A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Submission

In the process of submitting writing to literary magazines, one often stumbles upon an “About” section on the mag’s website.  I did that today, in a cubby in the children’s corner of my library.  Before my brain could catch my tongue, I was whispering in this corner to this scroll of employed, word-scrubbing faces smiling intimately off my shine-screen.  “Ahh, let’s see who’ll be rejecting my work,” I said: a soft exhale, pleased as always for benevolent strangers to throw even those words down cliffs.

Again with the Galway

Irish Fields

What is it about Galway?  Oh tee hee.

Another night watching the moon behind clouds, miles from Neverland.

Watching men sing on Youtube, in vests and brogue, meaning every word.  Hearing the heart of them, like a string stretched.

On Dominick St in the Afternoon

It doesn’t hit so much anymore, and it doesn’t bite so hard, this wanting to fly to Neverland, because a part of me grew up there last summer.  She ran through Duncan’s gate with it, like he said she would; like he said, she was growing up.  It rained and the leaves on the trees were like slices of bread, and she ran through the gate that reached her hip and sang on the street, I’m all grown up, I’m all grown up!  She twirled in midnight air.

On the way to Pauli & Eva’s

So that is how Galway doesn’t bite as hard.  Because a part of me is now only a pit, and the flesh that grows around it is of a different fruit.  But I also miss how I used to miss it.  It was what I knew for years.  Two rotations around the sun I wore a longing which never warmed me.  It was, yet, a beautiful coat.

To the Fete

Clare says she always misses Thailand. Though she is in love and a wife now in a place that it is not, because it is not, I suppose for those of us who end up where we are meant to be, when we are meant to be there, it is an insane task to leave.  After all, ending up in a place is supposed to be an end.  It is ending up there.  But still we board a plane and return to our parents, siblings, and families who love and know us beyond repair; impossibly, we return and in so doing somehow end the ending.

Yellow Tights on Cross St

So my inside doesn’t beat upon the walls of myself, the cage that hugs my heart.  It just dimly tolls the drum, the ever-present reminder of what kind of love it takes to leave love.   To end an end.

It is a patience to know electric hot joy and to live in the negative of its photograph.

The Salthill Shore

Short

Not much to say.  Dark overtook the day.  In Starbucks cafe.  The chamomile’s okay.