Page Title

Two from Ronan Barbour...

Saturn’s an Indifferent Lesbian
I Used to Work With

Facing a wall of rabbit eyes staring, I think: why

don’t we all grow pregnant with guilt? Humanity

my chair; a Swiss cheese soul; a brittle spoor

the inescapable corner of every forest

becomes the hatchet of gentle hands, the spear

trigger-traps behind each child’s soft, inquisitive lips.

My head in my hands: Dear God You’d better blow a wind!

Jupiter close your eye and turn away:

something’s going down in this neighborhood…

family friend

Thanksgiving Day I was at the table

with my family and a few others.

The atmosphere inside our little townhouse

was as bubbly as golden champagne;

it tickled our throats

and we all became free.

Talking, we smiled at one another

in between mouthfuls of turkey,

cabbage, cooked carrots, roast potatoes

and honey baked ham hot dripping

with sweet smoky flavor,

so alive on our bud-bricked tongues.

Someone brought up the name of an old family friend

whom none of us had seen or heard from in 15 years.

She lived in San Francisco. She was old. She was nice.

She used to have us over all the time.

But one day my eight year-old self had accidentally broke

one of her porcelain statues

and we’d never got invited back.

“Let’s call her!” my uncle said, “Why not?”

“No, no,” said my mother. “It’s been a long time.”

“Go on, go on! Call her.” The others chimed in.

“All right,” my mother said. “But you do the talking.”

My mom found her number in the old phonebook

and gave my uncle the phone.

He asked for everyone to be quiet, SSH-SSH stop talking!

and then he dialed.

We waited silently
for about fifteen seconds.

“Hello,” he said, telling his name, where he was,

and who he was with to

her answer machine.

“We haven’t heard from you in a while, I think it’s been
about

15 years, and we were just talking about you and
wondering

how you were so, if you’d like to get back to us the number

here is…” He gave the number and said goodbye.

Then I said to my uncle,

“HEY YOU SHOULDA SAID

SO WE’LL HEAR FROM YOU IN ANOTHER 15 YEARS!”

I expected a bunch of laughs but

the room got very quiet instead.

Everyone looked at me.

“That was very rude,” said my uncle, looking red-faced

over his shoulder at me.

“What?” I said. “You’d hung up already, right?”

“No,” he said.

“That was loud enough to have been recorded.

She’ll never call us now.”

Everyone went back to eating and conversation resumed

thick and mumbled.

My face didn’t know what to do

and my girlfriend said I love you.

The mere flick of a tongue

like the scrape of a match

thrown to incautious wind:

it’s that easy

to burn a bridge

twice.

Ronan Barbour was born in Canada in 1981, and is
currently an Irish Passport-holding American Resident
living in California. He works a bit, writes when he can,
enjoys Texas, and wandering his neighborhood at night.

Poesy from Adam Kane

1/.
letter passed down
through the colonies
and delivered to my
flailing sanity

splintery cryptic language
falling from my eyes
and onto these pages
from memories,
adjacent verbs
that make me recognise
that a time arrives
when you must
look further within self
to realise that
it is more simple and virtuous
to die young
in a car wreck
than to bleed
translucently
from the gut
age 65 or 70
having lived a purple lie.

I remember hard now
when I was 23
and living in a small room
in venice.
living off beans and corn bread
drunk everyday by 11
lonely
half mad
I used to receive letters
from females in Australia
(place of birth and childhood)
that I hardly knew
or had met twice,
declaring solidarity to me
claiming
my vigour and honest brevity.

I used to take these letters down to
the beach
with a bottle of port wine
and take off my shirt and shoes
and lie flat on my back
in the California sun
burning.
drinking that port wine down
and reading those letters aloud
always finding something
mildly humorous or
significantly interesting
in their words
and wondering what I had said
or done to these females
so far away
sending these hot words
down through the colonies
words laced with want and need
like a refugee.

separated by an ocean,
those girls with all the strength for
me
so far away,
me drunk on the beach
clutching those letters
being ridiculed by the bums
and madmen.
the tourist,
looking at me like I was a rapist
because I was young and drunk
and
reading aloud
and becoming conscious of it all,
the attention
from the bums and the madmen
and the tourists
and the young females in Australia.
immediately
becoming sick of the sand,
sick of the blue sky
and sick of the world.
feeling that I wanted out
but knowing I was already finished.
soon after the letters stopped.
I never replied
maybe that was why.

life was taking care of
what was left of me.
I’d return home
and my landlady
would be on all fours
cutting in the turf
for a new location for a Tulip
to die.
I’d walk by without saying a word
and check the mailbox.
“desperately empty”, she’d say.
the corners of her mouth turned up
with lucid mockery
her face playing 35
but her complexion savage with
bitterness
fabricating a declaration of 50.

