How People Take Their Tea Mint in Morocco— with apple shisha in a crowded café. White leaves in a clay pot— a hilltop in Japan. Masala chai, sugar, milk— plastic chairs on a Mumbai street. Serene flecks in a white bowl— the matted floor of a Chinese suburb. Bagged, Nambarrie, semi-skimmed— a bungalow by the Irish coast. Jen Herron Jen’s work has been featured in The Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Jukebox, The Waxed Lemon, Skylight 47, The Irish Times, BBC Radio and more. She won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, 2022, and is an editor for the Belfast Review. Jen is currently working on her first poetry collection. She…

Folks Songeneration At last I tried to make it last, the last some her I spent at Cailleach’s dim and dust he home with shingles and shutters. Lull gone by, I fell to sleep without leaping sheep but to song: Seesaw, Margery Draw sold her bed to lie in straw. Wasn’t she a naughty girl, to sell her bed to lie in straw? Do knot pit he her. Scornful, yes, sorrowful, yes, mournful, yes, but know pit he. See, I saw Margery Draw sell her bed as the last straw seized. Kneeling before an altar of stars, my twinkling mind threw the little night and the blank kit from my…

Peter God From the off, let me state for the record his name was James. –       How are you today, James? –       Ah sure I´m fine, thanks Peter God. (Nicknames were nailed to your back where I come from)  James commanded the far corner of the bar like a general surveying his infantry. Customers came and went, saluting. Fuckle was another favourite of his. One day my father took him a live lobster as a thank you for a job he’d done on a car we had – a death trap. Held together by bailing twine and Hail Marys. –   Fuckle I do…

The Day I Nearly Killed Donal Reagan with the Bucket of a JCB The day I nearly killed Donal Reagan with the bucket of a JCB  had actually started well – a 7am cycle through Myross Wood, out past Rineen at full tide, trees electric with waking birds,  tractors dieseling along the lanes to a creamery on its last legs;  hedgerows thick with that baited combination of  nettles and blackberries, honeysuckle and briars; a spangle of spiderwebs glistening in the dew, stitching them all together. Then and there, the first measure of a real man was the ability to run a loaded  wheelbarrow up a plank of wood into the…

Trinity Knot: A Nollaig na mBan Story (in 3 Parts) I After my son was born, I didn’t know what birth story to tell. When people asked how it had gone, what version of the truth did they want to hear? The word traumatic was on the tip of my tongue but I swallowed it back. I defaulted. The important thing is he’s here now, I would tell people, even though, secretly, I felt I wasn’t fully there myself. There wasn’t one birth story. It had fragmented. There was the story I told everyone else; the story I would eventually tell my son; and the story I told myself –…