Extra Terrestrial

Ciaran Berry

The flowers die, the flowers come back to life.

Through the rainbow blinds, I point towards my lost star.

It’s like I’m that sad usher waving her torch

along the rows of the Astor Cinema to make sure

the courting couples haven’t gone too far.

Crushed Coca-Cola cans, Monster Munch,

Sam Spudz Thicker Crinkled Cheese ’n’ Onion. The smell

of popcorn and of piss from the men’s room.

I throw a ball into the dark, the ball comes back.

I step once more into the backyard of it, light washing

through the slats of the unkempt garden shed.

Its rakes and hoes. Its charcoal and lawn seed.

I sit out in a deck-chair, wait for whatever it is

to take a form. I leave a trail of Skittles or M&Ms

on the off chance it might follow me home –

this creature who is me and not me I’ll conceal

behind the bedroom closet’s louvered doors,

his head nothing anyone would ever look for

amidst the one-eyed teddy bears and GI Joes.

The way his skin is stretched across his bones

puts me in mind of some ageing relative

whose veins begin to show through the translucence

like the curves and discursions of a back road.

Whin bushes and fuchsia, oak and ash, potholes.

A strip of grass running down the middle

like a Mo-Hick haircut as my aunt was wont to say

of what must be Dolan’s Lane or Dolan’s Brae.

I take the long way round again so as not to be seen

in my Lord Anthony coat and my bell bottom jeans.

His sacred heart, his telescopic limbs

remind me I’m space cadet, I’m alien,

a blow-in on my way home with messages.

Soup meat wrapped in brown paper. In waxed paper,

a sliced pan. A plastic bag of bones the dog

will bury in the ground where later we’ll bury him.

I carry it all in the basket of my mother’s Raleigh Shopper

that I wish were a BMX, or a Chopper,

a flame motif across the double crossbar

on which my cousin, acting the goat, will split

his scrotum right between the stones. To think

of it is to cross your legs like that girl in the back row

who fears things are about to go too far,

her souped-up lover staring at the screen,

where those two brothers sniff the warp and weft

of their absent father’s shirt for the scent

of Sea Breeze or is it Old Spice, as his hand

climbs the incline of her thigh. I lie down

beside it again, go eye to eye with it. The spilled milk

on the kitchen floor. The cold sweat on a can

of Coors. I finger the dial of that transmitter and receiver

conjured from a circular saw blade, a record player,

the keyboard from a Speak ’n’ Spell. I hold

my ear up to the unlabelled baked bean tin of it

and hope you’ll pick up at the other end

and talk to me along this piece of string. It’s been too long,

and what I want now more than anything

is that moment when the bikes shift skywards

in a sudden swell of strings above the hillside

of the half-built suburban dream. Redwoods and cornfields.

The tinkle of a nearby stream. Everything

balanced on the handlebars and freewheeling,

like a boy kicking his Nikes or Adidas through midair.

The steady skitter of the reel. The tractor beam

of the projector. Before all of this puncture and repair.

Poetry Ireland Review Issue 120:

Edited by Vona Groarke

Vona Groarke's final issue as editor is packed with new poems from leading contemporary poets, including Simon Armitage, Sinéad Morrissey, Colette Bryce, Paul Muldoon, Sean O'Brien and Caitríona O'Reilly. Books reviewed include new work from Derek Mahon, Bernard O'Donoghue, Rita Ann Higgins, Martina Evans, Denise Riley and the 2016 Forward Prize winner Vahni Capildeo. The centrepiece of the issue is an interview with Paul Muldoon in which the Armagh maestro shares his thoughts on subjects as diverse as public surveillance, the economic down-turn, and the exclamation mark. The cover image is by photographer Justyna Kielbowicz, and the issue also contains award-winning artwork from Sven Sandberg, Aoife Dunne, Jane Rainey, and Michelle Hall. Instead of an editorial, Vona herself answers the questionnaire she put to the contributors of Poetry Ireland Review Issue 118: The Rising Generation.