A visit

Every place on earth should be like this; unexpected.
On a good day, you can see forever.

Restful sleep for a windy place.
Tranquility is a marvelous experience
sound of meadowlarks in the morning, music
for the body.
Breath and love are everything.

This is sort of my home town.
Where my father went to school,
took piano lessons.

I had stitches on my hand in this place �

Nice to be back home,
to see the old schoolroom and
place where I was born

Different than I remember it as

Hope we weren�t too much trouble.
Thanks for the beer.

(You will remember me by the broken chair)



Entries in the visitors' guest book at the Convent Inn in Val Marie, Saskatchewan, Canada, noted during a visit in the autumn of 2006. Submitted by Shannon Bruyneel.

Phonica: Three

For the third edition of Phonica we will be joined by Michelle Hall, Keith Lindsay, Aod�n McCardle, Michael Naghten Shanks, Dylan Tighe and Suzanne Walsh for a blend of sound, word, image and performance rooted in multidisciplinary practice and innovation.

Phonica is a Dublin-based poetry and music venture with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Curated and hosted by Christodoulos Makris and Olesya Zdorovetska, Phonica aims to provide an outlet for the exploration and presentation of new ideas, a space where practitioners from different artforms can converse, and an environment conducive to collaborative enterprise and improvisation.

Phonica: Three
8pm, Wednesday 15 June 2016
Jack Nealons, 165 Capel Street, Dublin 1
Admission Free

Michelle Hall is a visual artist who works with a variety of materials and processes and her work often takes the form of video with scripted voiceover. Throughout her practice she uses objects, images, details and textures as catalysts for narratives that fall somewhere between fact, fiction and myth. She recently graduated from the MA Art in the Contemporary World programme at NCAD with a first class honours and received the Artist�s Support Scheme Bursary from Fingal Arts Office in 2014 and 2015. She also collaborates with other practitioners and has shown collaborative projects at IMMA, Triskel and Pallas Projects. She has exhibited work in group shows at Block T, MART, Dra�ocht, The LAB and Catalyst Arts as well as other venues across Ireland, France and the UK. She presented her first solo exhibition �The Lament of the Jade Phoenix� at Steambox Gallery in January of this year.

Keith Lindsay is a Dublin based sound artist who works with a wide range of media including music, sound, projection, film, sculpture, and electronics. His recent projects include a solo exhibition "Soundscapes" at the Pallas Project Studios and a new sound works for the Nag Gallery Dublin. He is a member of the experimental arts collective 'The Water Project' which he has performed with in Paris, London, Kiev, Cork & Dublin. His work as a sound designer has been featured in TV documentaries, feature films, short films and interactive media.

Aod�n McCardle is a painter, a poet, gardener, tattooist, designer, maker, father, he has delivered babies warm in the dark and wrapped the dead in white hospital cotton. He is a co-editor at Veer Books. His PhD is on Action as Articulation of the Contemporary Poem though physicality and doubt are the site of meaning and the stance respectively where the action operates. His way into collaboration was as part of London Under Construction LUC. His current practice is improvised performance/writing/drawing as a finding out. He grew up in the mountains, moved to the city, lives by the sea.

Michael Naghten Shanks lives in Dublin and is editor of The Bohemyth. Recent publications include the special 'Rising Generation' issue of Poetry Ireland Review and The Best New British And Irish Poets 2016 anthology from Eyewear Publishing. In 2015 he was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. He has read his work at numerous events, most recently during the International Literature Festival Dublin. Year of the Ing�nue (Eyewear Publishing, 2015) is his debut poetry pamphlet. He tweets @MichaelNShanks.

Dylan Tighe is a musician, actor and theatre-maker. His second album Wabi-Sabi Soul - a one-track gapless song-cycle was released in April. It was hailed by The Irish Times as "framing reflective music with remarkable eloquence". His radio drama for RTE� Record, based around his debut album of the same name, was nominated for the Prix Europa Radio Prize.

Suzanne Walsh is an audio/visual artist and writer from Wexford based currently in Dublin. She uses performative lectures, fiction and voice to explore  various themes, sometimes around the relationships between animal/humans as well as querying the borders of the self. She also collaborates with film-makers, musicians and other artists frequently. She is part of the Hissen sound group performing in IMMA in June, and is taking part in an upcoming show in The Lab Gallery in November called 'A Different Republic'. She is an editor of Critical Bastards magazine and is published recently in gorse journal.

Prompt: Fairy Tales

Illustration by Yuko Shimizu from The Wild Swan

Fairy tales are a type of short story that typically features fantasy characters (dwarves, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, mermaids, trolls, witches) and usually some magic or enchantments. They differ from other folk narratives such as legends which generally involve some belief in at least some truth to the tale.

We usually think of fairy tales as children's literature, but authors have also written modern and more adult fairy tales.

Like many of us, author Michael Cunningham read fairy tales as a child, but he continued to wonder about what happened after the tales ended. In his collection of stories, The Wild Swan, he answers that question for a number of fairy tales. Cunningham is best known for his novels The Hours and The Snow Queen (which was inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story).