I’d walk on in
closing the door quietly behind
and look at the faded calendar
hanging by a nail.
with that relentless
Californian sun falling all over the
place,
and my buttermilk semblance-
I’d laugh.
for all the answers
were passed over to the sane
or fare from the reach
of my simple grip.

2/.
ubiquity like the
quiet functions

how much I long
for the simple cast of mind
where days will pass
easily
within the confines
of equal even thoughts

nothing that rides
the razor’s edge
of considered felo-de-se

where evil children

call viciously
beyond the boundaries
of their white picket fences

how much I long,

for the easy taste
of the Opiate
spoon licked filth
of parents
and friends,
to succumb
from silent gazing,
shaken heads,
the monstrosity
of their deliberations
determined to evade
any real occasion
of respect or salvation,

the hypocrisy

of their twisted charm
honest with
involuntary deceptive waves

and their fucking
Blonde Labradors,
barking
the footpaths empty
while the horrible
July sun
shrouds it all
in a veil
of ridiculousness.

3/.
through a glass
darkly

everything seems simple and
deliberate
and life’s deficiencies are
displayed
with melancholy
on the faces
of men I passed in the street today.

minor things
have happened in this room

that I sit in now to write.
things that could be condensed
into
a vague recollection of a dream.

arguments, falsified reproaches
unjustified manias and ranting.
things of no measure, when
compared
to the feelings that I post
for this fantastic darkness.

earlier, I arrived home
and instead
of going straight into the apartment
I climbed the fire escape, high
and looked out over the city.
the rooftops, violated over the years
all holes and broken tiles,
shadowed with pollution,
looked impermanent
and untried
by the sun,
a distant memory.

surely it must remember better
days
when it’s arm lent tenderly upon
the streets
and warmed the back of birds
as they passed
and all the hopelessness that
denigrates
the lives of the men and women
here
was lost in the warmth and
dryness.

4/.
finding a romantic
teenage boy within me

The Man With The Golden Arm
is a classic!
morning sun cresting with juvenile
purpose
splaying blue light ambitiously
across the window pains of
Sunday morning erections.

mother nature lies constently
dangling the promise of easiness
towards the quiet aspirations of
sanity.

I have not learnt my lessons
from the buzz of the naked light
bulb
and I have not pretended to.

my life falls about this tired
Apartment
rasping with cracked radio notions
as I am held up
and forced to the ground
by bloody tracks of deformed
delusions

and spent quickenings of solitary
torment.

as tonight leaves me again
vacuous and allied
no more hospitals will find me
awake at 4am

rain will fall first,
as it does daily
and I will become a clean swab
and a dirty affection.
The Man With The Golden Arm
ia a classic
and I am nothing forceful
but quietly I have found
the romantic teenage boy within
me.

7/.
Zion Excruciated

the promise of quiet hallways
and the calling of
a solitary smile
are corrupted by
the mocking of indulgence.

lonely without aflictions
that find me
forsaken in the light
of tommorrow-
that grows distant
like the discarded silver
chambers of April’s
pink moon.

it is a short summer
in Gehenna
and memories like forgotten
soldiers
secure internal borders
from the irrationality
that enthusiasm presents.

the diminishing monuments
of burnt spoons
are disregarded
when warm blood forms
in Sunday morning sinks-

and nights are dark because
they can not continue to be bright
with conversation and smokes.

BIO...
ADAM KANE was born,1972 in
Sydney, Australia to Northern
Irish Immigrants.
In the mid nineties Kane
moved to Los Angeles, California
and worked in numerous bars
and on building sites and lived in
cheap rooms in both Venice and
Hollywood. Restless and
dissatisfied Kane travelled the U.
S and then Europe, Britain and
Ireland writing and recording his
experiences with a disposable
Camera.
He published his first stories at
the age of 23. His poetry has
been published widely in the
small presses in the U.S and
Europe and his Photographs have
been seen in Galleries across
Britain and Australia.
He currently lives in Belfast,
Northern Ireland.