A poem by Richie McCaffery

You measured my depression in pheasants

I know exactly what you did now –
you measured my depression in pheasants
by thinking that taking me from England
to Belgium, all would be better.

You were a realist, you knew pheasants
exist here too, but are much rarer,
only seen on train-tracks in early morning
and usually dead, whereas at home,

in England, every glance out the window
reveals a foppish pheasant cock.
You were lovingly mistaken in thinking
you could control my depression this way

for I do not measure it in pheasants,
I do not know what I measure it by.

Richie McCaffery (b.1986) recently completed a Carnegie Trust funded PhD on the Scottish poets of World War Two, at the University of Glasgow. He now lives in Ostend, Belgium. He is the author of Spinning Plates (2012), the 2014 Callum Macdonald Memorial Pamphlet Award runner-up, Ballast Flint and the book-length collection Cairn from Nine Arches Press, 2014. Another pamphlet, provisionally entitled Arris, is forthcoming in 2017. He is also the editor of Finishing the Picture: The Collected Poems of Ian Abbot (Kennedy and Boyd, 2015). 

A poem by Hilda Sheehan

WONDER

Take DADA, a living wage

stored behind OUR Tescos

lost in lost of ready meals

and saved plastic. Save

the children, enter drastic

boats tied by borders

and wonder WONDER

the empty gardens

and imaginary wealthy

culprits. Can you cry for

the ecstatic arrival of colour

or turn into TINS of sardines?

Hilda Sheehan’s debut collection is, ‘The Night my Sister Went to Hollywood’ (Cultured Llama Press, 2013). She has also published a stunning chapbook of prose poems, ‘Frances and Martine‘ (Dancing Girl, 2014). ‘Joyously funny whilst simultaneously discussing disability, animal rights, racism, size, the menopause, love, female relationships and other issues … comic writing with bite’ – David Caddy, Tears in the Fence.