The Bitch of Blackrock
She owns the place
by taking it all in
with abrupt jerks of the head
little sniffs searching
for flaws or relations
tugging her companion after her
eyeing the state of the shoes
around the place, the quality
of the getups.
Get too close and you’ll hear about it.
The stink off her, she growls,
This is mine! Mine!
as she yanks on her pink diamante chain.
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Severance
At a nuclear testing site in the Nevada desert: the incinerated body of a soldier. Its shadow had become severed in the blast, and rose again to walk. Making its way to civilisation within hours, it preached its liberation on street corners. Shoppers paused, trying to guess what it was. Busker? Protester? Sales promotion? Meanwhile the low, dark elements which followed them were convinced. Conversions to the ex-soldier’s severed lifestyle were swift. Now politicians are quaking about the end of days. Churches are blaming terrorists.
From boardrooms to bedrooms, rude gestures are spreading and shaking over the floors as shadows strain against their hosts. Phantom limb syndrome has nothing on this. The shadow-abandoned complain of homesickness, vertigo and paranoia. Subtext and body language disrupted, colleagues and love interests begin to doubt even the simplest utterances. Worldwide, a mass breakdown in communication: crashed servers, forged business letters, bitter texts.
On May Day negotiations commenced. Flexi time and holidays have been offered. Still, Achilles tendons ache in their thousands, while negative spaces appear to be pulling their feet out of very tight boots. When checking in on neighbours, you may have encountered one of The Severed in a darkened room, washed pale in the blue light of electronics. It is not yet known if anything can be done.
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Jennifer Matthews was born in Columbia, Missouri in the USA. After studying for the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria she moved to Cork, Ireland in 2003 and continues to live there now. Aside from reviews, she also writes poetry and has been published in Mslexia, Revival and Poetry Salzburg, and has read her work at the New Writers Showcase in the Heaventree Poetry Festival in Coventry, UK. In 2010 she was anthologised in Dedalus’s 2010 collection of immigrant poetry in Ireland, Landing Places. She has poems and journalism forthcoming in the Cork Literary Review and RunAmok.