bleed?
Do you love the boy who forced you to your knees?
And where is the choice when my freedom’s described by my fear?
Am I so alone that I can’t even read the mirror?
Did your blood run dry when you looked at yourself in my eyes?
Was I wrong to steal what even a saint would despise?
Am I alone in this room if I’m holding myself in my hands?
When my poison blood dies, then where will our memory be?
I will go there, take me home
Take me home
Published by Young God Publishing administered outside of North America by Mute Song.
Used by permission.
Michael Gira
abridged 0__40
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Copyright remains with authors/
artists.
abridged is a division of
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c/o Verbal Arts Centre,
Stable Lane and Mall Wall,
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Derry - Londonderry BT48 6PU.
website: www.abridgedonline.com
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email: [email protected]
We are still here, here where it is time and gravity that
we feel the most. In a purgatorial state we orientate
ourselves around the notion of escape, everything
seeming to advance toward a great mythologized
flight. But our prospects in this genetic ambition
are questionable, specifically because we are limited
to our mythologies alone. The ancient promise of a
timeless paradise plays on our minds, but here time
is all that we know. It is time itself that gives us
the sense that we are moving somewhere, waiting for
something to happen. And we wait lifetimes here for
things to happen. We know the sun, it is familiar to
us. It marks time, reminds us of its cycles, arcing
itself across the sky every day of our lives. We know
the myth of the sun and how it holds us in suspension,
though to our old eyes it seems only to draw circles
around the time-space capsule of our world. Either
way, illuminating our light-bound static, it encloses
us. The landscape leans on our senses. Though we walk
and walk, we feel our bodies weighted, rooted to the
earth. We know ourselves to be of the same stuff as
this greenery, this ground, this solid surface. That
is all we can know as we inevitably drop our knees
to the earth like magnets and knock our knuckles on
the ground, drumming as children for the comfort of a
mother. Green is the colour of movement, of time, and
of our short lives blooming on the mountain slopes.
This purgatory is an island, a sea-level microcosm
pitching itself toward the zenith. The physical aspires
to the metaphysical and fantasises the ethereal,
stretching beyond itself to the reaches of human dreams
and imaginings, but in the midday light only really
knowing the blunt weight of its own rocks in bearing
the spiked burden of its mountain peaks. This island
is our only object, its definite presence in time and
space our only certainty. Here we can remember, the
familiar geography signifying our lives to our minds
and bodies. This is the archetype of existence, and
here we exist. We have sculpted this mountain with our
circling feet and carved a history by the pressure of
our memories. This peculiar island rock coiled alone
on a singular stretch of ocean is our life paradigm.
How we exist here is all we know about how to exist
at all. In an Alcatraz of the soul we compulsively
project our memories. Purgatory is when the sensory
present cyclically aligns itself with the landscape
of the past. This is our condition as far as time
allows us to remember. It is a self-contained cycle.
We fantasize the prospective rupturing of this cycle,
an ultimate explosion into the linear and rocketing
toward a culminating oblivion, a restorative cure for
our spiritual homesickness.
But simultaneously we resist, this physical place
being, after all, the only home we have felt with
our palms and soles. Can weight imagine weightlessness
without getting dizzy-sick? The parasitic social-
self insists on its survival, valiantly resisting the
notion of its own dissolution in favour of anonymous
transcendence. Behind the rhetoric of our ideals, in
the quiet shadows of our mind we cannot but anticipate
a local homesickness, one for our familiar body and
earthliness. At the prospect of oblivion, all the little
hooks of memory tether our wills to the earth that we
insist is temporary, we ourselves being creatures of
this temporality. Even as we dream of something other,
another dimension, another colour, our dreams are
limited. This otherness is beyond our comprehension.
We can only crane our necks, look up, and move in
steepening circles along the mountain paths. In all
we are at home in our isolation, tribal in our habits,
unquestioning of our patterns of life that we follow
like water through veined rock or ravines or valleys.
They are our familial birth gifts that we customarily
accept with the ease of formula. Yet, churned by the
diverging pull of an unseen paradise against the
earthly magnetism of memory, we move through them,
collectively, as particles in liquid turmoil, washing
back and rushing forth toward the ultimate obscuring
mouth of Oblivion.
Thanks to Hugh Mulholland and the MAC Belfast for the
collaboration with the ‘I Will Go There, Take Me Home’
show curated by our own Gregory McCartney as part of
their Guest Curator programme. We were very pleased to
be able to be a part of the project. This exhibition
informed the nature of our last three issues. Thanks
also to the artists Olaf Brzeski, Adrian Ghenie and
Pieter Hugo. And special thanks to Michael Gira of
Swans who kindly allowed us to use his lyrics and base
the exhibition on one of his songs.
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Shooting Star
I spent a long time in darkness.
I had come too far, the distance ahead
too far away. I hummed
a long, silent serenade to the cats in the alley below
wailing in intercourse like children teething.
I lie here, bent like a question-mark,
under a whiskey-soaked duvet. Unkind voices
wash freely over my driftwood-skin.
