“Cowboy Country” & “Housebirth”

Poetry by T.S. Bronson & “The Begley Brothers” & “Bodhran” – Needlepoint by Ciara O’Connor

 

 

Cowboy Country

 

It is the howling wind

And High Noon Neon.

Tumbleweeds

And barren roads.

Pistol fire once echoed

Through these sparse ravines

That carve the face

Of this backwater town

Like the marks of blade

In clay.

It is your beating heart,

Like horse hooves galloping down

The dried out riverbeds of our

Dead grandad’s blood;

Beating fast and wild

For grandmama’s home baked biscuits

And a long, hot, Juniper day.

It is where we both learned to shoot,

Casting lead into the valley

Where Sagebrush burned one summer

And nearly took the family farm.

When we were kids we would pretend

To smoke toothpicks like cigarettes.

“I don’t know where we got the idea”

You say. I light up and shrug.

“I guess it’s just

Cowboy Country.”

***

 

 

Housebirth

 

There is a weighted knocking

Every morning

On the days the sun quit shining

-even now-

Four walls rising

To the tune of hammers crying

In the hands of

The cheapest labor

This city could find

Tearandscrap every oak beam

Strip their ground of its history

Cover up all the remnants

With plywood and pavement

And replace the windows

With replications

And art deco blinds.

Driving by

(Almost daily)

In the past

(Like a daydream)

Sits a vision of curtains paisley

And youth erased

And condos built

And no remaining evidence

Of a doorframe

Where her height

Was marked and measured

As the years went speeding by.

Now there comes that

Weighted knocking,

New front door,

New lock and key.

All memories

Buried down

And covered over

By the steady hand of time.

Now, at night, all is silent.

They’ve raised the roof,

And paved the driveway.

Tomorrow, even more will grow

On the grave

Of what was left behind.

 

 

***

 

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T.S. Bronson has been born a couple different times in a couple different places. His formative years were spent in Portland, Oregon. He now lives in Tennessee, where, as a writer and a musician, he toils in obscurity.

 

 

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Ciara O’Connor is an Irish visual artist. She works in a combination of free motion embroidery, hand stitching and raw-edged appliqué. Born in Glasgow to parents from County Kerry, O’Connor spent her formative years in Dublin. She studied Fine Art in GMIT, specializing in Painting and Printmaking. After college she opted to travel before settling in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. Here she dabbled in photography, millinery and silversmithing. This nomadic life contributed to her fascination with the themes of identity and belonging and through her work she seeks to investigate, celebrate, and strengthen these connections. She also consciously aligns her practise with feminist themes,  and seeks to create art that generates positive social shift. Her work is currently on show in Following Threads at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, OXO Winter Open, Outset Gallery, Galway, and RUA Annual Exhibition in The Ulster Museum, Belfast.