Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
A Competition
Buzzard over crow, but
hooded crow over raven. Salmon
thrashing on a hook and leader
over sugar in the evening. Winter
branches scribbled on the sundown
like witches’ fingers over
thin silk leaves of bible paper.
Corroded silver forks, I think—
never sold, just given—over
late-night radio, coruscant streets.
Silence over apology until
we insisted on it for three mornings
and by then the blood had seeped
too far into the soapstone to clean.
Two notes over silence, though.
And four string-skipped notes
over twelve. Give me the first,
third, perfect fifth, and
minor sixth of the way you pick
our summer plans. Fasting
and praying over breaking bread.
Sex over dancing. Show me again
how you move to cerulean blue
when I turn the wheel to tiger orange.
St. Columba Via Laxness
The swell, the suck, the pleiadic edge—the sea’s lung
breathes in close to sweep and drag him out
from the slack rock pools to test the breaking strain
of sacred membrane. Columba watches the beach fleas,
unnamed and unremembered, forage decay between tides.
The day of the Lord is near. The words translated
through the origin fire of sunlight shattering
a salt grain soaked and sprayed off his cut into the cold
folds of water with a wake unmendable as a bell strike.
Translation, the refraction of language. Like Kolumkilli
and Gunnvor, the mother. We called her child eater, hill witch,
river poisoner, man’s doom. Don’t ever stumble
to Winterhouses or she will pluck the apple seeds
from your opened rib cage. Wasn’t it her. Wasn’t it her
that called you away from the tiller. Leave her on the hill.
The day of the Lord is near…a day of wrath and vengeance.
The Mother From Shunem Pleads With The Prophet Elisha
If you’re going to give me a promise from god
then at least stay to see what happens
when it fails.
I was an oyster
shell-calloused viscera
but you went for the seam.
Lie on the little body I never dared ask for.
Wash yourself in souring fluids.
Hands on hands belly on soft belly.
Warm blood on cold.
Come and we’ll shadow
the collapse of the day
like swallows spinning out
over the evening land
dipping in and through
each other’s
slipstreams
filling the spaces
we each leave in open air
while we wait for the dead.
Find love
that scatters like spores
sneak sips of wine
garnet to persimmon in the light
while I pretend
to look away.
We will cover the walls of this house
in salt and oil.
Cry from sorrow or from joy
but be so lost in one of them
that you wake back up
in the tomb like in a crib
call out with your small voice
and run out to take my hand again.
Daragh Hoey is an Irish poet recently returned home to Cork after many years in Seattle. A practicing lawyer and mediocre (if enthusiastic) fly angler, Daragh is also a student in the creative writing MA program at University College Cork. His poetry has appeared in Solstice Magazine, Midway Journal, Bluestem Magazine, Skylight 47, and others, and he was selected for an “Introductions” reading slot at the 2025 Cork International Poetry Festival.