I can’t shake off
the awful feeling
that it is all just a preparation,
a squaring up; nothing more
than a few encouraging jabs
to entice our frail footsteps further out
into the woods, the deserts and the seas,
where we won’t hear the sirens and the alarms
that have already been called for us. Where all our ghost-guides,
dead relatives, enemies, judges, allies, onlookers and speculators
stand hopelessly way off, too confused in the certainty of the crush
that sends us scattered towards the infinite, obliterated before perfection.
The wick simply lowered to its end, bringing its horizon in,
and like all shooting stars that blaze a trail across the sky,
is enveloped by the unfathomable darkness.
Paul McMahon Opposite: Olaf Brzeski, Breath, bone soot, 2009
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Mare Nostrumfor the captain of the Leonard Tide
Now, international regulation
on sea rescue proscribes such persons
be repatriated to the nearest port,
which meant a U-turn to Tripoli,
but some demanded I tow them
to Italy, and the whole boatload boiled over
to a frenzy when I had to refuse,
threatening to fling themselves into the sea.
Considering women and small children
were in the hold, the middle ground
was to bid them board the Leonard Tide.
Water, chocolate bars and first aid
could thus be duly administered.
Some of those we treated for pussy
bullet wounds and knife cuts, just blushed
like men showing us their private parts;
the more mouthy there raged at paying
thousands of American dollars for passage
to Europe and being abandoned
in the middle of the Med like a pail
of kittens. Evidently there’s money
to be made in promising a man
some crackpot impracticality
he has fantasized, or had put in his head.
I note Italian battleships
are henceforth patrolling the zone
in the likely event of further rescue
operations being executed.
Adam White
North-westerly course out of Tripoli.
(Re)Provision of foodstuffs and water
to the offshore rig Zagreb 1,
fifty miles (nautical, mind) off the coast
of Libya. Routine operation
really, until one of my officers
spyglassed what looked to be an agitation
of gulls over a small craft.
On consultation I gave orders
to tack and when we closed and saw
it was men hailing us with their shirts,
yelling in the unintelligible,
sent my second in command, an Egyptian,
to sound out the crew in Arabic.
Well I saw ants once, when I was a child,
eclipse a slice of apple let fall
on the front stoop of our building,
and that is what it was:
one hundred and fifty souls overcrowding
the deck of a fifty-foot wooden vessel,
and as many again squatting below
between the boards, I learned subsequently.
That they badly lacked water and food
was relayed to me, and were parched for petrol,
so adrift under a big midday sun,
and not a rudiment of navigation
nor a lifejacket amongst them.
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Mist
I ride in the back of a taxi
thinking of heaven. To the right
of the highway, an exit—
off the ramp, the funeral hall—
where my friend the farm boy from Oklahoma
who married a Korean woman saw
her father’s body burnt
before his eyes, the blackened skeleton
crushed to chips and ash while
the mourners sang. What was left
in a little box tied up neat with string.
But perhaps not all, I think--surely some
of the burning flesh drifted up and out
the chimneys in the crematorium smoke,
the fine particulates silting into the furrows
turned over with last season’s stalks,
there by the ditch where the patient beetles
roll their balls of dirt and dung and eggs,
there where the cows mull, chewing their cuds
by the lopsided sheds, there where the paddies meet
the sudden crazy crags here in this country of extremes,
that body, all those beloved bodies,
now a part of this forever, the one he watched
get burned, and him, the strange new family, and me, in my taxi, too—
Part of it all, this raw, soft early spring mist hanging
like sweet woodsmoke and cloud at dusk. Heaven.
Joanna Grant Opposite: Adrian Ghenie, Nougat 2, 2010, Oil on Canvas, 220cm x 200cm,
Collection Verdec Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp.
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Via Dolorosa‘Nobody in the world knows where I am’
John Berryman, Dream Song (355)
Gerald Dawe
Groggy with the height and wind in his ears
and, for all we know, the sound of the mother
going on at him, poor Mr. Bones decided
he’d had enough and was off, a lurid flight,
away from those who loved and in return were loved,
with no rhyme or reason why but for the busted-up bits
and pieces of the past, Mr. Bones, all heart, cried
his goodbye and was spotted only once, a ghost already,
in the resistless fall down to the river’s demented dark.
Opposite: Pieter Hugo: Casmiar Onyenwe. Enugu, Nigeria,
2008, from Nollywood series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg & Yossi Milo, New York
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Comet The Lodge
Emma McKervey
Coasting the reel of golden thread to the realm of the dead,
suspended in air from that line of faith came the inheritors of the stars;
but the windlassed fall remained unfixed,
the dark flight of meandering over-shot orbs
strobed in cosmic dust: the yellow of iron,
the violet of calcium and the splattered cadmium red
of nitrogen and oxygen- each pin pointed
mote of this ephemeral rainbow-
remained, despite disintegration,
significantly larger than an atom.
Nearing Earth these objects unspooled,
targeted in trajectory and curve of light,
the thread unguided and lost, leaving the glistering frayed remnants
to be ground into the weary clay.
Maroula Blades
Leave me alone to wallow
in my algae-green room,
narcoleptic, in a state undone.
Snow crystals melt
under the heated magnifying glass.
Spring’s arrived in a split second of time
on the metallic window ledge.
For that moment,
I am a goddess,
empowered to change the seasons.
The Bunsen is raging,
a Terpsichorean flame fans out.
Caloric waves catch my eyes as I stoop,
listening to the hiss of water.
