Publications

Sample from Sweetie

It started with a shiver, a flitter, a disturbance in the shadowy vapour smothering the Mall River, and a feeling, as subtle as a candle's flicker, of being stalked in the night. A middle-aged woman's aching feet, encased in white runners, quickened toward Main Street and the Mullins Hotel, as gorse smoke poured off Cnoc an Cairn, dimming streetlights. It shrouded shops and parked cars and breached the locked iron gates of the Protestant church, where it deposited a layer of particulates on sinking tombs mottled with lichen blooms, on rusting insular crosses, on three leafless sycamores, and on the smudged glass of a parish notice box that wasn't noticed much anymore. The fumes rode roof ridges and gutters, plumed the pavement like dry ice in the nightclubs of her youth, and pooled down at the Mall Bridge, where it momentarily swallowed whole the flashing red taillight of a bicycle with a squeaky chain, before the rider turned right and pedalled up John Street.

Sample from An Entertaining Story

In the mornings, Étáin dreamed of him. Drowsy, blanketed, she dawdled in the warm, snug space between oblivious night and the disappointments and loneliness of daylight. He was a faceless, thin-hipped, strong-yet-tender phantasm, his long arms circling her in the ancient grove of trees. 

Canopied above, a green helm of branch and susurrous foliage quivered with leaves of aspen, gnarly oak, and tall ash and shaded their bed of soft grass and lustrous moss. Wild garlic grew, and the five-petaled, yellow beathnua that shielded from evil, as did the supple rowans, while the berries of her holly blushed at the couple's kisses.

Her father valued dreams but deemed fantasies a folly. Serious, he insisted on discipline with visions, deploying them only for community decisions, such as optimal planting or defeating enemies.

Night Walk, Sláidín

Pebbles, tide-tossed, huddle on strands of nets and seaweed smell,

shine as if dipped into that curved white bath of an Imbolg moon.

I'd love to climb up, jump, and splash in light, escape the east wind's

slap, slap, slapping of a sheep skull with a drained Domestos bottle.

Dripping home, candescent, you'd see me glow outside, as I ignite

within at the sight of you drinking tea in our lit kitchen window.

Published in Romance Options, Dedalus Press

The Increasing Weight of the Sky

As a child, heaven floated high above,

unmoored, mythical, stretched-balloon blue.

In grass, prone, scenting Aunt Carol's scones (love

was flour-fingered), I watched clouds unscrew

into spaceships, faces, trees. This fenced lawn,

I thought, a basket lightly held by breeze

of goodness – all those saints, relatives gone

where Mom said angels step with feathered ease.

Now, each year, cirrus wisps look lower. My

Aunt wanes gibbous, Atlas-pressed with pain, worries.

I would take a turn – hold her heavy sky,

push back heaven, but I'm not strong Hercules.

When it flattens her, will she find release,

unfold, untether, rise up into peace?

Published in Skylight 47