Read More: A Brief Q&A with George Looney
Like Only a Woman or Ghost
Today, from World’s End, James Fort is
just gray architectural forms
hunkered in the distance. An iron gate,
locked, kept me out of the tower
still visible from my hotel room
even with this construct of a sky so gray
no ghost would even try to talk
a woman into bed. They do
here, you know. Ghosts get gussied up
& head for the pubs. Locked out
by recent iron from going up
rough stone steps to the tower
I can see from this, the other side
of the Bandon, I’m left to
imagine what I might’ve seen
from up there. It’s the lady in white—
that local, romantic ghost of
a woman walking, like only a woman
or ghost can, along the battlements,
restored, of Charles Fort across the water—
I believe I’d have seen. That woman
who sees flowers on the rocks below
as sad reminders of just how little
we need this world in order to love.
Prelude: A Vague Inheritance
For now, Kinsale’s not a place so much
as a frail & unfamiliar construct
of syllables, not yet a language,
what logic its ruins may insist on
still whimsy. Distant enough to be
easily dismissed, a woman laughs
& the brogue in her voice, in the midst
of a nuisance drizzle, echoes off bricks
old enough history’s a drunk
who leaned on them to keep this
damp world from spinning off
with him. Even this haggard metaphor […]
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Valentine’s Day in Kinsale
The wind visible in every local face
has turned cold. With weak light
& the chill of ocean nearby,
hearts have to be sconces. A woman
with tremors & a cane carries on
with a gull & seems to win the point. […]
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George Looney’s books include the recently-released The Visibility of Things Long Submerged which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award, and The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible which won The Cider Press Review Editors’ Poetry Prize, Ode to the Earth in Translation, a collection of stories, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, the novel Report from a Place of Burning which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award, Meditations Before the Windows Fail, the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through, Monks Beginning to Waltz, and A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness. He founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, serves as editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and was co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.
Read More: A Brief Q&A with George Looney