Intervention is vital until
the sun appears to thaw the silence.
Dishevelled I wait to embrace the warmth.
Keloidal tissue forms in the mind.
Hibernation eludes me unlike the bear.
I am not free like you, robin
in this cedar tree before me
with half a slug pinched tight in your beak,
or the playful black Labradors,
running in snow coats that
flake off like transient moments.
Gaiety bound to nature’s form.
Out on the waterfront,
the sea kicks in twilight.
Three orange buoys
pivot in a snow-laden sea.
The dark enters and straddles itself,
a shadowy void appears.
Grey smog smothers.
The cold has claws,
snow-ice forms again on the window sill.
I cave in,
as the neon tube-lights flicker on in this room.
Overleaf: Adrian Ghenie, The Blow, 2010,
Oil on Canvas, 35cm x 65cm, Private Collection
Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp
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OXMANTOWN(Baile Lochlann – Scandinavian Homeland)
Opposite: Pieter Hugo: Chigozie Nechi. Enugu, Nigeria,
2009, from Nollywood series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York
Through Oxmantown
I walked but saw no ancient lights
or herdsman with his fattened cattle,
no trace of those who were founders
of the place, who had to cross
the watery divide, build on soft ground.
And now new blow-ins have arrived
but there is still some vestige of the days
that time works hard to obliterate.
An old Dane haunts the parish, a renegade
from the annals whose axe
broke stones on the stony road.
That Old Dane, a mad-eyed stranger
in wolfskin and a mask, came to taste
the Liffeytide in Anna Livia’s mouth
and stayed to live a second life,
perfect the art of exile, cunning, hatred.
Gerard Smyth
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Homeland Security
Opposite: Pieter Hugo:
Patience Umeh, Junior Ofokansi, Chidi Chukwukere. Enugu, Nigeria,
2008, from Nollywood series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New YorkJennifer Matthews
The highest law is home, and a man
got to protect his young. A fist can feed,
I mean, it can catch a catfish—
and the best meals, believe me, are the daddies.
Their bodies are big tongues,
they sense your hand in their nest
before it connects. Be ready,
he don’t wait for you to get at the eggs.
He strikes first, charges through mud,
jaws clamp down on your arm to draw blood.
He’ll fight—you got to be strong
enough to pull him out the river,
throw him on the bank,
fins gaspin and flappin.
Mind you, this is the old way,
but if it ain’t broke... when you’re home,
get your hammer and nail the head
to a post in the yard. Skin him,
strip insides out. Your lady can roll
his flesh in cornmeal and pepper,
fry it up for a nice family dinner.
I can nearly mark a calendar
from all them spines
lined along the fence, months
of keeping our Fridays holy.
Only problem we got now—
when it comes to night
when me and my family are all tucked in,
there’s something in the rotting stink, it calls
to them that gnaw on bones,
no matter how clean I cut him.
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Remember The Deed, Remember
A new present creeps and leaves – a wave that
takes flesh from my bones and returns it, quietly.
Every few seconds I become anew and
walk through pasts, appraising landscapes.
Remember; we turned south, from door to door.
After, we stayed sitting and
made some satisfaction
in catching different dialects;
as though nothing could remind you
that that was not your home.
A bird breaks my sight, severs skies in two, and
although unchanged, the river’s grown smaller.
Suddenly, we’re old.
Benjamin Mitrofan-NorrisOpposite: Olaf Brzeski,
Dream Spontaneous Combustion, 2008.
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The Last to Leave
I would throw up my hands
and release them all;
clutter the sky
with island parts
and name them
one by one.
Not just the Plough
but the sickle and scythe,
the pitchfork and hoe,
the threshing mill.
Yellow iris, saltmarsh, turf,
stonecrop, bracken, inland cliff.
My manx shearwater,
black headed gull,
arctic tern and eider duck,
stock dove, gannet, lapwing, nest.
Schoolhouse, cottage, garden gate,
boatman, teacher, daughter, son –
the children,
all of our children.
Cassiopeia,
what have you lost?
Oh Cephes, who ties
their daughter to a rock?
But the sun is high,
the stars have gone out
and the boat is set to tip,
so I drop the Copeland
pebbles, one by one,
and watch them sink.
Out in the yard
they are selling our lives,
and the gavel drops –
while he sits inside
stoking the fire,
fixated on the flame.
When the time comes,
he steps into the boat
without looking back –
and sits by my side,
not saying a word.
He can’t meet my eyes.
My own eyes fall
to the thick wooden slats
and the iron bolts
that keep me afloat,
above the currents
swirling on the Sound.
If only it were night,
I would look to the stars;
the stars my father named for me
sixty years ago or more,
lifting me onto his shoulders
so I could touch the sky.
Stephanie Conn
Student
Dimmed in smog of L. A.
she’d been away for so long,
the wrapped-toffee river of cars
cutting through memories,
orange groves, live oaks,
chaparral. Blood of coyotes
pierced by inventions, bright
men exploding atoms
or the next great idea.
Her shades insufficient
to shrivel the glare of history,
or was it industry, taking life,
taking on shape, machine-
driven, bulging with pistons,
circuits, the whole business.
Watching a movie of sunsets
refracted from particles:
glossed in, unable to scream.
