Sarah Clancy has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes including the Listowel Collection of Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her first book of poetry, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull, was published by Lapwing Press Belfast in December 2010 and a further selection of her work was published in June 2011 by Doire Press. Her poems have been published in Revival Poetry Journal, The Stony Thursday Book, The Poetry Bus, Irish Left Review and in translation in Cuadrivio Magazine (Mexico). She was the runner up in the North Beach Nights Grand Slam Series 2010 and was the winner of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam 2011.She was an invited guest at the 2011 Vilenica Festival of Literature in Slovenia and in Spring 2012 her poem “I Crept Out” received second prize in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition.
Beetroot Soup
This was one of those scrapey awkward days
and I was one of the squinters who frowned sideways
at it not prepared to look at anything directly.
You were one of the wardens, the guardians
checking that things were progressing as
they should be and I sat in my habitual seat
in my usual Cafe and kept my cranky head down
in the paper while you leaned on the counter
and watched me. I felt it on my neck hairs where
it landed and so I murmured fake approval for
the photos of some small-faced politician and
I perused the ads for gadgets that could be used
to improve my golf swing or those beige all in one
leisure suits that I can’t imagine anyone wearing,
and I spooned my soup up feigning unfelt relish
for my audience when in fact I consumed it like a duty
instead of appreciating its exoticism and it
was beetroot thyme and ginger, but on a day like this;
a day for not feeling, for not even being it would take
Jalapeño peppers to break through my defences
to surmount my down-day survival mechanisms,
so it was odd then that I found my throat burning
and eyes watering when you said ‘listen sorry
for interrupting, pet, but is anything the matter?
Her sister remembers it differently
But then again she would wouldn’t she? The ones
who are older say their little sister bore the brunt of it though
he doesn’t see it like that. She prefers to dance in the kitchen
with both parents singing and her up late on a school night
when she should have been sleeping, but they said they were
in training for Broadway, for stardom and not to tell anyone.
She prefers stowaway games where they hid in the attic as quiet
as mouses, as mices, as meeses, she likes better the adventures
she invented at Granny’s while her mother was away singing Opera,
in Paris or London or Rome, and she prefers how important
she felt in the schoolyard when the others were taunting
but she was the one in the know that the reason her Da
had got scarcer was because of his extremely important work as a spy
and if she said where he was to anyone they all might die
and she’d crossed her heart anyways so she wasn’t saying,
she likes to remember reciting poems she’d learned off in school
to pirates on shore leave down at the bar in the docks, how her Da
had brought her and none of her sisters and how that night
he’d held her so tightly and not let her get further in case those
seafaring varmints would steal her and make her queen of the seas
but he wouldn’t let them, no chance of it, not in his lifetime;
he’d slay ‘em like dragons, like vagabonds and he’d brought her
up main street where they’d sat in the church and lit candles
till she started to shiver and he’d sworn she was destined
for fortune, for magnificence even if he did say so himself and
she liked remembering that bit, she repeated it often, like when
they brought her to visit her mother she’d say
Ma we’re going to be magnificent aren’t we? and they’d all laugh
while her mother would hug her.
But her sisters remember it differently.
Counting on your OCD Streak
First I’ll let mail and junk advertisements pile unopened on the porch,
then I’ll order take- away five nights a week and leave half- full cartons
congealing sweetly in the sitting room, I’ll step every inch of carpet in
sand- shedding shoes, let milk go rancid, open on the counter. Meats?
I’ll stack them together unwrapped, raw and cooked, I know that drives
you nuts, I won’t put the bins out for weeks, I’ll burn plastic in the fireplace
and never clean it out, I’ll let those globs of hardened toothpaste form glaciers
on the sink, when light bulbs blow I won’t replace them, I’ll just move rooms
at will until finally I end up comatose on the sofa having swallowed the contents
of that lurid liquor we bought at duty free, I will put ketchup on everything
even though I hate it and I’ll read the first two pages of every novel in the house
then hurl them from me to the floor where they’ll hit my overflowing ashtray
but I’ll kick the spillage under that horrid rug your mother gave us when
we moved here, you said it signified acceptance at long last and you gave it
pride of place, that’s what I’m counting on here your OCD streak, and
I’m guessing, fingers crossing, you won’t be able to endure the thought of all
this squalor, so you’ll land in here on a mission to restore order and the method
in my madness is that disregarding your motivation -you’ll be back.
The Galway Review 