the pickled body - issue 1.3 bull - autumn 2014

the pickled bodyIssue 1.3 Bull

Autumn 2014

New poems byMatthew Sweeney

Doireann Ní GhríofaAnamaría Crowe Serrano

Breda Wall RyanDavid Butler

and more

Featured artistJenny Bowens

The Pickled Body

Contents

Issue 1.3

Bull

Autumn 2014

Editorial 6

Matthew Sweeney Toro 8 Breda Wall Ryan

Stella 9 Maurice Devitt Love in Autumn 11

David Butler Minatory 12 Maggie Breen Secrets 13

Maeve O’Sullivan Portuguese Haiku 14 Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Instructions to Kill a Daughter’s Minotaur 15 Maeve in Chile 16 Rachel Mulholland Cooley Concise 17

Featured artist Jenny Bowens 18

Mike Alexander This is Glam 23

Carol Shillibeer techno-bull 25

J. Roycroft Von Aschenbach’s Dream 27 Anamaría Crowe Serrano

!µ"#$%&'(! 28

on first reading Stuart Kendall’s Gilgamesh 29

Contributors 33

Editorial

We are all minotaurs living in our own labyrinths. Sometimes it takes a brilliant poem to be our Ariadne or our Theseus. Yet as editors we may have been tempting fate in

choosing the theme for our third issue. What if everyone took the word ‘Bull’ literally’? What we might have expected: Greek myth, astronomy, cant; insemination, persiflage, Picasso; Hemingway, Miles, Manolete; horns of plenty, horns of death, horns of a dilemna or a dilemma. Meat, blood, wine. Victory and death. Picadors.

What we got was poetry, proper honest-to-goodness poetry, some of which addressed some of the subjects listed above – but not all of the work that came in was about the animal ‘bull’, or bullshit, or papal edicts, or Jake La Motta. And that’s what we hoped would happen. More than anything we looked for sideways glances.

What we pickled is, we think, a stunning selection of poems that to a greater or lesser degree took the notion of ‘bull’ and decided for themselves what that meant. From Matthew Sweeney’s masterful ‘Toro’, in which a gladiator-animal recalls his glory

days, to Anamaría Crowe Serrano’s thrilling, experimental poems; from Rachel Mulholland’s condensed retelling of the Táin myth, to Mike Alexander’s exploration of 1970s pop; from Carol Shillibeer’s science-fiction breakdown, to J. Roycroft’s perspective on Death in Venice… There’s so much here that’s bullish without being bull. We love Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s devastating ‘Instructions to Kill a Daughter’s Minotaur’ and

‘Maeve in Chile’. Lost souls abound in this issue. David Butler’s ‘Minatory’, Maggie Breen’s ‘Secrets’ and Maurice Devitt’s ‘Love in Autumn’ invoke their spirits and dare us not to look. Breda Wall Ryan’s ‘Stella’ is a lost soul of a different kind – lost in the stars. Maeve O’Sullivan’s ‘Portuguese Haiku’ is relief of a sort, bringing us on a holiday where we might open a bottle of wine, first taking the plastic bull from around its neck. After the

emotional rodeo of reading in one sitting all of the poems in this issue, we think you may need it. Finally, we were delighted to ask Jenny Bowens to contribute to Bull as the featured artist, and as you’ll see, her extraordinary work ties the whole thing together in a way that’s at

once honest and stark and strange in an almost Moreauvian blending of bodies, human and animal. Strong meat. We hope you enjoy The Pickled Body 1.3 ‘Bull’ as much as we loved discovering this work, and now take great pleasure in presenting it.

– The Editors

The Pickled Body Issue 1.3 – Bull – Autumn 2014

8

Toro

Matthew Sweeney

I’m the only bull who was set free.

I gambol round the field all day,

I have both my ears and my tail.

The matador recalls me with a shudder.

I came very close to goring him,

closer to one of his banderilleros

who was carried off with a bloodied leg, and walks now with a limp.

I hoofed the ground, looked up,

snorted, then charged at the matador. I shook the darts from my back,

made sure to keep my shoulders closed.

I ripped his suit of lights, knocked the sword from his hand. I chased him

to the wooden perimeter which he

vaulted over. I waited for him

and he came back, stood angled,

held out his red cape which I

tossed aside, then swivelled to try to nail him this final time. It was

not to be. The handkerchiefs waved,

the President signalled it over. The matador looked at me and bowed.