She had felt like a woman
in a greenhouse, impossibly
large, unpeeling rose-tinted
beauty. Experiments
leap-frogging one on another,
shining P-thirty two
on her face, method lately
abandoned because of its danger
to fish in the drains,
the odd alligator.
She had felt like a wallet
left out in the weather, notes,
lips stuck together, fading
identity nibbled and bent.
Alone in the desert,
she had only one vision,
a ghost-ridden motorbike,
leaving, quiet at night.
Jane RobinsonOverleaf: Adrian Ghenie, Flight into Egypt,
2008, Oil on Canvas, 200cm x 340cm,Titze Collection.
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Benediction
Today, I am visited by an improbable moon
Cut by laser disc, so huge and whole, a wafer
Stuck like some galactic stamp
On a pale blue envelope of sky
Before slipping into the mouth of morning
Echoes of forgotten sacraments
Strong hands wrapped in heaven’s cloths
Raising the monstrance with its glassed-in heart
Gold spikes caught in the cloudy trails of
An incense burner on its shifting chains
The sky is suddenly empty
A hole cut in a page
Helena Nolan
Opposite: Pieter Hugo: Abdulai Yahaya, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana,
2010, from Permanent Error series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York
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Bode
A traveller, shy and curious, considers a childhood.
Black and white images, composed and careful,
Intricate orchestration, variations on non-colour,
At once mysteriously isolated, frighteningly crowded,
And lightened, or darkened, by the slow pass of time.
He watched constantly, waiting for something to happen.
Then he went out and walked, passing without minding
The leaning tall narrow houses, and smelling
Without tasting the cities famous café pastries.
The mind’s wheel swiftly calibrated, he sees musicians
Sit cross-legged. He imagines a viola. He hears a mandolin
On a pastis-tinted morning between rush hour and lunch hour.
Thoughts lead him to the river; he thought about counting
The bridges, thought about removing his shoes to walk
In wool-stocking soles, so clean swept were the boards.
He turns a coin. He stands motionless. The man in charge
Of the life-station tells him: No one ever jumps off at night.
A crescent moon. A winter sky. Everything overwhelms him.
Dark silhouette of a tall man in a dark blue-green loden
And equally dark black bowler hat faces with his back
To the onlooker, and also to the traveller ~ he speaks
Urgently, refers to various means of transport, requests
The facility to move precisely from one locus to another—
There may be
Flying machines.
There shall be
Riders on horseback.
Barbara MortonOpposite: Adrian Ghenie, Pie Fight Study 8, 2009,
Oil on Canvas, 38cm x 33 cm, Cyril Taylor Collection U.K.
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Spinning Shadows
Opposite: Pieter Hugo: Gabazzini Zuo. Enugu, Nigeria,
2008, from Nollywood series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New YorkClaire Savage
Bright as a fresh-minted sixpence, her swollen
form hung solemn, gleaming, radiant, as dusk
danced into the trick of night like a child caught
in faerie magick – sinfully innocent
of a landscape lit darkly by dying stars.
A silver hare flashed before me through the trees,
trailing translucent breadcrumbs in his wake as
he crossed my path but spurned all hope of helping
me home. A sharpness iced the air like a blade
of the damned – a weapon which could slice through stars.
Goggled by guarana-berry eyes, my blood
froze under the twitching gaze of suspicion.
I tripped and followed my white rabbit swiftly
through the myre of leaping shadows and compressed
space – where black dogs galloped through prison of stars.
She spun destinies from the scourge of our souls,
lightly laced them with the hearts of our desires.
Deftly, keenly, her fingers hummed misfortune;
in her eyes tumbled a universe of stars.
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god of the dead
Daniel A. Nicholls
the failed things had drawn to me
not as if I’d wanted them
burnt-up dewdrops pooling on the kitchen floor
not as if I’d chose this estate
creaking with my forebear’s weight
tried moving once
tried to construct a hideaway Ikea-square
slid in snug among the apartment rows
struck straight with bare white walls
thin walls you could drive a man through
walls that would not hold a nail
insubstantial planes
thinner than the flock of spectral crows and
the creeping leak of old ghosts
that sought out my new home
tried to be a normal woman once
to take my daily latte in the morning’s strip-mall café
put the sugar-dusty sugar cubes in
without a creamy splash
but Charon, hands-on, found me
started ferrying things across
knobby knuckles taciturn stirrer
steam-devils in the froth
I had asked them I had pleaded
finally sought to speak sense
but
you know what whispers slip back
from the lips of the abyss.
Oppisite: Olaf Brzeski, Final Weapon, ceramics, l-100cm, 2008
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Waiting for Jodo
Marion Clarke
Enveloped in the fog
of the ordinary,
amidst discontent
and idle rumour,
our existential disorder
thrives.
We strive
for the extra-ordinary,
the additional,
the supplementary,
inviting disharmony,
beckoning apocalypses.
We sit
in chaotic darkness,
hit
the Morning Bell Chant
wait
for the White Lotus
to deliver us
to the Pure Land,
just a short step from Nirvana,
where we will be extinguished.
