Rebecca Gutteridge is a British master’s student studying Irish Writing at Trinity. Her academic interests lie in gender and material culture, and her poetry – while finding freedom from the rigid constraints of academic writing– follows similar themes. Her lyric is set within dislocating domestic spaces that bridge childhood and adulthood: playing on spatial awareness and distance to convey a sense of alienation. Memories of childhood often invade present concerns with love and loss. More recently, her writing has been shaped by her move to Ireland, expatriatism, and the uncanniness of cultural similarity within difference in a postcolonial landscape.

 

Sea swimming

 

Cosy Macs (NOT dry robes – we are the cosy mac gang), 

UGGs, sea shoes, sun cream (to help the sea shoes slide off), 

hot water for hands and feet afterwards (a swimmer’s tip)

Jaffa Cakes for Sustenance: all the right kit.

The sea swimming brigade descends

acrunch 

onto hostile surface

chit chatting, pebbles clattering, grit 

          cascading. 

 

The weather is good. (It is spitting and 11℃)

Aye, it is.

how are your sons?

10 degrees, do you reckon? In there.

I got stung by bees yesterday. 

The Queen is called Trix, after my mother. 

I was only trying to give the blasted animals 

water;

 

sidling in timidly, then wading

triumphantly before the Earth drops out. 

Disconnection; Momentary panic; ecstatic thrill; pride. 

Bobbing, water sliding between toes 

smooth, oleaginous, weightless –

then out. Ten minutes up,

the lengthy after-faff of getting dry

now human again extremities

 

then to land and away.

 

Éire

 

I see you across the water.

 

You are not emerald as I imagined

protruding,

like a cold pebble washed over by 

shoreline chaos and released

exposed again, dark and damp.

Glistening

 

you, Éire, are the horizons 

of my hopes

what am I? Small Brit looking for 

new life 

at sea:

waiting for grey to turn

Emerald, 

 

I see you across the water.

 

Simon’s Blues

 

Dog eared pages 

barking coffee machines bleat 

Shit the milk is burned

a caricature laugh from the interior beckons – 

carried on air steeped in caffeine stink –

trills in harmony with screaming milk

slurping his coffee

as I chew on cake-fudge and continue to turn 

the scuffed page over over 

over 

chasing the scent 

of the next big thing 

that means 

very little

 

Dublin Fox

 

Scruffy bog brush 

aloft, up to mischief 

Dublin fox follow me

home, an umber escort against

Night sweats, spiritual therapists

and risky

business – doing his business

in the street.