I muscled round the sandy ring

with the crowd on their feet, yelling, clapping, and loud music playing.

Hundreds of flashbulbs went off.

I ate the best grass that evening.


9

Stella

Breda Wall Ryan

Our sister Stella scans the dark for crystal

stars mapped in the astronomy book

she knows by heart from start to end

and pinpoints Pegasus tethered in a stall of woven cosmic wire

beside a pool

of stellar light no sane eye sees, but Stella spools strung crystals

on her arms as any half-baked woman wired

to the moon from reading zodiac books

might, and stalls her explanation till night ends,

as end

it must, then takes the pool cue she uses to point out galaxies into the third stall

in the ladies’ loo where a crystal

chandelier lights the cover of her astronomy book inlaid with silver wire.

She channels her guide via telepathic wire –

Galileo, Galileo – from the Cosmos’ invisible end to pool

his astral knowledge with the secrets in her star book

and so end

dispute, forestall

debate and stall

unscientific speculation. Galileo’s haywire

answer sent by satellite, crystal clear to Stella’s stargazy mind upends

extant theory: Pegasus’ bright pool

is a porthole on the Next Dimension charted in Stella’s book.


10

At Trinity College Library, Stella’s Stellar Book is treasured like The Book of Kells, installed in a pool

of fibre-optic light, alarm-wired.

Meanwhile Stella – wonders never end –

cracks alien codes by casting tumblestones and crystals.

Suspected spawn of his trans-stellar gene pool, high on crystal

meth, she transcribes distal Galileo’s starlore in her book –

our Stella, wired and on her wonky orbit to the end.


11

Love in Autumn

Maurice Devitt

Hands graze her throat

red, smooth and brittle.

She bites his tongue –

tastes of lies, black as butter.

Eyes light out their past

gaudy as silk shoes,

geography of bruises now old and shameless.

The cove of her breast

where once cloud-free he hid, is seamless

with deception. Memories

tick at her knuckles as she grips and un-grips

the last certainty of love –

leaves falling will find her naked.


12

Minatory

David Butler

All night the tide, engorged, has charged,

foamed, bellowed, pawed at the shingle.

Morning has tamed it. The moon-faced girl

who plays amidst the detritus has quite forgotten her terror now.

Idly she lines up shell and fragment

in the wrack. The sea is watching.

Could she read these runes, might she

thread through their maze the mounting

wave and undertow; the bestial swell of obsession; the monstrous birth;

the black sail that drowns a father?


13

Secrets

Maggie Breen

We had a bull that went bad,

he was red, a deeper shade than my hair,

he roared at us across the ditch,

we had to stop playing in the front garden when he started scraping at the ground,

gouging out deep holes,

charging at nothing.

It was around then

that Mammy told me

that speaking out

would get me in trouble.

The trailer shook like a toy

when he was taken away

and I could hear him roaring, as I watched from the kitchen window,

my breath on the glass

and I wrote secrets on the fogged-up places but they soon dripped away

and no one could see.


14

Portuguese Haiku

Maeve O’Sullivan

bullring the tap tap of a cane on ground tiles

balmy afternoon

on the estuary a boat horn sounds

honking again:

those irate geese who chased us earlier

after-dinner batwatch

they swoop down from the pines in ones and twos

hard-to-reach places the sting of sunburn


15

Instructions to Kill a Daughter’s Minotaur

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Listen sister, it’s simple: just do as mother did with us.!

Catch her as she returns from the well. She’ll drop

the bucket, she’ll yelp, spill water. Let the thirsty sand

swallow it. Do not worry, for you can send

her little sister for more soon enough.

You’ll need two of you to lift her, clever girl,!

she’ll know by now where you are taking her. !

Carry her through the labyrinth of lanes, !

to the red house that sits at its heart. Knock twice. !

Close your ears to her bawling. !

Her eyes will be so white in her face, rolled back in fright. !

Inside, she will use all her words to beg you !

to release her. Do not yield, sister. Hold her.

Hold her. Hold her down.

Do not let her see the blade. She’ll still scream, !

better to hold a rag by her mouth – she will scream, we all screamed.!