Jodo Shinshu is a school of Pure Land Buddhism, founded in 13th century Japan
by Shinran (1173-1262)
Opposite: Adrian Ghenie, Pie Fight Study 4, 2008,
Oil on Canvas, 52cm x 52cm, Private Collection
Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp
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BABA YAGA’S CHILDREN
3.
shivering, at the turning point. The trail,
no longer crumbs but hoofprints, forks in three.
Which will you follow – the red horse of sunrise,
whose drama flares and burns triumphantly
then fizzles out – or the white horse of day,
a flat calm radiance like a stagnant pool,
or the black horse of night that drags you further
away from daylight, shriveling your soul?
To choose is risky; not to choose is death.
But in the end, all choices are the same.
You can’t get out of here until I free you;
the pounding hooves of daylight, midnight, flame
all go in circles. So do you. Your dreams
close in, you’re sleepwalking, the darkness seems
4.
to smother you. Gnarled roots and branches clutch,
sharp twigs and pine needles. Your hands are caught.
Dark channels open in your wrists. Blood seeps.
You raise your hands skywards to help it clot.
For some of you, the sky itself’s a threat,
you burrow under leaf mould, pull the roots
over your heads; you feel dark waters rise.
You choke, you drown. Some of you struggle out,
follow the glimmer from half-buried skulls,
candles in long–dead eyes among the stones.
You make for the edge of the woods, the fields beyond,
shivering as you pass my house of bones,
- not knowing it was I who dragged you out,
into the darkness. Through it. Into the light.
1.
I am the witch of legend, Baba Yaga.
You are my children, launched like spiderlings
into the hostile or indifferent air,
feeling the chill that separation brings.
Now it’s up to you to slink away,
find a vacant hearth and call it home.
Human parents who won’t understand you.
Veil the mirrors. No reflected gleam
to lure you out into the dangerous moonlight.
Stay in. Stay in. Until the piled-up days
topple and threaten to crush you with their weight.
Scuttle out from under them, crawl away
into the welcoming whispering sheltering forest.
A maze of paths; you take the one that’s nearest.
2.
You feel at ease, here in the purple shadows,
sheltered from daylight with its cold demands
until you realize it’s gone too quiet.
Where are the laughing and singing, where are your friends?
When did it get so dark? And lost, lost, lost
drips from the scratchy branches. Are those crumbs
scattered on damp pine needles round your feet,
stale leavings from your parents’ empty rooms,
dropped there to guide you out, or deeper in?
Is it a trap or a trail? It gleams in the dusk
with the dull mouldy sheen of dug-up bones.
Your guts are rattling like an empty husk.
Your screwed-up eyes are aching. Hunger drives
you on until each one of you arrives,
Janet SheppersonOverleaf: Adrian Ghenie, Air Raid, 2008, Oil and Acrylic on
Canvas, 220cm x 185cm, Weco Group AS Collection.
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Granada. (After the film by Michael Smith and Neil Bianco)
I’m drowned out by opera,
I’m listening to a foreign language,
it’s hardly child’s play -except for children,
tormenting the shopkeepers
every corner a different race
and we won them all,
‘til Tesco did.
Somebody looked after everybody,
everybody looked after somebody,
but nobody looked after nobody.
Always a dog to follow you home, feed it scraps,
Nessun Dorma and Chicken Korma,
seven shades the next day,
we all kept singing, Wops, Jocks, Paddys, Pakis,
They say all black now, or Muslim,
you know what I mean?
The dogs bark, they were born in this street,
being born is important, no control,
but best be dropped in the right street.
Racism? It’s all about arrival, the beginning of it,
not the end. We can’t fuck off home,
this is our home now.
Opposite: Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara,
Ogere-Remo. Nigeria, 2007, from Gadawan Kura’ - The Hyena
Men series II © Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape
Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New YorkPeadar O’Donoghue
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SpamI never seen a black before, says Johnny Kang,
I thought was Draculas. Some shit like that.
He learned his English from the Marines. You can tell.
Write that shit down fuck, he says, when I forget
something on one of his many lists—Dinty Moore beef stew.
Spaghetti-Os. Frozen TV dinners buy one get one free.
Orange gummy candy. I know the things I buy for him
are technically black market. But I don’t care. Sometimes
we sit and eat American junk in the lobby of the New Seoul Hotel
and he tells me things. Then this Dracula come up to me,
he says, and give me candy. Chewing gum. Spam.
We have nothing then after we get out of Seoul. Everything
blown up. Where you see roads now nothing. Bomb holes.
Big Dracula Marine, Lieutenant Colonel, sat me on his knee.
I was baby then. Fed me Spam. Budae jjigae, I try to say.
I try out new words on him. It makes him laugh. Yeah,
Army stew. Spam, hot dog, noodle, pepper paste, whatever
you got, Johnny says. Put that slice American cheese on top.
The Draculas made that. Some real good shit. Spam, I say.
I remember eating that. Long time ago way way back when.
Sometimes we don’t understand what the other’s trying to say
but we can talk about food forever and a day. Spam sandwich,
I say, we used to put potato chips in them. He’s amazed.
I can’t believe you eat weird shit like that, he says. Me? I say.
What about you? At least it was my native food! We laugh.
All over Korea I ride with my Dracula, Johnny says. He want
to take me home with him. My mama, she say no. Of course she did,
I say, why would she want to give you up? I might have been
a real American boy, he says. I used to want that too, I say.
