New Irish Writing: September 2019’s winning poems

THE SHEEP

I killed my first sheep today.
I cut the throat of a chubby Cheviot,
ground the six-inch German blade
until it glowed – a new pristine shine,
plunged into the thick white abyss,
the cotton cloth of his hidden neck.
As the blood-burst from the incision
fell and flowed, like a crimson Styx,
all I could do was imagine – how
the soft wool had kept my hands
warm on this December morning
before the sun arrived, how
the wool resembled tight-knit clouds
that refused to part. And the heart
concealed somewhere in his chest
had gotten louder. And now my own
blood pulsed and ran and sang.
He passed in a few seconds,
then came another, and another,
then another – like the heads of dead
daisies they dangled on a motorised chain.
So, I watched him off, how he swung,
his leg from an iron rung,
like a giant's fingertips, half
in this world, half in some other.

UNBORN

I enclose the unborn lambs in a bin-liner
and throw them into the yard behind the slaughterhouse;
three miniature trinkets cut from the bowels

of an ancient ewe that O Grady can't afford to feed.
All day through the fire escape's wedge of light and air
their oiled bodies beam from a plastic flap as July sun pours

on bloody concrete and they ferment into tatty stuffed-teddys.
While their condemned mothers ride the steel shackles
in condemned silence, O Grady waits for his cheque.

Irish author sells fictional Donnie Brasco sequel to Amazon Audible

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Your face appears when the phone rings, the way
it always does, smiling, captured and illuminated
in Glenmalure Spring. The phone sings

"The Day We Caught the Train", and when I swipe
the green icon to hear your voice I'm greeted with agony:
snotty spurts, in-audible sniffling, the language of grief –

your creation. I could leave this place of death,
to find you still inconsolable on the front step,
or tearing down the nursery we built together, filling

plastic bags with gender-neutral teddy-bears.
Or stay in the abattoir, as if one with the slain,
its entrails exposed, forever deaf, numbing as silence.

Clifton Redmond is a student at Carlow College – St Patrick's, and a member of the Carlow Writers' Co-operative. His work has appeared in online and print journals, and has been placed in various competitions and awards