Christmas 1978
We didn’t ask him to play dead. His record was three days.
But we kicked each other over like he’d told us then cleared the battlefield.
We spied his advance, inch by inch, the big shoe dragging,
polished beneath a sharp crease. False teeth gritted
above the perfect Windsor, hair blown wild over no-man’s land.
To accordion songs he tapped along, haunted by an absent quickstep,
smiling through the frostbite that kept his counting steady at thirteen.
Machine gun laughter rattle out from under that German tree,
thick glasses misted as brandy smoke rose-up from the pudding trench.
Wincing with every crunch under spoon of Viennetta on best plates
he closed his eyes in the lounge, it was said he could sleep anywhere.
A sixty-year-old shout stopped the house, but he didn’t see us at all.
Then he said his foot was cold, and everyone laughed, and I
laughed with the adults. It was warm in the Christmas ceasefire,
playing Subbuteo in the lounge.
Patrick Slevin has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Skylight 47, Drawn to the Light, The Cormorant, The Poets’ Republic, The Manchester Review, The High Window, The Blue Nib and others and has also been featured on RTE’s Poem of the Day.
Coal Partridge
My grandfather returned from the war
and found his first love had gone
and married someone else —
and he was the third son, in a family of farmers
who’d sold the bedrock under their land
to one mine or any of the others.
He could hear machines thumping under the tractor,
something large, eating his heart and rising up
through new veins in the mountain,
through silent centuries of rock, up
through the soil, in place of sorghum.
My grandfather didn’t sleep well,
nights or any other time.
He kept having dreams about pulling the trigger,
and the mess that came after — the cry and the fall.
He’d wake with his index finger in spasm,
crooking itself, again, and again and again,
as though beckoning the brothers he lost.
Sour mash in a jar was better than medicine.
My grandmother was nineteen when they married,
when he pulled her out of school,
stripped off her tasteful silk, her rough furs, and furrowed her
for babies. Onetwothree they shot out
like melon seeds and she never saw the inside
of her father’s big house on the hills after that.
She had a blown glass partridge with a horsehair tail—
all them pretty rainbow colours —
she took from her family’s Christmas tree.
She didn’t have, or want, permission —
for this, or anything else.
Every year, on the first of December,
she’d set it on the window sill, to catch the light.
It never sang any pretty songs for her,
and no one else did, neither.
Bethany W Pope has won many literary awards and published several novels and collections of poetry. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described Bethany’s latest book as ‘poetry as salvation’…..’This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.’ She currently lives and works in China.
Cockroaches and christmas cards
there will come a time
when my mother
will talk
cool words
that will
trickle
along
the muggy
micro-climate
(tears snot breath sweat)
I create
once a year
under my
duvet
she’ll stroke my hair
behind my ear
afraid calm
I’ll
shiver smile
and forget
what she says
but remember
her bare feet
kicking the cockroaches
out of my head
she’ll look at my hands
say that they were once hers
hold hers out, say that they are mine
then she’ll
give me a pen
and ask me to write
christmas cards with her
and I will shake
at all the times
I said
no
Georgina Norie Jeronymides-Norie is a poet/facilitator with an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. Georgina has performed across the UK with various collectives. Shortlisted for the Poetry Rivals Forward Poetry Prize in 2016, she is published online and in-print. IG: @georgienorie. FB: @georginanoriepoetry