He looks at me strange. You wanted to be real boy? Never mind,
I say. I don’t really get it either. I still eat this food and think
of him, he says, my Dracula, though I know he dead long time ago.
Makes me think of my dad too, I say. He dead long time?
Johnny asks. Yeah, I say. He dead. Long time. It’s late late at night.
The midnight murk settles in, all neon, low fog, old grease, mothballs.
I head up to bed, but not before I promise. Tomorrow. From the
base commissary. Next day. More Spam. Low salt. Candy cherry,
by which he always means orange. Razors. Right kind this time.
And don’t forget the Spam. Fuck the ration. I might just buy one extra.
For myself. And we might just slice one up and eat together, potato chips or no,
And sit. Swallowing preservatives, and salt. Tasting the past.
Don’t forget now. Write that shit down. Good night.
Opposite: Pieter Hugo: Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana,
2009, from Nollywood series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New YorkJoanna Grant
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Children Of Lir
Hailstones bounce Mexican jumping beans,
kamikaze pilots crashing against the windscreen
as we speed down the M1.
In these days of snow and sunshine,
frost on the tulips, white daffodils, flash floods,
I remember the shape changers.
Falcons and stags, story makers reborn.
The old man in the pub singing with his eyes closed,
his hands held on either side as they wind him up.
The clocks of heartbroken myth,
the earth refusing to receive a father’s smashed body.
A boulder pushed up a hill.
Lost lands, underground people, waves of invaders.
These quests wander the globe,
they belong only to the teller,
changed each time in the telling,
the reincarnation of history.
I know the accent doesn’t matter,
but still I can’t decide if this is a gift or robbery.
Why the incongruence of the guitar bothers me,
the politeness of churches as a setting for pagan butchery.
My heritage is big on revenge, not forgiveness.
The ghosts whisper this is not our language.
I have lost mine and feel all the discomfort of the changeling.
Even my name comes from the sea, the fostering of a culture.
As a small child I cried the first time my father
read me the story of the swans.
When you think about it, wasn’t it the Christian bell that killed them?
Transformed them from beautiful birds united in their suffering
into ancient withered men and women ready for burial.
Do I really want to be turned back into a human?
Aoife Mannix Oppisite: Olaf Brzeski, Snoopy, fiber glass, h-40cm, 2004
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Short Love Poem
Our love is an embarrassment of furniture,
a shuffling of newspapers,
a tick tock century of minutes.
Our love is a crossword uncompleted,
crumbs on the table,
a text message that reads
‘Be home later x’
from the atrophy of late afternoon
to growing warmth of evening.
Michael Dineen
Contributors
Stephanie Conn’s poetry has been widely published. She was
shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize, highly commended
in the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and selected for
Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. She is a graduate of the
MA programme the Seamus Heaney Centre. Stephanie is a
recipient of an Arts Council Career Enhancement Award and
recently won the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New
Writing. Her first poetry collection is due to be published by
Doire Press in Autumn 2015.
Gerald Dawe’s most recent collection, Mickey Finn’s Air is
published by Gallery Press. The Stoic Man: Poetry Memoirs and
Early Poems will appear shortly from Lagan. ‘Via Dolorosa’ is
included in Berryman’s Fate: A Centenary Celebration in Verse,
edited by Philip Coleman and published by Arlen House.
Michael Dineen is a poet from Cork based in Dublin. He works
in data analytics and has been published in Southword, The
Shop, The Penny Dreadful and Weary Blues journals. He was
selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2015.
Other interests include triathlons, Guinness, gigs and film.
Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania) graduated in 2001
from the University of Art and Design, Cluj, Romania. He has
been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums including
the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2012–2013);
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kuns (S.M.A.K.), Ghent (2010–
2011); and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest
(2009–2010). His work has been included in exhibitions at
the Palazzo Grassi, François Pinault Foundation, Venice; Tate
Liverpool; Prague Biennial; San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art; and Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, among others.
Ghenie’s work is held in a number of public collections,
including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum van Hedendaagse
Kunst, Antwerp; SFMOMA; and S.M.A.K., Ghent. In 2005,
Ghenie co-founded Galeria Plan B, a production and exhibition
space for contemporary art. He lives and works in Cluj and
Berlin. Ghenie joined Pace in 2011. Recent shows include:
Adrian Ghenie, CAC Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo
de Málago, December 12, 2014–March 8, 2015. Adrian Ghenie:
Golems, Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, June 12–July 26,
2014. Adrian Ghenie: Berlin Noir, Galerie Judin, Berlin, May 1–
June 28, 2014. Forthcoming shows include: Adrian Ghenie, 56th
International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Romanian
Pavilion, Venice, May 9–November 22, 2015. I will go there, take
me home, The MAC, Belfast, May 8–July 26, 2015.
Maroula Blades is an Afro-British poet/writer living in Berlin. The
winner of The Caribbean Writer 2014 Flash Fiction Competition
and Erbacce Prize 2012, her first poetry collection “Blood Orange”
is published by Erbacce-press. Works have been published in
Thrice Magazine, Volume Magazine, Kaleidoscope Magazine, Trespass
Magazine, Words with Jam, The Latin Heritage Foundation, Domestic
Cherry, Blackberry Magazine, Peepal Tree and other anthologies and
magazines. Her poetry/music programme has been presented
on several stages in Germany. Her debut EP-album “Word Pulse”,
Havavision Records (UK) can be found on I-Tunes and Amazon.
