Poet, researcher in narratological complexity, and financial journalist Oisín Breen’s debut collection was published in Mar. 2020 by Hybrid Press. Breen, 36, is published in the Blue Nib, Books Ireland, the Seattle Star, Modern Literature, the New English Review, La Piccioletta Barca, the Bosphorus Review of Books, Disquiet, Universe, Mono, and Dreich.
Photography by P. M. Chatelain
Fatherhood
My father died when I was young,
He was kicked in the face by a horse.
The coroner called it an accident,
But I knew it was revenge.
I punched the horse once,
I was standing in the muck,
Holding the reins,
And the farrier readied hammer and nail.
I was standing in the muck,
And the air was crisp,
The hammer struck, and I, with it, half fell
Slipping in horse shit.
The horse bucked,
Spooked,
And tore into me,
Into my shoulder.
Then, under its ministry of gnashing bone,
My eyes a burst of blood-fed vision,
I lashed out, and the horse quieted,
Carefully watching, through a now wet eye.
Sunday Afternoon
We spent last Sunday
hurtling, a mile-a-minute,
skinny-dipping in the wet streams, climbing trees,
and scaffolding our desire,
only to rumble it, to tear it, to smithereens,
until gasping, it became a mirror of our breath,
and we sighed in the sluice broke pluckings of laughter fulfilled.
Then, like engorged ticks, fattened on one and other’s blood,
hoping to drop to the same spot, and rest in a shared tuft of grass
we waited, until once again we would be ready to drink deeply,
and fly, 299 million 792 thousand 458 miles a second,
as the fierce embodiment of entropy,
along gas-lit Georgian streets held in reminisce.
And we walked arm in arm,
snatching at the brittle leaves,
and they were beautiful.
And our love is a symphony of colour and colourlessness,
a metronome measured instantiation of the original melody,
wisdom wrested from the late corncrake’s invigorating call:
crex crex crex crex
and so it is
AMEN.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 