Have someone hold her legs open. You must cut carefully

until you feel the give of flesh, the gush, the shudder, the blood, !

the heat of torn muscle, the bleeding meat. When she stills,

you’ll know that you’ve freed her from that evil root.!

Let her weep, but do not remove the rag from her mouth.!

Whisper, don’t scare her. Poor child, poor child, poor blood of our blood. !

Hold a clean cloth to the wound, whisper prayers to her, sister,

rub her brow smooth, let her blood clot and cool. !

Lift the skein then, the spool of red thread.

You may weaken now, but remember, it is you

who hold the ball of thread and you who must help her

to find her way away from this place. !

Run your needle through the candle flame, sister. Hold her again. !

Each stitch is a step back home to where she belongs with you.!

You must bring her back, sister.

You must bring her back as a woman!

– so stitch her neat – stitch her – tight. !

When you have finished, knot the thread.

Remember to put the skein on the shelf for the next.

Now you can smile, sister, and sing the old lullabies !

that soothed her when she screamed before you

eight summers ago – your little calf, your screeching,

womb-raw daughter. You birthed her once, sister. !

Now you must birth her again, !

from blood.


16

Maeve in Chile

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

In Valparaiso, we are drunk again on Pisco sours.

Later, I hunger for food that I cannot name.!

We stumble into a night café, where you feed me

pale potatoes, boiled to a shine, with lengua – boiled tongue.

You wait for me to grimace like the other gringos, but

I smile.

I know the taste, the shape of a dead tongue in my mouth,

strong muscle meat, grey, heavy. I cut a chunk.

The root is thicker, tougher than I remember,

When it slides down my throat, I think of home:

of scrubby grass turn to cud on tongues, of ragwort, of furze.

I think of torn hands stacking stones into walls to keep bullocks

in and raiders out. I think of the forgotten words that sit in spaces

between grey rocks, between grey clouds, between grey drops.

I think of the frantic low moan of the cow who calls her calf back.

I've never been so far from home. No. I’ve never been so close.

I turn to you and ask for more.


17

Cooley Concise

Rachel Mulholland

Two cows swallowed worms,

birthing brown & white-horned.

White under a woman, leaves her for her husband. So she wants

Brown at any expense, offers

everything & sex. But boasting

messengers pull down wars &

battles fill up mountain gaps.

Brown won then & taken back,

but wounded, wanders, only to

return to worm.

Featured Artist Jenny Bowens

From an early age I’ve been interested in both nature and art, so drawing

animals became a favourite pastime of mine. When I was asked to make

some images for Bull I was so pleased. The Pickled Body sounded like a wonderful thing to be involved in and the theme of Bull was exactly the sort

of thing I love to draw. The editors pitched me the idea of merging the

female reproductive organs with the face of a bull, as they’re often compared

to one another. I really liked the idea and used it as my starting point. I then tried to find other organs in the shapes of the musculoskeletal structure of

bulls. They’re such magnificent animals and I had a lot of fun drawing them.


23

This is Glam

Mike Alexander

THIS IS GLAM/1

For the craft project, undisclosed quantities of Elmer’s glue,

what they call construction paper, not to mention

liters of glitter.

THIS IS GLAM/2

What exactly makes up this tinsel stuff?

The hair of mannequins? Bootsy Collins’ aura?

Fingernails on the chalkboard of centrifugal galaxies?

Or just simple silica, multiplication tables, ethical dilemmas?

What is this stuff that makes dead trees come alive in our duplexes?

THIS IS GLAM/3

I hated disco just for being on the radio. It wasn’t personal.

I was told I had to like the predominant bass.

What was it Burroughs called it? His soft machine? His sewing machine. His typewriter. His money maker.

In the late seventies, we were all William Tell.

We wore blindfolds with eyeslits.

We made overtures.


24

THIS IS GLAM/4

I am the antichrist.

I am the anarchist. I am the antithesis of Donna Summer.

THIS IS GLAM/5

Will you wait in line for the next world war?

Will you wait outside Studio Fifty Four? Will you be transmitter or receiver?

Will you sit through Saturday Night Fever?

We have saxophones. We have sexual healing.

We have sequined satellites on our ceiling. We have disco biscuits. We have cocaine.

We’re so vain. We’re so vain. We’re so vain. Honey.

Do you promise us forever, in an odd way,

like the changes from the lights on Broadway?

