The Ofi Press Magazine
International Poetry and Literature from Mexico City
Turns By Martina Evans (Ireland), Featured in Issue 22.
My grandmother forbade my aunt to court John. The Lynches and all belonging to them have bad chests, you’ll end up nursing him to his grave. TB was still the the executioner in the forties but it didn’t stop Helen. Two boys and one girl knocking on their shop door the other boy taking Helen’s arm, the other girl linking with John - swapping back when they were out of sight a Shakespearean comedy or a couples farce. Luminous eyed, stigmatized TB patients were rare in the sixties but it was cancer who took one of John’s lungs. A child, I lay awake holding my own breath as his suffocated breathing filled that small house like a hunter. During the day my aunt was always watching for smoke, the guilty blue spirals signaling out of the shed as he stole one more puff.
My First Confession
A thunderous drumming on the sweet smelling incense-infused wood like something you’d hear about out of The Exorcist maybe or a Protestant Black Mass. Father O’Shea’s shy stutter asking What’s that? from the other side of the grille. At seven what sin could I have been confessing? What made me lose control? No clue - only to this day the sound of the Niagara roar of my urine on the boards and a new dazzling list transgressions - defiling concentrated ground the grievous Sin of Omission, answering the timid priest, with a transparent lie, I don’t know father. Studying the Green Catechism alone with my conscience, it seemed at best, an Imperfect Contrition, at worst, a Sacrilegious one, The clear outline of the wet footprints I carried all over the grey and white and red church tiles - my conscience as heavy as the velvet curtain that muffled out the sound of people’s sins the darkness that hides the details of my original sin.
The Tinker Girl
She came alone on foot and straight away they noticed she was a rebel, before Punk before Rap she had streaked hair orange and black and a loud transistor radio that blared through the village that hot day drowning the sound of the insects in the grass. She didn’t say ma’am to anyone, she said, I don’t want your fucking ould clothes or your ould fucking soft apples. She said she wanted money and she went to every house repeating her request, kicking foxgloves rejecting every other thing that was offered and no one produced money only everyone said that the world had gone mad and it was only now they realised weren’t the old tinkers lovely and quiet compared to the cut of that big one with her transistor radio bawling under her arm like a terrible fuck-you voice from the future. The last place she called was Mikey Dorgan’s. He gave her a half dozen eggs out of the goodness of his heart not realizing that she meant business it was only when she’d left he found that she’d pelted the six of them and they were running in yellow streams down the back of his gable wall. |
Martina Evans is an Irish poet and novelist. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub, shop and petrol station. Martina began writing in 1990 and has published four books of poetry and three novels. Her first novel, Midnight Feast, won a Betty Trask Award in 1995 and her third novel, No Drinking No Dancing No Doctors (Bloomsbury, 2000), won an Arts Council England Award in 1999. Her fourth poetry collection, Facing the Public was published by Anvil Press in September 2009 and has won bursary awards from both the Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Eiraíon) and Arts Council England. The Navy Blue Suitcase
I woke up every night at 4am seven years before Mammy died. They say it’s when the soul leaves the body so when they woke me up that night in Mallow, I wasn’t surprised. We’d been prepared. Everyone relieved and shivering in the grey-beige County Hospital corridor, with Pad the porter who’d fed us for ten days, with the small purple Cadbury snacks, you can’t get in England, Pad showing us the clip-on tie that saved him from the death-strangle of a Mad Polack in Casualty. For a moment I thought we would have peace - then I saw the navy blue suit-case so small in my brother Peter’s hand. Someone had packed that for her nightdress, slippers, washbag soap, - things for the short stay and I was plunged into ice in the buzzing night-time fluorescence, the navy blue case she would never take home again.
Rostro bajo el agua 1
Catalina is a Guatemalan born Mexican artist who studied at the National Centre for the Arts (CENART) and the Academia de San Carlos, both in Mexico City. She has exhibitied her work all over Mexico and in London.
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