Katy Mahon is an Irish musician and poet brought up in London and living in York. Her poems have appeared in various Irish and English journals, most recently The High Window, The Honest Ulsterman and SurVision Magazine. She was New Irish Writing’s featured poet for the Review section of the Irish Independent in February 2022. Katy’s debut chapbook Some Indefinable Cord was published by Dreich in July 2022, and a second pamphlet, Cry, is due out in 2025 with Valley Press.
How to store coats in summer
Coffee beans in the electric grinder,
Radio 4 vibrating on the newly-sanded floorboards,
a squeezed grapefruit hazing the air,
and my mother, the sound of my mother
vowelling her voice into the rotary phone,
winding the cord around her finger,
mouthing her annoyance at the moths eroding yet
another cashmere coat in the wardrobe.
And my aunt, the sound of my aunt
leaking from the earpiece into the room –
I can still hear her nasalling down the line,
admonishing my mother: she shouldn’t have let
my father leave, and should have put cedar
in with the wool all summer.
When my aunt called a few years ago
to tell me not to marry my mother’s lover,
I silenced her spiny voice with a wrist movement
and a thumb tap. My phone screen went dark
before she had time to finish her sentence.
The hungry dog looked up,
my mother’s ghost hovered,
coffee murmured in the Bialetti.
Luggala
IM Garech Browne
In a futile exercise I shake the curtains
out of the window,
try to disturb the clutching beasts
whose names I later learn:
Brimstone, Green Hairstreak.
I obsess over the volatility
of creatures whose paper lantern wings
hide in the lightless night.
But they disappear by morning
and I dress alone, learning in time
to trust their early departures.
I start to miss their swarf bodies,
then forget what they look like;
how many spots on the hind wing,
whether their veins thread violet or red,
the irregular pulse of the abdomen.
After the day’s lake swim, bursting
with childhood, iodined arms sculpting
wings in the water, I return damp
to a house warm with slow-cooked stew,
then to a cotton-dry bedroom.
They’ve resumed their places
as if wary of my fear
of abandonment.
Heirloom
for my father
I always managed to fall asleep to Olympia
punctuating the night under my father’s
insistent fingers stabbing keys.
Now she squats in the Sykes Bros. apple crate
beside an OED, shows me grime
on the overused ‘s’ and ‘e’. I clean her
from time to time, damp tissue squeezed
into gaps, cotton bud twirled
along the space bar edge.
I unclip the ribbon spool cover.
Its plastic groans against my hands.
Old dirt grins, caught in a game
of hide-and-seek. Then the thought:
how much more could I get at if I learnt
to remove paper bail, carriage release lever.
But she is full of trapped ghosts.
I feed paper in, strike letters
onto a hopeful page, make the type
come alive.
Fireflies
They were commas skirting hedges.
There, Adèle would point out each night,
in front of the hazel tree. Each time I’d blink
and miss their brief glittering.
We’d cycle into Pont l’Abbé,
wheels spinning with summer,
to buy sweets. The adults would get wine,
café chat, Le Beurre Bordier.
Once, our group tilted back via the hill.
Baguettes stretched out of rucksacks.
Ticking wheels, the arrhythmic clank
of stones hitting spokes became music.
I looked up at the curve of adult backs and realised
I was following the wrong crowd.
Stopping beneath a street lamp,
trying to remember phrases,
I asked a couple for help, je suis perdue,
and got an offering of chocolate,
the telephone. In the blue night
I tried to remember the number,
but all I could think of was the fireflies
whispering around the hazel tree.
Their evasion.
The Galway Review 