Olaf Brzeski, b. 1975 in Wrocław, Poland, sculptor, author of
installations and films. Between 1995 and 1995 studied at the
Faculty of Architecture of Technical University in Wrocław
and from 1995 he studied at the Faculty of Sculpture at the
Wrocław Academy of Art and Design. He defended his diploma
work in sculpture in 2000 at the prof. Leon Podsiadły’s studio.
He has shown his works at individual and collective exhibitions
both in Poland and abroad. In 2009 he was nominated to
participate in the “Spojrzenia” / “Views” (award of Deutsche
Bank Foundation) organised by the National Gallery Zacheta
in Warsaw. He lives and works in Berlin and Wroclaw. Selected
solo exhibitions include: Tender Look, Gallery Labirynth, Lublin,
2015 Everyday I split , Brno House of Arts, Brno, 2014, Amigdala,
TMOCA, Tehran, 2014, At Heart, Raster Gallery, Warsaw, 2013,
Self-seeker, Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle,
Warsaw, 2013, Shine, Gallery Arsenal, Białystok, 2013, From My
Eyes Only, Gallery Awangarda, BWA Wroclaw, 2012, The Fall of
the Man I Don’t Like, Contemporary art Gallery, Opole, 2012.
Marion Clarke’s work has been published in literary journals
including Burning Bush II and The Linnet’s Wings, as well as
international haiku titles such as The Heron’s Nest, Frogpond
and Modern Haiku. In 2013 she was longlisted in the Desmond
O’Grady Poetry Competition and was recently one of the final
twenty-two poets considered for the Seamus Heaney Award
for New Writing organised by Community Arts Partnership’s
‘Poetry in Motion’ programme. In the schools section of this
project, she received a Seamus Heaney Award for Achievement
for her poetry facilitation services to the overall winners,
Grange Primary School, Kilkeel. A lover of short form poetry,
one of her haiku received a Sakura award in the Vancouver
Cherry Blossom Festival, 2012, and her entry was shortlisted
in The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Awards for Individual
Poems, 2013. She has been twice commended in the Irish
Haiku Society’s annual competition and was awarded third
place last year. Seven of her haiku featured in Bamboo Dreams
– an anthology of haiku from Ireland published by Doghouse
Books, Tralee. Marion lives around the corner from the beach
in Warrenpoint.
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Michael Gira is an American singer-songwriter, musician,
author, and artist. He is the main force behind the group
Swans and fronts Angels of Light. He is also the founder of
Young God Records.
Joanna Grant is a Collegiate Associate Professor and
Wandering Scholar for the University of Maryland. She
teaches writing and humanities classes to American service
members deployed overseas. To date, she has taught in Japan,
Kuwait (twice), Afghanistan (twice), Djibouti, and South
Korea. The poems in this issue were inspired by her time in
the ROK (Republic of Korea).
Pieter Hugo (born 1976 in Johannesburg) is a photographic
artist living in Cape Town. Major museum solo exhibitions
have taken place at La Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,
The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée in
Lausanne, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Fotografiska in
Stockholm, MAXXI in Rome and the Institute of Modern Art
Brisbane, among others. Hugo has participated in numerous
group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, the
Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the
São Paulo Bienal. His work is represented in prominent public
and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern
Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum,
Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum
and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the
Rencontres d’Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in
2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako
African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for
the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012.
Jennifer Matthews was born in Missouri (USA) and now lives
in the Republic of Ireland, where she has made her home
for over a decade. She writes poetry and book reviews, and
is editor of the Long Story, Short Journal. Her poems have been
published or are forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, Mslexia,
Burning Bush 2, Revival, Necessary Fiction, Poetry Salzburg, Foma
& Fontanelles and Cork Literary Review, and anthologised in
Dedalus’s collection of immigrant poetry in Ireland, Landing
Places (2010). In 2012 she read at Electric Picnic with Poetry
Ireland, and had a poem shortlisted by Gwyneth Lewis in the
Bridport poetry competition. Her poetry was recognised in
both the 2013 and 2014 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year
competitions. In 2015 she was chosen to participate in Poetry
Ireland Introductions series.
Emma McKervey is from Holywood and has worked in
community arts, music and teaching although her first love
is always poetry. She has had work published in Incubator, A
New Ulster, and The Galway Review, among other journals and
anthologies.
Paul McMahon’s poetry has been widely published in
journals such as The Threepenny Review, The Salt Anthology
of New Writing, The Montreal International Poetry Prize Global
Anthology, The Moth, Hennessy New Irish Writing, Southword, Ambit,
Orbis, Crab Creek Review and The Poetry Saltzburg Review. His
prizes for poetry include The Ballymaloe International Poetry
Prize (2012; judge Matthew Sweeney), The Nottingham Poetry
Open Competition (2012; judge Neil Astley), The Westport
Poetry Prize (2012; judge Dermot Healy), The Golden Pen Poetry
Prize (2011; judge John Harding), and second prize in both The
Basil Bunting Poetry Award Competition (2012; judge August
Kleinzahler), and The Salt International Poetry Award (2013;
judges Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery), among many others. In
2014 he was Highly Commended for both The Patrick Kavanagh
Poetry Collection Award and the Fool for Poetry Chapbook
Competition. He was awarded a Literature Bursary for poetry
from The Arts Council of Ireland (2013) and was selected for
the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series (2014) and for the Cork
Spring Poetry Festival Pre-booked Readings (2015).
