Tag: gender politics

To Professor John Henderson, by Maria Andrews


By Robert Garnham

To Professor John Henderson, about my/his belly.

John,

Would be great to cut a fine figure.
I do, says your belly,
Swaying on my two pins.
Uh huh? I’m listening, I say.
Yeah, I cut a fine figure of a Henderson belly
asking John for a hug.

You’ve got persistence going for ya,
I give you that. Yeah I have,
my/your belly drawls,
taking a long drag of a cigarette,
I’ll ask him till the day I die. I placate curve
with smoothing palm.

Are you thinking about John now?
John Henderson belly closes her eyes.
Yeah. All his vocatives rolled
into one tumbling waterfall of cadences.
What about his ablatives, his hyperbatons?
All cases. All cadences. One long

Belly schmoosh. His semantic analytics?
His patterns? His parsings? His epics?
His topsy turvey word order?
My belly is opening her lips, lost
for words. His exploratory thematics?
She’s gone, lost in loin-louche.

Maria Andrews is a short film maker and photographer who occasionally gets published in poetry mags (Polka Dot Ceiling, Still Life) and was once published in a collection (Bloody Amazing). Her current alias is a puppet called Leopold, who is a London correspondent for Helmiflix.com She likes belly laughs. manifestafilm@weebly.com.

 

Plums, by Lee Campbell


By Robert Garnham

Plums

I walked into the kitchen and there was Mum
Sitting at the table with a truck load of plum
As Mum de-stoned the fruit to make it into a pud
She wrote a short verse which I thought was quite good

She has this skill of writing as if she is somebody else
Looks like the voice of this poem is that of myself

And so, she wrote:

‘My mum’s been busy cutting up plums
Her son, her chum thinks they all look like bums
Now she is glum as she is getting numb thumbs’

A few hours later she had no reason to grumble
Those numb thumbs had made way for the perfect crumble

Lee Campbell is a performance poet and regularly performs at Paper Tiger Poetry in London His poem ‘Clever at without being Seen’ was recently included in Sometimes, The Revolution is Small, Disarm Hate x Poetry’ project by Nymphs & Thugs Recording Co. UK and published in Queerlings online magazine. His poem Juniper Park was recently published on this website.

 

My Mother Said, by Sharon Phillips


By Robert Garnham

My Mother Said

Always take care of your man
and try not to seem too clever.
The home is a woman’s domain;
this floor could do with a hoover.

Men like to think they’re clever
so buck your ideas up, my girl:
this floor could do with a hoover
and you’re wearing a dirty skirt.

Buck your ideas up, my girl,
make him feel proud of your looks:
you’re wearing a dirty skirt
and wasting your time on books.

Make him feel proud of your looks
and give that bathroom a clean;
there’s no time to waste on books;
cook something nice for his tea.

Go on, give that bathroom a clean;
the home is a woman’s domain,
so cook something nice for his tea
and try to hang on to your man.

(Previously published in Snakeskin, May 2018)

Sharon stopped writing poetry in 1976 and started again forty years later, after retiring from her career in education. Her poems have been published online and in print and she is currently studying for an MFA at York St. John University. Originally from Bristol, Sharon now lives in Otley, West Yorkshire.

 

Their Relationship Inventory, by Kevin Higgins


By Robert Garnham

Their Relationship Inventory

He’s proof there’s nothing as loud and long
as an idea whose time will hopefully never come.
She’s the type who gets illnesses,
her own, and other people’s.
Shutting him up is like trying to screw down the lid
on a coffin full of alligators,
all in a rush to get to the airport.
His list of those who need to be taken out and garrotted
is thick as Ghislaine Maxwell’s black book,
and always being updated.
Her sulks are more protracted
than a bad summer in Kilkee.
He’s the sort who paints a mayonnaise and chocolate
Jackson Pollock
on the new furniture she spent months choosing
within five minutes;
though, about the household accounts,
he’s uptight as a pro-lifer’s under-elastic.

And when she ran him over
in the small car he bought her
for her birthday
and didn’t visit him in hospital afterwards,
he sat up in bed and announced:
he was choosing not
to take this personally.

That she’ll be back
to run him over again.

KEVIN HIGGINS

Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway. He has published five full collections of poems: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), & Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019). His poems also feature in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems was published by Salmon in Spring 2017. Kevin is a highly experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. He has facilitated poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and taught Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute for the past fifteen years. Kevin is the Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway International Summer School and also teaches on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. His poems have been praised by, among others, Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, writer and activist Eamonn McCann, historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan; and have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press magazine, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. He has published topical political poems in publications as various as The New European, The Morning Star, Dissent Magazine (USA), Village Magazine (Ireland), & Harry’s Place. The Stinging Fly magazine has described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. One of Kevin’s poems features in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels which is just published. His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4. His book The Colour Yellow & The Number 19: Negative Thoughts That Helped One Man Mostly Retain His Sanity During 2020 is was published late last year by Nuascealta. His extended essay Thrills & Difficulties: Being A Marxist Poet In 21st Century Ireland is just published in pamphlet form by Beir Bua Press. Kevin’s sixth full poetry collection, Ecstatic, will be published by Salmon in March 2022.

 

No Joy, (after Marie Kondo), by Agnes Warren


By Robert Garnham

No joy

After Marie Kondo

I drew the line at Marie Kondo
and not a straight, well-behaved line.
More a squiggly, thrice drawn,
twice rubbed out, kind of line,
the likes of which Marie could never approve of.

