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ÓRFHLAITH FOYLE is a short story writer, poet and dramatist and lives in Galway. She’s published a novel, a poetry collection and two volumes of short stories. She also wrote and directed the radio dramas May’s End and How I Murdered Lucrezia, which were both adapted from her short stories and received full BAI funding, as well as premiering on Newstalk Radio.
Marvellously off-kilter, wry and utterly absorbing tales
— Elaine Feeney
There you sat in the pub, your face all curled up in smoke and you wanted me to smile. I said my smile was worth more than any of your boy poems. You said I suited the green juice of your poems, that I am the well-behaved sister of your mad girl. Well, I told your mad girl that I wasn’t having any of your slobber on my bed and she laughed and said now why would he like your kisses?
You drank from my beer. You asked for a cigarette, lit and God forgive me, but I opened my mouth to inhale you. Pub voices rolled behind our backs and your eyes looked at mine.
‘You’ve been in love with me for years,’ you said and stroked a fleck of beer from my chin.
‘Years,’ I agreed and gazed at your pudgy smile.
I magicked you up, dear Dylan to have this conversation. I went back in time and through all your poems to find you here, perched solid on a bar stool, smelling sour from the pre¬vious night and you’ve known how many times I have thrown your poems against the wall, your dominionless deaths and your Fern Hills.
And you said you didn’t mind where I had blown in from because I bought you a beer and gave you a few cigarettes.
‘A poet,’ you said. ‘Really,’ you said.
And you sounded like those taunts in my head.
Well, I am just as good as you, Dylan Thomas, and I’ll prove it too.
We were sitting in that pub and I told you that not much has changed between our worlds. There’s a war at the mo¬ment, not exactly World War Three, but it began in Europe too. Stalin and Hitler are dead but there’s another version now and the bombs can f ly for long stretches by themselves before they obliterate buildings with people in them, and refugees, there are always refugees… and what is the point of life, I asked you.
‘I don’t know,’ you said.
Then Caitlin broke free from her American airman, pushed in between us, grabbed your head and kissed it. You growled, shook her grip off, took her by the neck and forced her to look at me and said,
‘Say hello to this poet, my love.’
Caitlin plucked my cigarette and put it in her mouth.
‘Cat got your tongue?’
‘No, he’s got my knee.’
Caitlin’s airman sauntered up. ‘Can I buy you all a drink?’
He was tall in a white lemonade way, straight-lined with straight lips and straight eyes. He ordered new beers and of course you cajoled a cigarette from him.
‘Can’t take you anywhere,’ Caitlin said with her eyes on me then just as cool she smiled up at her airman who whisked her off to dance. She was all legs and knickers. Dust raised from the pub f loor and men watched from their beer glasses. Women too.
You said, ‘Let’s shuff le forth, you and I.’
‘No.’
You gave me that smile that your mother never stopped loving.
The Other Poet drives a black Mercedes, knows historians and sea-swimmers, and remarks that from Portumna on, the land goes back in time, closes in, grows dark and stays quiet.
I am the second poet, sipping water, hoping that our conversation won’t die a death from my shyness. I can see the landscape gnarl itself into dark green and, whirring down my window, I smell rank, sweet ditchwater. House windows flash the black shine of shadow and sun. I wonder if I shall spot anyone from another century. There are farming sheds still standing from the seventeen-hundreds.
Cows turn their big faces, and I am afraid of how life goes on until we die. All those dead tucked into the ground as the ancient Mercedes purrs by.
‘The Normans are coming soon,’ the Other Poet announces as we head towards Thomastown.
The land grows bright green in the Norman fields of the south-east, and Thomastown is seventeen-centuries-old and older, as is Grennan, a ‘Sunny Place’ in which the Other Poet’s black Mercedes parks.
His friend, the artist, lives here.
The artist’s house is pale blue and cut-in-two. One half is down and the other half up, where the artist’s ex-wife lives. And it overlooks the small, in-between courtyard full of rusting iron, bicycles, an old rowing boat, and a pear and an apple tree.
He insists he comes from Vikings. No, from the knobbled dark bog, the Other Poet says.
The artist shows me how to pluck a pear from its branch, my hand under its belly; once ripe, it will drop into my palm. I bite into it. The flesh is hardly soft, yet sweet.
Mind the dog dirt, the artist warns me.
There is a knocking on the window of his ex-wife’s half of the house. It opens and a blonde woman sticks her head out. You’ll get a stomach-ache and a bug from that pear!
It’s fine, the artist yells up at her.
When she’s throwing up she’ll have you to thank. Did he offer you tea or coffee?
He did, yes thank you.
Did he offer you anything else?
No, not a thing, the Other Poet says.
Well, come up here and I’ll offer you something.
Can I come up too? The artist says.
This time, yes.
Her kitchen-sitting room is painted mustard yellow with a cherry-red AGA and cherry-red cushions strewn across a Chinese golden-coloured sofa and chairs. Three cats spread themselves on the sofa, black, white and brindle. The dogs amble in and settle on the sitting room carpet. There are framed landscape paintings on the walls.
Hers and mine, the artist remarks.
Mine, she says. Mostly mine.
ISBN: 978-1-915877-09-3 | Pages: 136 | Year published: 2026
The Other Poet Drives a Black Mercedes is a paean to a writer’s imagination and experience, where the liminal border between the conscious world and the other world exists. A young teacher of English witnesses the results of a gangland murder in East End, London then later is visited by a fisherwoman, a medieval monk and a Norman knight. An artist murdered in Auschwitz now lives a refugee life in Athlone, Co. Westmeath Ireland. A family wake descends into a matter-of-fact burning of the dead. A poet journeys into the other world of her imagination. A medieval scribe writes an account of her pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory to her murdered father, Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Emily Brontë struggles to write her second novel, battling with the disapproval from her two sisters and brother of her first novel Wuthering Heights.
ISBN: 978-1-907682-95-7 | Pages: 176 | Year published: 2023
An older sister gathers her demons and journeys to Lorient, seeking closure with her estranged brother and his over-protective wife; a group of people holidaying in ‘Three Houses in Rome’ are faced with reality when death infiltrates their abnormal lives; shortly before their suicides together, a newly-wed Eva Braun makes a mistake on her marriage certificate to Adolf Hitler; after the sudden death of her new husband, a young woman returns from her own Hell in Australia to a gaol cell in Galway and fights to re-create her life. These strange, lonely and dark tales from Órfhlaith Foyle revel in the solitary fear and beauty of her characters’ lives, aware that evil is ordinary and love is often in its company.