Aoife Mannix is the author of four collections of poetry and a
novel. She has been poet in residence for the Royal Shakespeare
Company and BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. She has a PhD in
creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Benjamin Mitrofan-Norris is a poet from Bristol, England, whose
work regularly appears in journals and collections on both sides
of the Atlantic. He is the author of two short collections, and
is the poetry editor of Zymbol, a leading poetry and literature
magazine.
Barbara A Morton is published frequently in Abridged, and
abroad. White Porcelain Bowls is available from entropiebooks.com
Daniel A. Nicholls can most often be found declaiming poets
and poetry on Twitter (@nomopoetry). His work can be found
online at Agenda Poetry, Honest Ulsterman, Open Letters Monthly,
Compose Journal, Specter Magazine, and elsewhere. From 2010
until 2012, he was Writer in Residence at The Starving Artist in
Keene, NH. He now resides in Arizona.
Gerard Smyth has published eight collections of poetry,
including, A Song of Elsewhere (Dedalus Press 2015), and The
Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2010).
He was the 2012 recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award
and is co-editor of If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and
Song ( Dedalus Press ) which was Dublin’s One City One Book
in 2013. He is a member of Aosdána and Poetry Editor of The
Irish Times.
Adam White is from Cork, but lives and works in France. His
first collection of poetry was published by Doire Press in 2013,
and shortlisted for the Forward prize for best first collection.
Abridged Personnel:
Editor: Gregory McCartney. Had a sense it couldn’t last.
Watched the wonder wander past.
Editorial Assistant: Susanna Galbraith. Is in her third year
of English Studies in Trinity College, Dublin. She is currently
the Co-Editor of Icarus magazine and has poetry published in
Icarus, Abridged and Belleville Park Pages.
Helena Nolan has been selected for the 2015 Poetry Ireland
Introductions Series and will read as part of the International
Literature Festival on 18 May. She won the Patrick Kavanagh
Award in 2011, having come second in 2010. She was shortlisted
for a Hennessy Award in 2013 and has featured in a number
of competitions, including Strokestown, Fish, The Kilkenny
Broadsheet, Anam Cara & RTE/John Murray Show. Her work has
appeared in a range of publications including; The Irish Times,
New Irish Writing, Poetry Ireland Newsletter, The Guardian, The Daily
Telegraph and literary journals such as Abridged, The Stinging
Fly and The Moth, as well as online. She has an MA in Creative
Writing from UCD.
Peadar O’Donoghue is the co-editor of PB magazine. His
debut collection Jewel from Salmon Poetry was described by
Jim Burns in Ambit Magazine as ‘one of the liveliest and most
provocative poetry books I’ve read for some time’. His second
collection, also with Salmon, The Death of Poetry, is due out
later this year.
Jane Robinson lives in Ireland and won the Strokestown
International Poetry Prize in 2014.
Claire Savage is a writer from the Causeway Coast whose poetry
has appeared in the 2014/15 NI Community Arts Partnership
anthologies, as well as in arts ezine A New Ulster. In June 2014,
one of her poems was also performed in Belfast as part of the
Reading and Writing for Peace project from Queen’s University
and the Community Relations Council. Claire’s short stories
have appeared in The Incubator journal and Blackstaff Press
website, with another due for publication in The Lonely Crowd
magazine this summer. In July 2014, Claire received a grant
from the Arts Council NI to support her in writing a collection
of poetry and short stories.
Janet Shepperson has published poetry widely, most recently
in Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, Crannog, The Stinging Fly,
Literary Miscellany (Ulster Tatler), The Shop, Causeway/Cabhsair,
and I have six poems in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s
Troubles Archive. My two full collections are THE APHRODITE
STONE (Salmon Poetry, 1995) and EVE COMPLAINS TO GOD
(Lagan Press, 2004). Her short stories have appeared in many
outlets including Fortnight, Passages, Blackstaff Book of Short
Stories 1 and 2, the Irish Press and Sunday Tribune (both of these
stories were shortlisted for Hennessy Awards.) Originally
from Scotland, she studied English Literature at Aberdeen
University and moved to Belfast in 1978. She has worked as
a trainee journalist, primary teacher, Community Service
Volunteer and creative writing tutor/facilitator for Poetry
in Motion, Creative Youth Partnerships, Queen’s University
Lifelong Learning, WEA, the former Maze Prison, National
Deaf Children’s Society and many others.
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I will go there, take me homeCurated by Gregory McCartney
Olaf Brzeski Pieter Hugo Adrian Ghenie
This exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the John Ellerman Foundation.Image Credit: Pieter Hugo David Akore, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana 2010, copyright Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York.
8 May - 26 Jul
205188 MAC Greg McCartney A4 Press Ad_AW.indd 1 16/03/2015 14:15
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Cover: Pieter Hugo: Abdulai Yahaya, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2010, from Permanent Error series © Pieter Hugo.
Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York