I attempted to fold my underwear, à la KonMari,
but my rebellious knickers had other ideas.
Protesting at every turn,
like a bunch of radical feminists at Miss World,
defiantly refusing to be folded into submission.

She could never accept
my need for thirty books,
piled precariously on my nightstand,
a leaning tower of delight.
Even when I swore
they all sparked great joy.

Her sanctimonious smile,
her Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up.
It was never going to work.
It was her, not me.

In the end, she just wasn’t
nightstand quality

Agnes Warren lives in the West of Irelans. She is new to poetry writing, having recently participated in a series of workshops with Kevin Higgins, through Galway Arts Centre.

 

GDPR, by Marie Studer


By Robert Garnham

GDPR

He stretched his legs under the hospitality
Of her kitchen table, listed the locals lately deceased,
Those who reached old age, those taken young.
She offered currant cake.
Reaching for a slice he asked in a flash,
What age would you be now, Nonie?
She returned the plate to ellipsis equalised
On oilcloth. Smiling benignly, she enquired
What age would you think I am?
He subtracted generously from the score,
Near enough, she said.
No hacker would ever crack
My mother’s personal information or ransom her ware.

Marie Studer has written poetry since her teens in the1970s and started to submit in 2018. She won the Trocáire Poetry Ireland Competition 2020 and the Halloween Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Bangor Literary Journal 2019. Her poetry has been published in the Stony Thursday Book, The Waxed Lemon, Wee Book of Wee Poems, Fire & Water, Drawn To The Light, online and local anthologies.

Twitter handle: @StudiMarie

 

This shit?, by Jo Sachs-Eldridge


By Robert Garnham

This shit?

Is this it?
This shit?

Are you happy with your lot?
Cos I’m fucking not.
Not with this lot.
This rot.

Not this.
Is this it?

This shit?
If it is
I’ve had enough.
I don’t want this lot.
Not this.

I don’t want the trying
The crying
The sweating
The giving
Of everything
I’ve got.
For what?

Is this it?
This shit?

But don’t you dare ask
What do you want?
Cos who fucking knows.
But it’s not this.
Not this lot.
Not this.

She’s happy with her lot.
But what’s she got
That I’ve not?
What is it?
Maybe she just doesn’t know
What she’s not got.

Or maybe
I don’t.
Maybe whatever I’ve got
Is the lot.
Maybe you just grab that shit
And you say
THIS IS IT!
I’VE GOT IT!
This lot.
My lot.
I’ve got it.
I’VE GOT
THE LOT!

Jo Sachs-Eldridge lives in Leitrim where she mostly dreams up community projects involving bikes and words and other stuff she naively believes will change the world. She has notebooks full of writing that is legible to no-one and a daughter who is a wonderful distraction from everything.

 

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward, by Aoife Cunningham


By Robert Garnham

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward.
I nearly fell down the loo,
Like Alice in wonderland.
While im trying to excrete urine.

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward.

My shoes are dr martens
And I dress like
a bohemian goth,
This I must say,
Gets in the way,
of my OOTD.
Because I don’t have access to my belts or my lace!

There’s no curtains in the psych ward,
So I have to get crafty,
I get a little bit arty
and hang a sheet.
It’s like a sad tapestry
For the room that it is.
I guess that’s true

There’s no toilet seats in the psych ward

Now I’ve learnt all the tricks,
From drifting between institutions.
To wear a scuba mask,
In case I fall down the toilet bowl.

I’ve learnt all the tricks
From years of experience.
To use your wit to find a way
out of this hole.

There’s no toilet in the psych ward

 

I am the Genie in the Jar, by Mandy Beattie


By Robert Garnham

I AM THE GENIE IN THE JAR

A wee glass jar with a maroon lid
is an insect-tent, it sits
on a shelf watching the sunflower
clock’s second hand scurry
on yard thick walls of stone
the wee glass jar peers down
above, around and spots a ballerina
in a white tutu and pink tap shoes
on a white wall waiting for Genie
to lift the maroon lid
to flit and look for ladybirds, spiders
and moths to scoop them up and squeeze
through yard thick walls of stone
to re-pot the ladybird on a Hyacinth
bush and the scurrying spider
on a newel post by raised beds
of rhubarb and blueberries
but Genie lets slaters bide inside
a yard of stone to scurry
over oak and hide under knots.

Mandy Beattie, is a feminist from Caithness, Scotland with an MA in Social Work Practice & Research. Her poetry is a tapestry of stories and imagery, rooted in people, place and the natural environment, set at home and abroad.

 

Because it’s total crap, by Karen Jones


By Robert Garnham

Because it’s total crap

Ratner lifted the lid on a sherry decanter
At £4.95 a pop too good to countenance
When asked about his high-street gems
Little tacky rings for working class girls
Risking bedtime dealings with blue collar boys

It was Gerald who had himself by the balls
All for earrings costing less than a quid
He’d choke on an M&S sandwich now
Fish the prawns himself if he could
Than grapple with the loss of a
$10 billion business, 10 seconds to nought

Now 30 years after the biggest PR gaffe
The Sultan of Bling can only think back
To Mrs Ratner and her word of advice
The only pearl he declined to string
Ego really is a terrible thing

Karen Jones is new to writing poetry, a student of Kevin Higgins, born in Northern Ireland, living in Dublin and working in public relations.