He gives us a a modern day lazy boy named Jack who lives in his mother's basement rather than get a job. One day he trades a cow for some magic beans. His poor widowed mother is stuck with this kid who is "not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains." But her opinion of him changes when he climbs the beanstalk and comes back with bags of gold. Mom invests in stocks and real estate. They build a mansion for themselves. He climbs the beanstalk again, More gold and they are able to buy everything they ever wanted. But Jack goes back again for even more gold even though "there's nothing left for him and his mother to buy."

In "Kissing the Toad" by Galway Kinnell, he takes that idea that appears in several fairy tales.

Somewhere this dusk
a girl puckers her mouth
and considers kissing the toad a boy has plucked
from the cornfield and hands
her with both hands;
rough and lichenous but for the immense ivory belly,
like those old entrepreneurs
sprawling on Mediterranean beaches,
with popped eyes,
it watches the girl who might kiss it,
pisses, quakes, tries
to make its smile wider:
to love on, oh yes, to love on.

We also use the term "fairy tale" to describe something unusually, perhaps unrealistically, optimistic, as in "fairy tale ending" or a "fairy tale romance." Of course, not all fairy tales end happily, and some are quite grim (or Grimm).

In her book, Transformations, Anne Sexton has a number of poem-stories in her retelling of seventeen Grimms fairy tales, including "Snow White," "Rumpelstiltskin," "The Frog Prince," "Red Riding Hood" and "Rapunzel". She takes the original story and gives it a modern turn that goes much further than the modern Disney version of the character, as this opening to the poem shows:

A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young.
The mentor
and the student
feed off each other.
Many a girl
had an old aunt
who locked her in the study
to keep the boys away.
They would play rummy
or lie on the couch
and touch and touch.
Old breast against young breast�
Let your dress fall down your shoulder...

For this month's prompt, you may choose from several fairy tale possibilities:
- Continue a classic tale, or following Cunningham and Sexton, rewrite a classic for our times.
- Choose a part of the plot or an element from a tale, as Kinnell did or as in A.E. Stallings "Fairy-tale Logic."

I found in my local library a copy of  Disenchantments which anthologizes a good number of modern day fairy tale poems.

Submission Deadline: July 3, 2016

Sleeping Beauty

Ramzan Mubarak Sahi Bukhari in Urdu Fonts

Rasool Akram (S.A) ny farmaya:-

Keh jab Ramzan ka maheena aata hai to Jannat k 

darwazy khol diye jaty hain, aor shetaan zanjeeron 

main jakarr diye jaty hain.

Rasool Akram (S.A) ny farmaya:-

Jo shakhs sidq e dil aor aitmaad e sahii k sath Ramzan 

main qiyam kry, yani tarawiyaah parhy to us k 

pichly gunah bakhsh diye jayen gy.

Rasool Akram S.A ny farmaya:-

Jis shakhs ny Imaan aor ahtsaab k saath Ramzaan ka 

roza rakha to us k pichly gunaah muaaf kr diye jaty hain.

Rasool Akram S.A ny farmaya:-

Sehri khaya kro, kiyon keh sehri k khany 

main barkat hoti hai.

Rasool Akram (S.A) ny farmaya:-

Keh humary rozy aor ahal e kitab k rozy ky darmiyan sehri khany main farq hai.

Rasool Akram (S.A) ny farmaya:-

Ramzan k aakhri ashry main Shab e qadar talash kro, 

Phir agr tum main sy koi kamzori dikhaye ya aajiz 

ho jaye to aakhri (7) raaton main susti na dikhaye.

Hadees e Nabvi:-
Hazrat Abu Hureraa Biyaan karty hain keh 
Hazoor Akram S.A ny irshaad farmaya:-
Jab tm main sy koi rozaa aftaar kry to woh khajoor 
sy aftaar kry. Kiyon keh woh baa's e barkat hai. 
agar woh na paaye to phir paani sy aftaar kr ly. 
Kiyon keh woh baa's e tahaarat hai.

Mystery in Sochi

They are about two inches wide,
squarish, and five inches tall.
They hail from the Toggenburg
Valley of northeast Switzerland,
and they are held in the highest
regard by experts around the world.
They are glass bottles used to hold
athletes� urine samples.



From Mystery in Sochi Doping Case Lies With Tamper-Proof Bottle,Rebecca R. Ruiz, New York Times, 13 May 2016. Submitted by Evie Groch.

In Shimla

it always rains twice,
once, from the sky,
then, when the pines drip.

The same with you, Lalita,
once, when you went,
then, as it hit.

Spring is here

I've just been amazed at how rapidly
the last few weeks have flown by - like
tiny little birds not like
Canadian geese
who are like the B52s
of the Avian world.
I have more bird poop
on my car recently.
Spring is here.



An email from my boyfriend. Submitted by Debby Thompson.