Jim Feeney was born in Dublin and has lived in Vancouver since 1979. He has published previously in Rattle, Cyphers, The sHop , Oddball Magazine, The Galway Review, New Lyricist Magazine and in the anthologies The Anthropocene Hymnal and Before I Turn to Gold. He also writes lyrics for The Mitchell Feeney Project , their song “Willie’s Oasis was featured on RTE’s Country Time with Brian Lally .
He blogs at https://stopdraggingthepanda.com
Pandemic Postcards
Early days
a faint whiff of weed
that old Vancouver perfume
cherry blossoms bloom
xenophobia
hums in the background
like a cheap fridge
Jericho Beach
the trees look guilty
the ocean ill at ease
no one’s fault, but still…..
the courts are empty
no tennis ball pock pock pock
Canada geese honk
and those ducks
those ducks don’t know squat
about social distancing.
Entertainment
Only the postman comes to the door.
You watch documentaries, comedy specials,
Scandinavian crime dramas
cold as an autopsy table.
Diane Keaton falls in love with an Irish tramp,
played by Brendan Gleeson
and still anxiety crackles
The Dream
In the absence of the new
the brain feeds on itself
like an animal caught in a snare.
In a dream you drive to a town in British Columbia
which for some reason is called Trenton
you attend a meeting at a hotel
where everyone knows you
but you know no one.
You walk out into a vast square
full of white marble statues of a man lost in thought
elbow on knee, chin on fist.
You watch Germans play soccer
in an empty stadium
and it’s not a dream.
you write a haiku
four in the morning
moon shining on toilet bowl
porcelain pathway.
Eat your heart out! Basho!
Whistler-The Morning After
A forest fire haze turns the morning sun orange. Down in the village square dazed coffee drinkers nurse their hangovers. Here and there perky couples with dogs take photos for their blogs. Jpegs spiral upwards into the cloud, which is not a cloud, it’s a bank of a billion hard drives humming hard in flat roofed, air-conditioned buildings somewhere I will always think of as Texas.
glaciers retreat like a tide
stayed too late
at the Dublin Gate.
Gibson’s Landing (Summer 2021)
The low bark of broken mufflers, pickup trucks idle at the Starbuck’s drive through, air con running. A gang of bikers, middle-aged and leather clad, roars up the coastal highway. It’s been a long hot summer, fun fun fun in the pandemic pause, but it’s a guilty heat and there’s this nagging feeling that the future has arrived too early, that science fiction has become fact. Daddy never took the T Bird away.
forests burn
smoke silts
the lungs of the town
The Galway Review 