We stomp around the dance floor like T-Rex. The only emperor is the emperor of sex.


25

techno-bull

Carol Shillibeer

don’t be deceived by the crafty inseminators

the bull is not a PI || or AI bred

gone are the days of a hands-free style

artificial intelligence || insemination tail volume = negligible: the cow is balanced

but ectoparasites such as the village ||

our veterinarians, their testes should

have a minimum 30 cm circumference if they are unwilling to leave you

with a semen straw, if they,

who can direct you, present endemically

for breech birth and cranial capacity || size matters

and yet pulling up at a stop-light

counter-clockwise, an average cow her force of friction on the dance floor

hoof action, bull and cow

on a nearly sterile hillside, mines that took a rocky dump,

creating a steep-sided ziggurat

of coppered leavings,

poop-n-stomp || rave cattle rave summer thunderstorm on shit

and the greening,

copper tailings || territorial scarring

a human brand burned down past soil || a temple to our collective

prayers for prosperity

no cattle came tumbling down and really, the only thing

that matters = what sticks around

cattle, cattle, cattle as agents of restoration not information


26

O bull || O cow || don’t be deceived by the crafty inseminators

they who reap where they have not sown

seed texts:

http://www.theorganicfarmer.org/dont-be-deceived-by-crafty-inseminators/

http://www.awestthatworks.com/2Essays/Stomp_Restoration/Stomp_Restoration.pdf

http://www.eblex.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/brp_b_beefbrpleaflet-

bullhealthandfertilitybeforeandafterpurchase.pdf

(Artificial Intelligence) compilation album released by Warp Records, 1992.


27

Von Aschenbach’s Dream

J. Roycroft

is a dark dream, full of crepuscular water, shadow and light. And the boy?

He is perched precariously high, a breeze catching his hair; like a conductor,

he orchestrates a concatenation of gulls, while a group of stevedores lounge about

and smoke, eying him lustily. His friends call him to play and he goes, though

reluctantly. This is, after all, a dream. You stir, not quite awake. The boy, lithe, sweats his

youth from his pores. For you, it is nicotine and brandy, the old cures. In this dream, madness is a dripping clock-face; a split lip; a bruised frenulum; a salty kiss. The muscular arch of his

back, before wakefulness overtakes you, leaves you dusty-breathed on the piazza, no

longer yourself, but your apotheosis.


28

!µ"#$%&'(!

Anamaría Crowe Serrano

for picasso’s women

today we visited the picasso museum where everyone was in love except picasso he frowned and said he was trying to live

the moment with its intensity and wasn’t searching

for anything not some future form or aspiration

sometimes the less sure you are the more convincing

you come across i wanted to take note

liberate myself from want but his brow

creased to lowercase ksi unintelligible and olga gave him such a bitter look i could tell he had lied

obsession is not of the moment it’s of the past

a refusal of anything but mother’s milk the sea slapping under her armpits and jasmine round her waist

releasing witchcraft

in the museum dora tried to distract him flaunting her thighs cubes of pie she squatted at his behest

over his mouth dancing all the way down

to his cock right breast swinging left maracuya left breast sweet ripening round the back of a chair olé!

for a moment he forgot

what had driven him to anger all those gypsy words

that lost their lips in his youth

bulls and guitars blinding the walls with regret


29

on first reading Stuart Kendall’s Gilgamesh

Anamaría Crowe Serrano

spasms because

you move the maenad in me1

tongue

between your toes

slow curl under

paleolithic suck

these garments in the later paintings wispy

veils and want-want weave are too

dreary

dead as sleep in Nineveh2

i’ve ripped them up gauzy arabesque

of the type you imagined

in your weaker moments

might be

pulled off a shoulder

teased away to please

reveal…

1 we can make this

tomorrow’s fetish we must

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineveh


30

y aaaaa wn

my mouth

cannot

be naked

any

wider

i’m off to ride the bull if not slay it

before hunting your gods

who said love is like a red red3 rose…

it is

and there’s the rub

we need a good secateurs

i digress the real garment

is not wispy gauze but woven with my pubic hair4

the primitive joy of it

against your thighs and your crotch

3 so clichéd and Neruda’s poetry is over-rated too

4 Bethesda

houses your civility healing

is irrelevant after this


31

your hands chained

behind the chair

it’s woven to the crenellations

where we left the castle tour

to rewrite the untouched histories

of nooks hidden places5

where we could be

mythical animal

where cunt and prick and fuck

are not pejorative

the silken milk-and-honey bollocks

in the later paintings of the maenads

burns the painter’s brush

their buttocks is worthy of more

more realism

rubbing off Bacchus’ godly stubble

proper burlap chin rubble upper lip

red red real6

their juices7 dripping lava over his face

melting his tongue

5 in full view

6 / love doesn’t come into it

7 is there another word for that?


