Here ends my month as Writer In Residence at Necessary Fiction. Thank you so much, Steve Himmer, for the opportunity and the honor.

I’m pleased to have brought readers a March of excellent poems and stories written by (largely) Irish poets and writers. The entire issue can be enjoyed here.

My deep thanks again to each and every one of the fifteen contributors, (in order of appearance from most recent to first):

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

Bernie McGill

Kevin Spaide

Jon Boilard

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Mairéad Byrne

Jennifer Matthews

Kevin O’Cuinn

Cathi Murphy

Nessa O’Mahony

David Mohan

Eimear Ryan

Tania Hershman

Philip O’Ceallaigh

Madeleine D’Arcy

Congratulations to Erin Fitzgerald, winner of a signed copy of my story collection, Cut Through the Bone. Erin, please email me at ethelrohan@gmail.com with your address or the name and address of the giftee of your choice.

Erin chose to acknowledge the following excerpt:

“What the sky does in the back of a truck is closer to the human even than what the human does shoveling snow in. What the sky does with that snow in the back of the truck is as if a human did it. What the humans did with the pyramids is as if a mind like the sky dreamt it. But the physics is the same, unpreoccupied with culture.”
from Mairéad Byrne’s “A Heap of Snow”
(N.B.: It was very, very difficult to choose just one.)

I’d also like to send a copy of Cut Through the Bone to Nuala
Ní Chonchúir because she did such a wonderful job reading and supporting her fellow contributors’ work in this issue. Nuala, you’re an unfailing champion for the cause, thank you.

I leave you all with a poem from Irish poet Eavan Boland (the text borrowed from Poets.org)

Quarantine
By Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
     of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
     He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
     Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
     There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
     Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.