32

their lungs a feckless howl8 shredding sheets

the way storms strip

the sky

deflower

the forest

8 think Ginsberg

Contributors

Matthew Sweeney His most recent collection Horse Music (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the

inaugural Piggott Poetry Prize. A new collection, Inquisition Lane, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in September 2015.

Breda Wall Ryan lives in Bray, Ireland. Her awarded poetry has been widely

published, most recently in the Rialto, Fish Anthology and Deep Water Literary Journal. Winner

of Over the Edge New Writer of the Year 2013, she was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series, 2014. She has completed two poetry collections. Maurice Devitt After a career in business he completed the Poetry Studies MA at

Mater Dei in Dublin. Over the past three years his poems have been published by journals in Ireland, England, Scotland, the US, Australia and Mexico. He is a founder member and chairperson of the Hibernian Writers’ Group.

David Butler His publications include the novels: The Last European (Wynkin de Worde,

2005); The Judas Kiss (New Island, 2012); and City of Dis (due for publication in September

2014); the poetry collection Via Crucis (Doghouse, 2011); the short story collection No Greater Love (Ward Wood, 2013); and the play ’Twas the Night Before Xmas (Spotlight, 2013).

Maggie Breen Her debut collection of poetry Other Things I Didn’t Tell, was published by

Scallta Media in 2013. She has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Scaldy Detail, Crannóg and Southword, among others. She was guest editor of The Scaldy Detail 2013, launched in

February 2014. Maeve O’Sullivan is a member of Haiku Ireland, the Poetry Divas and the Hibernian

Poetry Workshop. Doireann Ní Ghríofa Pushcart Prize nominee Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an award-

winning bilingual poet based in Cork. She holds the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary 2014-2015. Her chapbook A Hummingbird, Your Heart is available free to download from Smithereens Press and her first collection of poems in English is forthcoming from Dedalus. Rachel Mulholland, 28, is from Dundalk, Ireland. She teaches English in Galicia,

Spain, where she has been based for the past seven years. She has work published or

forthcoming in Wordlegs, ESC Zine and Poetry24. Jenny Bowens is a fine-art student studying print at NCAD. She has lived in

Churchtown, Dublin her whole life with her parents, older sister and cat. Outside of college, she loves reading, cosplaying, horse-riding, helping out at IMMA and hanging out with the cats on her road.

Mike Alexander published a book of poems, Retrograde, last year, through P & J Poetics.

He drives down Houston’s Southwest freeway in the morning, & back up the same freeway in the evening. He still dreams he is the rock guitarist blasting from his voiture’s tinny speakers. His poems appear in River Styx, Measure, The Raintown Review, & elsewhere. Carol Shillibeer lives on the west coast of Canada. You can find her at

carolshillibeer.com J. Roycroft His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Burning Bush 2, Abridged, The

Weary Blues and The Bare Hands Anthology, amongst others. Work is forthcoming from Skylight 47 and The SHOp. He lives and works in Dublin.

Anamaría Crowe Serrano is a poet, translator, teacher and one of the editors of

Colony Journal. She is really excited to be included in this issue of the gorgeously lavish

Pickled Body.

The Pickled Body

www.thepickledbody.com

Also:

Facebook: /ThePickledBody

Twitter: @thepickledbody

thepickledbody.tumblr.com

Since 2013. The Pickled Body is an online poetry and art magazine edited, designed and produced by Dimitra

Xidous and Patrick Chapman. The poems and artwork featured in this issue are copyright © 2014 by their

respective authors and artists, and may not be reproduced without permission. The Pickled Body is copyright © 2014 by Dimitra Xidous and Patrick Chapman. All rights reserved.

the pickled body - issue 1.3 bull - autumn 2014

Documents